I picked up Wallace and Marshall of my college, and together we went to
the appointed place. There we found twenty or thirty enlisted or
unenlisted. I had come only to make inquiries, but I was carried away.
After a series of waits I was medically examined and passed. At 5.45
P.M. I kissed the Book, and in two minutes I became a corporal in the
Royal Engineers. During the ceremony my chief sensation was one of
thoroughgoing panic.

In the morning four of us, who were linguists, were packed off to the
War Office. We spent the journey in picturing all the ways we might be
killed, until, by the time we reached Victoria, there was not a single
one of us who would not have given anything to un-enlist. The War Office
rejected us on the plea that they had as many Intelligence Officers as
they wanted. So we returned glumly.

The next few days we were drilled, lectured, and given our kit. We began
to know each other, and make friends. Finally, several of us, who wanted
to go out together, managed by slight misstatements to be put into one
batch. We were chosen to join the 5th Division. The Major in command
told us--to our great relief--that the Fifth would not form part of the
first Expeditionary Force.

I remember Chatham as a place of heat, intolerable dirt, and a bad sore
throat. There we made our first acquaintance with the army, which we
undergraduates had derided as a crowd of slavish wastrels and
empty-headed slackers. We met with tact and courtesy from the mercenary.
A sergeant of the Sappers we discovered to be as fine a type of man as
any in the wide earth. And we marvelled, too, at the smoothness of
organisation, the lack of confusing hurry....