I had had the queerest interview with Bullivant and Macgillivray.
They asked me first if I was willing to serve again in the old game,
and I said I was. I felt as bitter as sin, for I had got fixed in the
military groove, and had made good there. Here was I - a brigadier
and still under forty, and with another year of the war there was no
saying where I might end. I had started out without any ambition,
only a great wish to see the business finished. But now I had
acquired a professional interest in the thing, I had a nailing good
brigade, and I had got the hang of our new kind of war as well as
any fellow from Sandhurst and Camberley. They were asking me to
scrap all I had learned and start again in a new job. I had to agree,
for discipline's discipline, but I could have knocked their heads
together in my vexation.

What was worse they wouldn't, or couldn't, tell me anything
about what they wanted me for. It was the old game of running me
in blinkers. They asked me to take it on trust and put myself
unreservedly in their hands. I would get my instructions later, they
said.

I asked if it was important.

Bullivant narrowed his eyes. 'If it weren't, do you suppose we
could have wrung an active brigadier out of the War Office? As it
was, it was like drawing teeth.'

'Is it risky?' was my next question.

'in the long run - damnably,' was the answer.