The first returned soldier of whom I had direct knowledge was my nephew Tom.  When he came back, after two years in the trenches, we asked him to dine with us.  “Now, remember,” I said to my wife, “Tom will be a very different being from what he was when he went away.  He left us as little more than a school boy, only in his first year at college; in fact, a mere child.  You remember how he used to bore us with baseball talk and that sort of thing.  And how shy he was!  You recall his awful fear of Professor Razzler, who used to teach him mathematics.  All that, of course, will be changed now.  Tom will have come back a man.  We must ask the old professor to meet him.  It will amuse Tom to see him again.  Just think of the things he must have seen!  But we must be a little careful at dinner not to let him horrify the other people with brutal details of the war.”

Tom came.  I had expected him to arrive in uniform with his pocket full of bombs.  Instead of this he wore ordinary evening dress with a dinner jacket.  I realised as I helped him to take off his overcoat in the hall that he was very proud of his dinner jacket.  He had never had one before.  He said he wished the “boys” could see him in it.  I asked him why he had put off his lieutenant’s uniform so quickly.  He explained that he was entitled not to wear it as soon as he had his discharge papers signed; some of the fellows, he said, kicked them off as soon as they left the ship, but the rule was, he told me, that you had to wear the thing till your papers were signed.

Then his eye caught a glimpse sideways of Professor Razzler standing on the hearth rug in the drawing room.  “Say,” he said, “is that the professor?” I could see that Tom was scared.  All the signs of physical fear were written on his face.  When I tried to lead him into the drawing room I realised that he was as shy as ever.  Three of the women began talking to him all at once.  Tom answered, yes or no,—­with his eyes down.  I liked the way he stood, though, so unconsciously erect and steady.  The other men who came in afterwards, with easy greetings and noisy talk, somehow seemed loud-voiced and self-assertive.

Tom, to my surprise, refused a cocktail.  It seems, as he explained, that he “got into the way of taking nothing over there.”  I noticed that my friend Quiller, who is a war correspondent, or, I should say, a war editorial writer, took three cocktails and talked all the more brilliantly for it through the opening courses of the dinner, about the story of the smashing of the Hindenburg line.  He decided, after his second Burgundy, that it had been simply a case of sticking it out.  I say “Burgundy” because we had substituted Burgundy, the sparkling kind, for champagne at our dinners as one of our little war economies.