Memory Hold-The-Door by John Buchan — Read

My first group of new friends came from the British army, of which hitherto I had known nothing. I made the acquaintance of some of the High Command, who were to be famous figures in the Great War, but my knowledge was chiefly of junior officers and the rank and file. In this way I learned something of that wonderful brotherhood, the old regular army, which came to an end at First Ypres. Many of the troops had been in India and they opened up for me a new world of experience. It was now that I acquired an interest in military history and the art of war which has never left me. "Shop," the talk of an expert on his own subject, has always seemed to me the best kind of conversation, and my appetite for military "shop" was prodigious.

Also I first came in touch with the men of the Dominions -- South Africans of the various irregular corps, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders. Batches of them were seconded to assist me in various jobs, and I had their company in many starlit bivouacs. At Oxford we had had a few colonials, but they were soon absorbed into the atmosphere of the place and seemed to lose their idiom. I had regarded the Dominions patronisingly as distant settlements of our people who were making a creditable effort under difficulties to carry on the British tradition. Now I realised that Britain had at least as much to learn from them as they had from Britain. I found something new to me, something in their outlook at once imaginative and realistic which I had never met before. They were an audacious folk, very ready, if need be, to throw rule and convention overboard, and often I was saved by their sagacious lawlessness. Yet in a sense they were stiffer traditionalists than the British. They combined a passionate devotion to their own countries with the vision of a great brotherhood based on race and a common culture, a vision none the less real because they rarely tried to put it into words. I began to see that the Empire, which had hitherto been only a phrase to me, might be a potent and beneficent force in the world.