He took down a copy of Through the Looking-Glass, and as by magic my untroubled mind came back to me, and not alone, but bringing courage, joy and hope. On April 27, 1918, he left for France.

I have been enjoying the autobiography of John Julius Norwich.  Born in 1929, about half way through the reign of George V, it captures that era of late Victoria, Edward, George V when Britain was at its zenith.  Norwich is a wonderful writer and raconteur and carries some of the the same historical intimations as My Early Life by Winston Churchill, A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, and even Fillets of Plaice by Gerald Durrell.  A whiff of an England long passed scarce imaginable in the prosperous present.  Norwich's book is Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 7.

My father, as a member of the Foreign Service, was exempt from the call-up—a fact for which I am heartily thankful, since had he not been I should not be here writing this book—but his friends were not so lucky. So much has been written of the massacre of the First World War, particularly of the young officers, that it seems superfluous to add any more: but I remember my mother telling me that by the end of 1916, with the single exception of my father, every young man she had ever danced with was dead. Much against her mother’s wishes—the Duchess could not bear the thought of her favorite child washing the wounded and emptying bedpans—she became a nurse at Guy’s Hospital. All the time she and my father were growing closer; only he, it seemed, could provide the strength and consolation she so desperately needed.

In June, 1916, he was invited to stay the weekend with the Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith. He wrote, characteristically, to his mother: “There was no motor to meet me at the station and no champagne. I think it’s high time the PM resigned.” A few months later his wish was granted. Asquith was succeeded by David Lloyd George, one of whose first actions—to relieve what was becoming a serious shortage of manpower—was to extend conscription to several of the “reserved professions,” including the Foreign Office. My father, who had been feeling increasingly embarrassed by what he saw as his enforced inactivity, confessed his feelings to my mother. On May 17, 1917, he wrote in his diary:

I explained to her that it was no nonsense about dying for my country or beating the Germans that made me glad to join, but simply the feeling I have had for so long that I am missing something, the vague regret that one feels when not invited to a ball even though it be a ball that one hardly would have hoped to enjoy.

The training was the worst part. It had been described by his friend Eddie Grant as “being stuck in a six-foot bog, trained like an Olympian athlete and buggered about like a mulatto telegraph boy,” and he hated it. He used to love to tell the story about a certain evening in late July when he briefly escaped to London from his training camp at Bushey in Hertfordshire only to discover that no one he knew, male or female, was in town. For once, he felt genuinely depressed; there was nothing for it but to go to his club—the Junior Carlton in those days, rather than the beloved White’s of his later years—and order the best dinner he could get, with a pint of champagne. From the library he took down a copy of Through the Looking-Glass, always one of his favorite books. “Then,” he wrote, “as by magic my untroubled mind came back to me, and not alone, but bringing courage, joy and hope.” On April 27, 1918, he left for France.