Charles Landbridge Morgan was born in Bromley, Kent, the youngest of the four children of Sir Charles Morgan, a civil engineer, and Mary Watkins Morgan. When he was thirteen, he entered the Royal Navy as a cadet and was educated later at naval colleges in Osborne and Dartmouth. After serving in China and the Atlantic from 1911 to 1913, he left the navy. "It appears he is happy in his present work, and all his surroundings," his father wrote to the Secretary of the Admiralty. "The reason he gives for desiring to retire from the Service is that he wishes to follow a literary career." A year later, however, with the outbreak of World War I, he reentered the navy, and by October 1914 he was a prisoner in Holland, following the retreat from Antwerp (an internment which lasted until 1917). During these years in Holland he was paroled and allowed to...