I can see as though I had been present Bohun’s approach to him, his patronising introduction, his kindly suggestion that they should eat their meals together, Jerry’s smiling, lazy acquiescence.  I can imagine how Bohun decided to himself that “he must make the best of this chap.  After all, it was a long tiresome journey, and anything was better than having no one to talk to....”  But Jerry, unfortunately, was in a bad temper at the start.  He did not want to go out to Russia at all.  His father, old Stephen Lawrence, had been for many years the manager of some works in Petrograd, and the first fifteen years of Jerry’s life had been spent in Russia.  I did not, at the time when I made Jerry’s acquaintance at Cambridge, know this; had I realised it I would have understood many things about him which puzzled me.  He never alluded to Russia, never apparently thought of it, never read a Russian book, had, it seemed, no connection of any kind with any living soul in that country.

Old Lawrence retired, and took a fine large ugly palace in Clapham to end his days in....

Suddenly, after Lawrence had been in France for two years, had won the Military Cross there and, as he put it, “was just settling inside his skin,” the authorities realised his Russian knowledge, and decided to transfer him to the British Military Mission in Petrograd.  His anger when he was sent back to London and informed of this was extreme.  He hadn’t the least desire to return to Russia, he was very happy where he was, he had forgotten all his Russian; I can see him, saying very little, looking like a sulky child and kicking his heel up and down across the carpet.

“Just the man we want out there, Lawrence,” he told me somebody said to him; “keep them in order.”

“Keep them in order!” That tickled his sense of humour.  He was to laugh frequently, afterwards, when he thought of it.  He always chewed a joke as a cow chews the cud.

So that he was in no pleasant temper when he met Bohun on the decks of the Jupiter.  That journey must have had its humours for any observer who knew the two men.  During the first half of it I imagine that Bohun talked and Lawrence slumbered.  Bohun patronised, was kind and indulgent, and showed very plainly that he thought his companion the dullest and heaviest of mortals.  Then he told Lawrence about Russia; he explained everything to him, the morals, psychology, fighting qualities, strengths, and weaknesses.  The climax arrived when he announced:  “But it’s the mysticism of the Russian peasant which will save the world.  That adoration of God....”

“Rot!” interrupted Lawrence.

Bohun was indignant.  “Of course if you know better—­” he said.

“I do,” said Lawrence, “I lived there for fifteen years.  Ask my old governor about the mysticism of the Russian peasant.  He’ll tell you.”

Bohun felt that he was justified in his annoyance.  As he said to me afterwards:  “The fellow had simply been laughing at me.  He might have told me about his having been there.”  At that time, to Bohun, the most terrible thing in the world was to be laughed at.