I had had the queerest interview with Bullivant and Macgillivray.  They asked me first if I was willing to serve again in the old game, and I said I was.  I felt as bitter as sin, for I had got fixed in the military groove, and had made good there.  Here was I—­a brigadier and still under forty, and with another year of the war there was no saying where I might end.  I had started out without any ambition, only a great wish to see the business finished.  But now I had acquired a professional interest in the thing, I had a nailing good brigade, and I had got the hang of our new kind of war as well as any fellow from Sandhurst and Camberley.  They were asking me to scrap all I had learned and start again in a new job.  I had to agree, for discipline’s discipline, but I could have knocked their heads together in my vexation.

What was worse they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell me anything about what they wanted me for.  It was the old game of running me in blinkers.  They asked me to take it on trust and put myself unreservedly in their hands.  I would get my instructions later, they said.

I asked if it was important.

Bullivant narrowed his eyes.  ’If it weren’t, do you suppose we could have wrung an active brigadier out of the War Office?  As it was, it was like drawing teeth.’

‘Is it risky?’ was my next question.

‘In the long run—­damnably,’ was the answer.

‘And you can’t tell me anything more?’

’Nothing as yet.  You’ll get your instructions soon enough.  You know both of us, Hannay, and you know we wouldn’t waste the time of a good man on folly.  We are going to ask you for something which will make a big call on your patriotism.  It will be a difficult and arduous task, and it may be a very grim one before you get to the end of it, but we believe you can do it, and that no one else can . . .  You know us pretty well.  Will you let us judge for you?’

I looked at Bullivant’s shrewd, kind old face and Macgillivray’s steady eyes.  These men were my friends and wouldn’t play with Me.

‘All right,’ I said.  ‘I’m willing.  What’s the first step?’

’Get out of uniform and forget you ever were a soldier.  Change your name.  Your old one, Cornelis Brandt, will do, but you’d better spell it “Brand” this time.  Remember that you are an engineer just back from South Africa, and that you don’t care a rush about the war.  You can’t understand what all the fools are fighting about, and you think we might have peace at once by a little friendly business talk.  You needn’t be pro-German—­if you like you can be rather severe on the Hun.  But you must be in deadly earnest about a speedy peace.’

I expect the corners of my mouth fell, for Bullivant burst out laughing.

’Hang it all, man, it’s not so difficult.  I feel sometimes inclined to argue that way myself, when my dinner doesn’t agree with me.  It’s not so hard as to wander round the Fatherland abusing Britain, which was your last job.’