TheCompleteMemoirsOfGeorgeSherston

permanently inside their craniums. My own idea is
that it is better to carry the best part of one's life
about in one's head for future reference.

As the reader already knows, I have seldom '/one
out in search of adventurous material. My procedure
has always been to allow things to happen to me in
their own time. The result was that when anything
unexpected did happen to me it impressed itself on
my mind as being significant. I can therefore claim
that my terrestrial activities have been either acci-
dental in origin or else part of the "inevitable sequence
of events". Had there been no Great War I might
quite conceivably have remained on English soil till
I was buried in it. Others have done the same, so why
not Sherston? The fact remains that up to the end of
1917 I had never been to Ireland.

Outwardly it was a dismal journey, for I left Liver-
pool late at night and the weather was wintry. Crewe
station at midnight was positively Plutonian. Waiting
for the Holyhead express to come in, I listened to
echoing clangour and hissing steam; people paced
the platform with fixedly dejected faces, while glar-
ing lights and gloom and vapour intermingled above
them. Crewe station and everyone inside it seemed to
be eternally condemned to the task of winning the
War by moving men, munitions, and material to the
places appointed for them in the outer darkness of
Armageddon. This much I observed as I stood with
hunched-up shoulders, feeling sombrely impressed
by the strangeness of the scene. Then I boarded the
Holyhead train, remembering how I used to ride
along the Watiing Street with die Packlestone Hounds
and see "Holyhead, 200 miles" on a signpost; this
memory led me to wonder whether I should get a
day's hunting in Ireland. After that an "inevitable

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