(1) Charles Hudson, quoted in Soldier, Poet, Rebel (2007)

During the Boer War...small flagged pins stuck into the large maps in my father's study fascinated me then, as they did later during the Russo-Japanese war, but as far as I can remember my father never explained their significance and I never had any hankering after a military career. Life in the army seemed to me excessively dull, for it never occurred to me that there was the remotest likelihood of there ever being another war, and an army without a war seemed to me quite pointless and rather ludicrous.