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11 NORTH STREET WESTMINSTER S.W.
Nov 27. 15.
My dear John
Thank you both so much for your letters and for coming to the service yesterday. I shall miss Harold badly. We were so naturally of one mind and so well content together that it is hard to think I shall never enjoy his companionship again on a mountain side or round the fire at home. And I can't help missing all the hopes I had for him as a soldier. He was too independent in mind and in a way too proud personally to have got on very rapidly in peace. But in this great business he might have had the chance of showing not only his courage but his power of leadership & decision in big things.
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But it may be he did as big a thing in going through a year of torture & hopelessness without once complaining or ever suggesting that he had been unlucky or would wish to be anywhere else than where he was.
He died like a great gentleman. When the end came his stout lungs & heart refused to give in without a desperate struggle & when he saw it was going to be a long fight & painful to watch he made my sister in law Gladys & Muriel Wilson, the two people he was fondest of, say goodbye & go away. Almost the last thing he managed to say to me, & it was a big effort, was that he was being a horrid nuisance. He showed no trace of fear, but the expression in his eye as he held my hand was just the same as I have often seen in him when
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looking for a little friendly support on the rope on a difficult bit of rock. At last he fell asleep & died peacefully in his sleep an hour or so later.
Now I regret all the hours & times I might have seen more of him than I did these last few years - you have been through all that too & will understand.
I once asked him if he hadn't hoped for a D.S.O. for the counter-attack in which he was wounded at Ypres (as his Brigadier had sent word to him in hospital that he had saved the day). He said "No, I hadn't done ten minutes work before I was hit . . . . but I did deserve one for keeping the First Brigade smiling all the way from Mons to the Marne." I like to think of him sitting by the camp fire in
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the desert winning the loyalty of some rather dubious tribe by recounting the story of "Great Klaus & Little Klaus" - now in garbled form a current tale from Darfur to Abyssinia - or checking dangerous local religious movements by sound orthodox quotations from the Koran.
Give my love to Susie and thank her for her letter.
Yours ever
LSA [Leo Amery]
P.S. I have just been tidying his books & papers & found a copy of Vol II of your history with "Hadji Baba from JB". Was that for Harold or for Mrs Grosvenor, for I have an idea she had lent him one or two of her volumes with your inscription.
I also came across a letter from his office clerk (I fancy) in Khartoum saying "all the Sheikhs are distressed that you are wounded & come here to make enquiries."
