In 1902 Munro went to the Balkans for the Morning Post, and later he became the correspondent of that paper in St. Petersburg, where he was during the revolution of 1905.

He left St. Petersburg to represent the Morning Post in Paris, and returned to London in 1908, where the agreeable life of a man of letters with a brilliant reputation awaited him. He had a lodging in Mortimer Street and lived exceedingly simply. It was his custom to pass the morning in a dressing-gown writing. His writing-pad was usually propped up with a book to make it slant and he wrote slowly in a very clear hand, rarely erasing a word or making a correction. His air and the movement of his hand gave one the impression that he was drawing and not writing. He almost always lunched at a Lyons bread-shop, partly because it was economical and partly because, as he said, he got exactly the sort of luncheon he liked. He cared nothing for money. He had to earn his living, but he was content as long as he had enough money to supply his needs. When a friend once suggested a profitable field for his writings, he dismissed the idea by saying that he was not interested in the public for which it was proposed that he should write. He loved his art, and, by refusing to adopt a style that might have appealed to wider circles, he made himself a place in our literature which, in the opinion of many, will be lasting. Almost every day he played cards, either in the late afternoon or in the evening, at the Cocoa Tree Club. The sight of the wealth of others did not excite his envy. I remember his coming home from a ball and relating that he had sat at supper next a millionairess, whose doctor had prescribed a diet of milk-puddings. “I had a hearty supper,” he said gleefully, “and for all her millions she was unable to eat anything.”

Munro was exceedingly generous. He would share his last sovereign with a friend, and nothing pleased him better than to entertain his friends at dinner in a club or restaurant. Nothing angered him more than meanness in others. I remember the indignation with which he spoke of a rich woman who had refused to give adequate help to a poor person, who stood in need of it.

This even life in town, occasionally varied by a visit to a country house, was rudely disturbed by the shock of war. Munro was in the House of Commons when Sir Edward Grey made his statement on the position that this country was to take up. He told me that the strain of listening to that speech was so great that he found himself in a sweat. He described the slowness with which the Minister developed his argument and the way in which he stopped to put on his eye-glasses to read a memorandum and then took them off to continue, holding the House in suspense. That night we dined at a chop-house in the Strand with two friends. On our way Munro insisted on walking at a tremendous pace, and at dinner, when he ordered cheese and the waiter asked whether he wanted butter, he said peremptorily: “Cheese, no butter; there’s a war on.” A day or two later he was condemning himself for the slackness of the years in London and hiring a horse to take exercise, to which he was little addicted, in the Park. He was determined to fight. Nothing else was to have been expected of the man who wrote When William Came, a novel in which he used his supreme gift of irony to rouse his fellow-countrymen from their torpor and to stir them to take measures for the defence of the country. Punch declared that there had been no such conversational fireworks since Wilde, in reviewing this book, but Munro was more gratified by a word of encouragement sent him by Lord Roberts, after he had read the book, than by all the praise of the critics. He was over military age and he was not robust. In the first weeks of the war there seemed little chance of his being able to become a soldier. “And I have always looked forward to the romance of a European war,” he said.

There still hangs in his room in Mortimer Street an old Flemish picture, which he had picked up somewhere, of horsemen in doublets and plumed hats, fighting beneath the walls of a city. It was, I think, the only painting in his possession. Perhaps it was this picture that represented to him the romance of which he spoke; but he did not hide from himself the terrible side of war. Happily thoughts about war can be given in his own words. The following piece appeared in the first edition of the Morning Post of April 23, 1915, under the title, An Old Love—

“‘I know nothing about war,’ a boy of nineteen said to me two days ago, ‘except, of course, that I’ve heard of its horrors; yet, somehow, in spite of the horrors, there seems to be something in it different to anything else in the world, something a little bit finer.’

“He spoke wistfully, as one who feared that to him war would always be an unreal, distant, second-hand thing, to be read about in special editions, and peeped at through the medium of cinematograph shows. He felt that the thing that was a little bit finer than anything else in the world would never come into his life.

“Nearly every red-blooded human boy has had war, in some shape or form, for his first love; if his blood has remained red and he has kept some of his boyishness in after life, that first love will never have been forgotten. No one could really forget those wonderful leaden cavalry soldiers; the horses were as sleek and prancing as though they had never left the parade-ground, and the uniforms were correspondingly spick and span, but the amount of campaigning and fighting they got through was prodigious. There are other unforgettable memories for those who had brothers to play with and fight with, of sieges and ambushes and pitched encounters, of the slaying of an entire garrison without quarter, or of chivalrous, punctilious courtesy to a defeated enemy. Then there was the slow unfolding of the long romance of actual war, particularly of European war, ghastly, devastating, heartrending in its effect, and yet somehow captivating to the imagination. The Thirty Years’ War was one of the most hideously cruel wars ever waged, but, in conjunction with the subsequent campaigns of the Great Louis, it throws a glamour over the scene of the present struggle. The thrill that those far-off things call forth in us may be ethically indefensible, but it comes in the first place from something too deep to be driven out; the magic region of the Low Countries is beckoning to us again, as it beckoned to our forefathers, who went campaigning there almost from force of habit.

“One must admit that we have in these Islands a variant from the red-blooded type. One or two young men have assured me that they are not in the least interested in the war—‘I’m not at all patriotic, you know,’ they announce, as one might announce that one was not a vegetable or did not use a safety-razor. There are others whom I have met within the recent harrowing days who had no place for the war crisis in their thoughts and conversations; they would talk by the hour about chamber-music, Greek folk-dances, Florentine art, and the difficulty of getting genuine old oak furniture, but the national honour and the national danger were topics that bored them. One felt that the war would affect them chiefly as involving a possible shortage in the supply of eau-de-Cologne or by debarring them from visiting some favourite art treasure at a Munich gallery. It is inconceivable that these persons were ever boys, they have certainly not grown up into men; one cannot call them womanish—the women of our race are made of different stuff. They belong to no sex and it seems a pity that they should belong to any nation; other nations probably have similar encumbrances, but we seem to have more of them than we either desire or deserve.

“There are other men among us who are patriotic, one supposes, but with a patriotism that one cannot understand; it must be judged by a standard that we should never care to set up. It seems to place a huckstering interpretation on honour, to display sacred things in a shop window, marked in plain figures. ‘If we remained neutral,’ as a leading London morning paper once pleaded, ‘we should be, from the commercial point of view, in precisely the same position as the United States. We should be able to trade with all the belligerents (so far as war allows of trade with them); we should be able to capture the bulk of their trade in neutral markets; we should keep our expenditure down; we should keep out of debt; we should have healthy finances.’

“A question was buzzing in my head by the time I had finished reading those alluring arguments:

“Some men of noble stock were made; Some glory in the murder-blade: Some praise a science or an art, But I like honourable trade.

“The poet has given a satiric meaning to the last word but one in those lines; perhaps that is why they flashed so readily to the mind.

“One remembers with some feeling of relief the spectacle last August of boys and youths marching and shouting through the streets in semi-disciplined mobs, waving the flags of France and Britain. There is perhaps nothing very patriotic in shouting and flag-waving, but it is the only way these youngsters had of showing their feelings.”