Quite apart from the official view, however, each individual had to decide for himself where his duty lay. 'I support you whatever you decide,' Buchman said. Many of them found if the most difficult decision of their lives. On the one hand there was the natural call to return to family, home and country, and the certainty of being understood. On the other was their conviction that the result of the war would depend upon America, where there was a job to do for which they had been trained in a way that few others had been.

Reginald Hale, the erstwhile Isis cartoonist, a British territorial officer of four years' experience and a passionate soldier, writes that by inclination and training he longed to rejoin the colours as fast as he could, but that he came to the conclusion that 'as a Christian, as an Englishman and as a soldier' his duty was to stick with Buchman at all costs. 'I could not expect that all my friends would understand and I did not blame them when they wrote harshly to me. But for me, my course was clear.'10

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