Books: Cheerful Protestant

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By all accounts, including his own, Gary was "extremely idle" at Oxford's Trinity College. He barely got his degree. While others studied, Gary talked, bought first editions and wondered if his income would stay steady. His college friend John Middleton Murry (later a literary critic and the husband of Katherine Mansfield) "never saw him do a spot of work." Gary's pals (most of whom did all right in later life) were a hard-drinking lot. Says Murry: "I mean you would see them sozzled three times a week. Joyce drank about like the rest of us. But he was the chap that would see you home." On one such late evening, just outside the college, Gary was sure he had suddenly gone lame. His friends, leaning out the window, roaring with laughter, shouted: "You've got one foot in the gutter, you fool!"

For Fun & Valor. In 1912, a few months after Gary finished Oxford, the first Balkan war broke out in Montenegro. Gary felt he had to get into it. "I didn't think there were going to be any more wars and I didn't want to miss it. And of course I did have some idea about this sort of freedom stuff." Gary went to the front with a Red Cross unit. He was also the cook. Sometimes a room 40 by 20 was crowded with 200 dead & wounded. "We were using the dead for mattresses, we had to, and the blood was a foot deep on the floor." Cooking the wretched rations of goat meat and lugging the wounded back from the lines were hard on the nerves. But the King of Montenegro himself decorated Gary for valor.

Back in London again and restless, he put in for the colonial service. He drew a job in Nigeria, and in April 1914 headed for Africa. But World War I came to Africa soon after Gary did; he left the colonial service for combat.

The Cameroons campaign was a weird hide & seek, where parties of armed men wandered around looking for the enemy, all of them concealed in elephant grass that towered over their heads. At the battle of Mora, Lieut. Gary was ordered to lead his 25 men in a charge up a hill. He got his objective, but lost half his men in the first minute and a half. It was there that he was wounded—"a beautiful shot" that pierced his helmet, chipped the mastoid bone and went through his right ear. Says Gary: "I remember thinking only 'this is it, and it's easy.' "

Later he was invalided home and in 1916 got married—to Gertrude Ogilvie, the sister of a college classmate. The Ogilvies weren't too happy about it. Gary had recurrent attacks of malaria and was down to 112 pounds. Besides, says an Ogilvie, "we thought he was rather harum-scarum." When he recovered his health he went back to Africa, to an area where wives were forbidden. For a year, acting District Officer Gary was the only white man in the rebellious district of Borgu. The natives were largely pagan, and Gary had no wire communication with his superiors. He headed a twelve-man native police force, was judge, prime minister, prosecutor and adviser. "I never had to hang a man," he says, "and it's lucky I didn't. I would have had to hang him myself because I was also sheriff."