In this he said: "I suggest your Excellency bring this book to the notice of a certain royal personage, and of the Strategy Board.

General Bolivar said, 'When you want arms, take them from the enemy.' Does not this also follow when you want ideas ?" What the Strategy Board thought of the plan is a matter of history.

This was in 1910.

A year later, during the coronation week, Lester Ford went to Clarkson's to rent a monk's robe in which to appear at the Shakespeare Ball, and while the assistant departed in search of the robe, Ford was left alone in a small room hung with full-length mirrors and shelves, and packed with the uniforms that Clarkson rents for Covent Garden balls and amateur theatricals.

While waiting, Ford gratified a long, secretly cherished desire to behold himself as a military man, by trying on all the uniforms on the lower shelves; and as a result, when the assistant returned, instead of finding a young American in English clothes and a high hat, he was confronted by a German officer in a spiked helmet fighting a duel with himself in the mirror.