Then came the War. Suddenly swooped down on us like a martial bird and bore us off. There was no time for goodbyes, either to family or sweethearts, movies and fiction to the contrary. ... We embarked from Folkstone. I remember sitting in that train with my battalion, on a siding, waiting to go. I could see from my car window the familiar streets I had walked so many times, houses of people I knew. I felt as a dead man might feel, revisiting, himself unseen, old haunts he had known well but which knew him no longer. I knew that I would come back but not as I was then. ...

Because I didn’t come back. I won’t go into the War and all that it did to all of us.... We went out. Strangers came back. It was the war that made an actor out of me . When I came back that was all I was good for-acting. I wasn’t my own man anymore.

I didn’t realize it at first... two years of it, four to five months in active combat on the field, invalided home, posted to light duty in Scotland, then discharged.

My feet had been shot off the earth.

Ronald Colman in Ronald Colman’s Secret Romance interviewed by Gladys Hall, Movie Mirror May 1934