He was a wonderful
all-round sportsman, and promised to be one of the finest
soldier-jockeys India has ever turned out, for here his light weight
and very diminutive size were assets. He came to France with the first
Indian contingent, went through eighteen months' heavy fighting there,
and then took part in the relief of Kut, where he won the M.C. for
conspicuous valour on the field, and afterwards gained the D.S.O. I
have heard him conversing in five different languages with the wounded
Indian soldiers in the Pavilion Hospital at Brighton (with the
Scottish accent underlying them all), and noted the thorough
understanding there was between him and the men. Young as he was, he
had managed to get inside the Oriental mind. He was killed in a paltry
frontier affray, six months after the Armistice. I am convinced that
Norman Kemp would have made a great name for himself had he lived. He
had the peculiar faculty of gaining the confidence of the Oriental,
and I think that he would have eventually drifted from the Military to
the Political or Administrative side in India. He was a splendid
little fellow.
Nearly twenty-five years earlier, I had known another very similar
type of young man. He was a subaltern in the Norfolk Regiment, and a
great school-friend of a nephew of mine.
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