Maugham (who, like Walpole, was homosexual) later satirised him in Cakes and Ale (1930) as Alroy Kear, a pushy mediocrity with a bogus reputation. But the boyish Walpole experienced more combat at the front than any of the other writers, including Gerhardie, a professional soldier. Describing the Polish front in December 1916 with a novelist’s eye, Walpole captured the almost cinematic beauty of the battlefield: “Wonderful views from the hill — the river, the fields of horses, the riding Cossacks, the regiments crossing the bridge, the cannon getting nearer and nearer, the endless lines of carts on the horizon, the smoke of the battle and the reflection of the shrapnel, the evening with the sky all red, the black village and all the army moving about silently, the graves, the wounded riding in bleeding, the dead coming in on carts, the burnt houses.”

In May 1915 Walpole, one of the rare Englishmen who became a Russian officer, joined a Red Cross medical unit in the Carpathian mountains of Romania. The following month he recorded an exciting and dangerous moment: “I had a most perilous adventure — shrapnel bursting very close to us, all amongst the lines, creeping in and out avoiding the moon, crossing the river, stumbling over hidden soldiers who didn’t cheer us by telling us to be quick as they were going to begin firing.” That year he was decorated by the Russian army for rescuing a wounded soldier under fire. After battle he seemed confident and energetic, and Lockhart was impressed by him: “Walpole, resplendent in a Red Cross uniform, was as tremendously enthusiastic and as refreshingly sentimental as ever. He had just returned from England, where the first of his Russian books, The Dark Forest, had had a great success.”

In February 1916, Walpole became head of British propaganda, with offices on the Admiralty Quay and a staff of 12. He predicted the murder of Rasputin two weeks before the event, and wrote influential articles for the leading Petrograd newspapers. Ransome admired Walpole’s speed as a writer, but they quarrelled bitterly when Ransome wrote articles that disagreed with official views. During the March revolution Walpole heard “a terrific noise of firing and shouting; went to our windows and saw whole revolutionary mob pass down our street. About two thousand soldiers, many civilians armed, motor lorries with flags. All orderly, picketing the streets as they passed.” November 7 brought the outbreak of the revolution and the ten days that shook the world. Walpole described the tumultuous scene in his diary: “The latest news that Kerensky has defied the Bolsheviks and arrested their committee . . . News in the morning that the Bolsheviks have the upper hand . . . Firing in the evening. Shelling of Winter Palace . . . Learn as I go to bed that the whole town in hands of Bolsheviks . . . Putting barricades up in the streets. Saw the damage shells had done to the Winter Palace.” Noting that he and Maugham (like Ransome and Lockhart) had worked together in the autumn of 1917, Walpole emphasised their swift change from high-minded hopes to bitter disillusionment: “Very depressing those months were, when the idealism of some of us got some hard knocks, and when all our preconceived notions of Russia and the Russians fell to the ground one after the other.”