G R I F F E N 2 0 2 3 | 3 0 Elegiac Reflections imaginative significance was the consonance of the bugle call with his own identity – he was in himself a sort of incarnate Last Post, whose whole life of multifarious activity, infinitely varied yet totally coherent, was an expression of loyalty and duty in the service of what must now seem to many to be a vanished order. Soldier, diplomatist, intelligencegatherer, explorer, linguist, scholar, mystic, circus ringmaster, wild hymn-singing eccentric – this was a man even more various, though infinitely more admirable, than Dryden’s ‘Zimri’. As English as he could possibly be, he was one who nonetheless found his ideal environments equally in the burning sands of Yemen and on the icy heights of the Himalayas. He trod, with delicate self-deprecation, in the footsteps of Lionel Dunsterville (Kipling’s ‘Stalky’), Aubrey Herbert (Buchan’s ‘Sandy Arbuthnot’) and What can better evoke nostalgia than the dying echoes of a bugle call? It was in many ways peculiarly fitting that it should have been the sound of the Last Post that sent Hugh Leach (1953) to his final rest on 14 November 2015. he present writer cannot have been the only one at his funeral who was reminded at that moment of John Bunyan’s line about the passing of Mr. GreatHeart: ‘And the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.’ There was suitability, of course, in the fact that Hugh was himself an extravagantly skilled performer on the instrument – he was known to some as ‘Lips Leach’ – whose extraordinary idiosyncrasy it had always been to order his daily routines, morning, noon and night, by the notes of his bugle. But of greater and more T.E. Lawrence (from whose trainwrecks he purloined chunks of steel rail for use as bookends). But he was more versatile than any of them in his skills and interests, and, unlike those paladins, was effortlessly at ease with women and children. He consorted as an equal with Wilfred Thesiger and Freya Stark, and received a medal from the Royal Society for Asian Affairs for his discovery of the source of the River Oxus; but these distinctions he seemed to place on a par with the elemental delights of dressing up and playing the clown to audiences of bewildered tribesmen. He would have dismissed as ridiculous the suggestion that he was one of the last knights errant of empire, with more than a touch of Don Quixote in his manners – but that was his natural calling, and he followed it joyfully to the end. T
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