Brigadier-General Hardress-Lloyd (GOC 3 Tank Brigade) thought Harper “an old ass” and claimed (according to the May 1918 journals of J.F.C. Fuller) that he had expressed scepticism about the new tactics of infantry advancing in single file (“worms”) and had remarked that they should advance in line as if “you were walking arm-in-arm with a girl”. Hardress-Lloyd claimed to have retorted “if the late Oscar Wilde were walking with you, where do you think he would go?” and that Harper almost had to be “carried from the room in an ambulance”.