William Herbert Lewis (b 1884) was a career Army officer who retired as a lieutenant colonel, with the D.S.O. and M.C. He met Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), the author, through a mutual friend, Charles Leonard, a South African lawyer, in or shortly before 1905 and corresponded with him until days before his death. (See A. Lycett, Rudyard Kipling (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 396, 433.)
From the guide to the Kipling-Lewis Letters, 1905-1936 (mainly 1911-1914), (University of Sussex Library)