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Page 41
Those who knew anything of the Army were well aware long before 1914 that
this type of officer--if he still existed, as no doubt he had once
existed--had become extraordinarily rare; that since the Boer War, the
level of education in the Army, the standard of work demanded, the quality
of the relations between officers and men had all steadily advanced. And
with regard to the young men of the "classes" in general, those who had to
do with them, at school and college, while fully alive to their
weaknesses, yet cherished convictions which were more instinct than
anything else, as to what stuff these easy-going, sport-loving fellows
might prove to be made of in case of emergency.
Well, the emergency came. These youths of the classes, heirs to titles and
estates, or just younger sons of the old squirearchy of England, so far as
it still survives, went out in their hundreds, with the old and famous
regiments of the British line in the Expeditionary Force, and perished in
their hundreds. Forty-seven eldest sons, heirs to English peerages had
fallen within a year of the outbreak of war--among them the heirs to such
famous houses as Longleat, Petworth, and Castle Ashby--and the names of
Grenfell, Hood, Stuart, Bruce, Lister, Douglas Pennant, Worsley, Hay, St.
Aubyn, Carington, Annesley, Hicks Beach--together with men whose fathers
have played prominent parts in the politics or finance of the last half
century. And the first ranks have been followed by what one might almost
call a _lev�e en masse_ of those that remained. Their blood has been spilt
like water at Ypres and La Bass�e, at Suvla and Helles. Whatever may be
said henceforward of these "golden lads" of ours, "shirker" and "loafer"
they can never he called again. They have died too lavishly, their men
have loved and trusted them too well for that--and some of the
working-class leaders, with the natural generosity of English hearts, have
confessed it abundantly.
And the professional classes--the intellectuals--everywhere the leading
force of the nation--have done just as finely, and of course in far
greater numbers. Never shall I forget my visit to Oxford last May--in the
height of the summer term, just at that moment when Oxford normally is at
its loveliest and fullest, brimming over with young life, the streets
crowded with caps and gowns, the river and towing-path alive with the
"flannelled fools," who have indeed flung back Rudyard Kipling's gibe--if
it ever applied to them--with interest. For they had all disappeared. They
were in the trenches, landing at Suvla, garrisoning Egypt, pushing up to
Baghdad. The colleges contained a few forlorn remnants--under age, or
medically unfit. The river, on a glorious May day, showed boats indeed,
but girls were rowing them. Oriel, the college of Arnold, of Newman, of
Cecil Rhodes, was filled with women students, whose own college,
Somerville, had become a hospital. The Examination Schools in the High
Street were a hospital, and the smell of disinfectants displaced the
fragrance of lilac and hawthorn for ever associated in the minds of
Oxford's lovers with the summer term. In New College gardens, there were
white tents full of wounded. I walked up and down that wide, deserted lawn
of St. John's, where Charles I once gathered his Cavaliers, with an old
friend, an Oxford tutor of forty years' standing, who said with a
despairing gesture, speaking of his pupils: "So many are gone--so
_many_!--and the terrible thing is that I can't feel it as I once did--as
blow follows blow one seems to have lost the power."
Let me evoke the memory of some of them. From Balliol have gone the two
Grenfell brothers, vehement, powerful souls, by the testimony of those
who knew them best, not delightful to those who did not love them, not
just, often, to those they did not love, but full of that rich stuff which
life matures to all fine uses. The younger fell in the attack on Hooge,
July 31st, last year; the elder, Julian, had fallen some months earlier.
Julian's verses, composed the night before he was wounded, will be
remembered with Rupert Brooke's sonnets, as expressing the inmost passion
of the war in great hearts. They were written in the spring weather of
April, 1915, and a month later the writer had died of his wounds. With an
exquisite felicity and strength the lines run, expressing the strange and
tragic joy of the "fighting man" in the spring, which may be his last--in
the night heavens--in the woodland trees:
"The woodland trees that stand together
They stand to him each one a friend;
They gently speak in the windy weather;
They guide to valley and ridge's end.
"The kestrel hovering by day
And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be swift and keen as they
As keen of ear, as swift of sight.
"The blackbird sings to him, 'Brother, brother,
If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you may not sing another
Brother, sing.'
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