ry houses. Twentieth-century England could
not be called degenerate while she counted among her hidden treasures
homes of such charm and culture and mutual confidence as those that
produced the Grenfells, the Charltons, a Lord Elcho, an Edward Tennant
and a Charles Sorley--to pick a few names at random from that galaxy of
'golden boys' who ungrudgingly gave their lives--for what?

The answer to that staggering question is not yet. But the splendour of
their gift remains: a splendour no after-failure can tarnish or dim ...

To the inmates of Bramleigh Beeches--Nevil excepted--the crash came with
startling abruptness; dwarfing all personal problems, heart-searchings
and high decisions. Even Lady Roscoe forgot Family Herald heroics, and
'crossed the threshold' without comment from Nevil or herself. The
weightiest matters became suddenly trivial beside the tremendous
questions that hovered in every mind and on every tongue: 'Can We hold
Them?' 'Can They invade Us?' 'Can it be true--this whispered horror,
that rumoured disaster?' And the test question--most tremendous of all,
for the mere unit--'Where do _I_ come in?'

Nevil came in automatically through years of casual connection with the
Artists' Rifles. He was a Colonel by now; and would join up as a matter
of course--to his wife's secret amazement and far from secret pride.
Without an ounce of the soldier in him, he acted on instinct like most
Englishmen; not troubling to analyse motives; simply in the spirit of
_Noblesse oblige_; or, in the more casual modern equivalent--'one just
does.'

Roy--poet and dreamer--became electrically alive to his double heritage
of the soldier spirit. From age to age the primeval link between poet
and warrior is reaffirmed in time of war: and the Rajput in him
recognised only one way of fighting worthy the name--the triune
conjunction of man and horse and sword. Disillusion, strange and
terrible, awaited him on that score: and as for India--what need of his
young activities, when the whole Empire was being welded into one
resistant mass by the triple hammer-strokes of a common danger, a common
enemy, a common aim?

It was perhaps this sense of a clear call in an age of intellectual
ferment, of sex problems and political friction, that sent so many
unlikely types of manhood straight as arrows to that universal
target--the Front. The War offered a high and practical outlet for their
dumb idealism; to their realism, it offered the 'terri