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poor; the soft, effeminate creature who had never faced the facts of life and never would. As to his soldiering--the common profession of so many of his kind--that was only another offence in the eyes of politicians like Mr. Keir Hardie. When the class war came, he would naturally he found shooting down the workmen; but for any other war, an ignorant popinjay!--incompetent even at his own trade, and no match whatever for the scientific soldier of the Continent. 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 _levee en masse_ of those that remained. Their blood has been spilt like water at Ypres and La Bassee, 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-
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