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-