us, he had just landed in the United States when the war broke out. He
was going round the world with a friend, youth and ambition high within
him. He turned back without a moment's hesitation, though soldiering had
never been at all attractive to him, and after his training went out to
France. He was killed in Flanders in July last. Let me give the story of
his identification after death on the battle-field, by his elder brother,
Neville, Army Chaplain, and ex-Balliol tutor, as Canon Scott Holland gave
it in the _Commonwealth_:--

"The attack had failed. There was never any hope of its succeeding, for
the machine-guns of the Germans were still in full play, with their fire
unimpaired. The body had to lie there where it had fallen. Only, his
brother could not endure to let it lie unhonoured or unblessed. After a
day and a half of anxious searching for exact details, he got to the
nearest trench by the 'murdered' wood, which the shells had now smashed to
pieces. There he found some shattered Somersets, who begged him to go no
farther. But he heard a voice within him bidding him risk it, and the call
of the blood drove him on. Creeping out of the far end of the trench, as
dusk fell, he crawled through the grass on hands and knees, in spite of
shells and snipers, dropping flat on the ground as the flares shot up from
the German trenches. And, at last, thirty yards away in the open ... he
knew that he was close on what he sought. Two yards farther, he found it.
He could stroke with his hand the fair young head that he knew so well; he
could feel for pocket-book and prayer-book, and the badge and the whistle.
He could breathe a prayer of benediction ... and then crawl back on his
perilous way in the night, having done all that man could do for the
brother whom he had loved so fondly; and enabled, now, to tell those at
home that Gilbert was dead indeed, but that he had died the death that a
soldier would love to die, leaving his body the nearest of all who fell,
to the trench that he had been told to take."

Again, of Charles Alfred Lister, Lord Ribblesdale's eldest son, an Oxford
friend says: "There were almost infinite possibilities in his future." He
was twice wounded at the Dardanelles, was then offered a post of
importance in the Foreign Office, refused it, and went back to the
front--to die. But among the hundreds of memorial notices issued by the
Oxford Colleges, the same note recurs and recurs, of unhesitating,
uncalc