August l4, 1915. 
land'' AND WATER, 
hopfes of: Oxford, of Cambridge, of business, of future 
professions, and all the rest of it, for their country. They 
leave us smiling, almost children, without care or fear; 
they come back to us a few months after, if they come 
back at all. a few V.C.'s and D.C.M.'s, bearing their 
honours lightly as if never won, ascribing them always 
to "flukes"; armless, legless, eyeless,, as if badly 
mauled by some savage beast, yet always cheerful. 
Only tlie look in their eyes betrays that they have looked 
Death ■ and Horror in the face not once, but many 
tim'es. Their talk is always banter and good-natured 
" ragging." Their similes always refer to some loved 
sport. One such wrote the day before he died — both his 
legs had to be amputated as tlie result of a shell : " I 
always funked those low ones in the slips : I never could 
get down to 'em." 
■ They talk of regiments and divisions " out lliere " 
just as they used, a year or so ago, to discuss colleges 
•other'than their own at the I'niversity. 
"By Jove! you should see the Leicesters ; the 
Germans won't go near 'em for love or money : they 
^re the lads." 
" The 29th Division? Yes — I should say so. I 
know stacks of fellas in that crowd ; they're just the 
very best ever. I never saw such a crew ; absolutely 
-without fear; go anywhere; do anything — the\- have 
made a name for themselves." 
"Oh, the IJIankshires ! Yes— they have made a 
mess of it. The biggest skunks on the face of tlie earth : 
ihey haven't a single officer who's washed since Noali's 
time, and as for their men . . . it's time they went 
back to scavenging. We've no use for 'em out there. 
. . ." And so on. 
They are made of just tlie same stuff as ever, these 
Public School boys, but in the past there has not been 
much to bring them out. " Spirits are not finely touched 
but to fine: issues." They may in the piping times of 
peace need some justification, but not now, not now. 
SA long as we have mep to lead us of such caKbre, men 
who last year may have been bank clerks, at a theological 
college,, in business, fruit-farming in B.C., school- 
masterS, polo players, landed proprietors, rich or poor, 
sporting or .intellectual, however diverse in their voca- 
tions or pursuits, yet bound together under the magic 
. title of Old Boys of Such and Such a School, 
there is no need of pessimism so far as England is 
concerned. 
Wh\-, even now, at tliis very moment, you will find 
that all the Public School boys who are physically in- 
eligible or are not old enough to join their dearest friends 
in Flanders or the Dardanelles are working here at 
^ home for tlie whole of August and September. You will 
find them on farms as har\csters, in goods yards as 
porters, with the Territorials, living with the men as 
Sergeant-Instructors (the War Office was wiser than it 
knew when it permitted them to undertake these respon- 
sible jobs), in Y.M.C.A. tents as entertainers, as 
Enumerators of the Register, ready as ever to do any- 
thing or to be sent anywhere if by so doing they can 
render some service to their country. This they are 
doing with a smile on their lips and a cheerful readiness 
which is all the more laudable, for under the surface 
there is the gnawing anger at the unfairness of it all — 
that not theirs is the honour and glory, the chance to 
fight and die, the chance to be with all those friends who 
matter; but that they have to stay at home with those 
" half-men, drear and dirty," who have refused to 
answer the call of honour; aye, and worse, are liable to 
be classed among them by short-sighted, interfering 
fools who think to do their country service by insulting 
every young man they meet not in khaki. 
The Public School spirit is not least of all to be 
seen in these who have to forgo their most cherished 
ambitions and abide here at home, cheered on onlv bv 
the motto " They also serve " and by their own hearts' 
innTost conviction. 
GERMANY'S BREAK WITH THE PAST. 
/ 
By I . March Phiilipps. 
PEOPLE who love arclntecture are well aware of 
the capacity it has for incarnating, as it were, 
the thoughts and emotions of its builders; so 
that, long after a generation has passed away 
and its clay mingled with its native soil, its 
spirit seems still to survive in those more permanent 
bodies of stone into which it has been breatb.ed. It is in 
;(ll>is sense illiat Mr. Lelhaby speaks of a Gothic cathedral 
.iasiaigrea* fragment of the Middle Ages sticking u;) 
through the strata of after centuries. Naturally the 
buildings which belong to the great creative epochs, or, 
as we say, to the great styles of , architecture, possess 
mosf, of this living interest, for it is these whicti were 
origfmaliy'i'Wspired by a positive and imited conviction. 
Mdi-e'hieanirig havthg been poured into them, they can 
conimiinicaVe inore. Hence it is that medicTval build- 
ings are able so effectively to impart medictval ideas that 
to submit Orteself to their influence is almost equivalent 
to being transported back into that periotl in our history. 
It is this power of architecture to express ideas, and 
to repel or attract according as its ideas are acceptable or 
the reverse, which seems to me to impart a jx-culiar sig- 
^ nificance to Germany's dealing;; with mediaeval build- 
.i'in'gs in Belgium and France. .After making all allow- 
ances it is difficult to resist the impression that the work 
of destruction carried out at Rheims, Louvain, Arras, 
and many other places v.as performed with a zest 
amounting to a quite willing and even eager alacrity. 
You \Vould say the Germans took phasure in tlie 
job; certainly you wou<d look in \ain fr»r anytraces of 
reluctance, or of a desire to spare, or for the smallest 
indication, in letters or diaries of German officers or in 
L ofSciaTor rteNys'i^'apef cottifncnfc; 'that the objects de- 
' "stroy^d' app^altd to ahy'feentirrieht" Of reverence shared' 
by the German race in common with other people. 
Whatever the thoughts may be which are preserved in 
these edifices, the Germans would seem very emphati- 
cally to riSpudiate them.' At least, that is the impres- 
sion conveyed by the spontaneous wantonness of the 
destruction they have wrought. 
And, indeed, their hostility in their outward action 
is no more than the hostility they are expressing in 
another way in their own modern style of building. For 
Germany, too, in these days has a style. The ascendency 
of the Prussian order of idea has been- so marked;- and 
has sD Completely dominated the national will, tiiat its 
mere external and official authority ' has succeeded in 
generating a kind of architecture imbued with all the 
characteristics of tlie Prussian ideal. This new German 
styJe is interesting as showing, not only that Germany 
has'broken with tiie -past, but the reason she has for so 
■ doing;- the reason being that she' has adopted a philo- 
sophy df life entirely different, and even antagonistic, to 
the mediieval point of view. ■ This it is that issigni- 
Hcant, and this it is — this desire on the part of Germany 
to substitute a new order of ideas for the ideas for which 
mediaeval art still stands in Europe — which will justify 
a moment's attention. 
• I'or many years the study of architecture has been 
carried on with us under somewhat discouraging condi- 
tions,- owing to the fact that it has fallen into the hands of 
a number of professional dealers, who are much more con- 
cerned v»ith maintaining their monopoly of a lucrative 
business than employing it, as an art, to express the ideas 
of their own age. I'nder the circumstanci-s, it is .-'^rv 
natural that all interest in the subject siiould nearly be 
•iUill-ediOJiiiti. XevertheiosK, ib.spite of this, there arc certain 
• it«i-l<33>of aK;hiiecture tlic innate; (Big»iliC£(nce of which is 
17 
