LAND & WATER 
12 
called thonisolves the County Archf ological Socicty-was 
shaped like the letter •' E " and had great {,'f 1^^^ ^ ^h 
niullioned windows whose leaden casements glo\xtd like 
fire in the westering sun. The oak-panel Ini? ^;•'^-. Wack 
Mith age, and on the plaster wall of one of the bed.ooms 
Moses and the patriarchs were frescoed m doublet a^ d 
hose, and Pharaoh's daughter stooped ON^r the bul- 
rushes in a farthingale. Tony loved it at fi;^^ ^ec^^e 
it seemed specially designed to enable Inm to pla> hide 
and seek in its oak closets, long corridors, and deep 
alcoves, and lie loved it to the end of his hfe because it wa. 
his home. He>-ond the yew hedge was the V^^^'^'J^^ 
beyond the paddock was the park, and above the to ^ 
of the beeches Tony could see the c^ge of the wok, 
which was a chalk down. Beyond that chak down 
he felt assured, was the Celestial City, although he had 
heard grown-ups cfill it " the howizon. 
He passed from the hands of a tutor to the public 
school for which his father had put his name down on 
the dav of his birth. He began as the lowliest of tags 
and the first thing he discovered was that for us name, 
which was illustrious, was rudely substituted another 
and a homelier-" Freckles." He came back after his 
first half with an immense stock of knowledge, not to be 
found in books, and a vocabulary which was unfamiliar 
to everyone at home except his father— a vocabulary in 
which '"• to thoke " is to slack " to brock. '^^ .to bully, 
in which " I.ongmeads " stands for a day off and Moab 
does duty for a lavatory. It is a vocabulary which once 
learnt is^iever forgotten ; men of his school speak it m 
the hill-stations of India, on the African veldt, in tlic 
back flats of Australia, and wherever two or three ot tlicm 
are gathered together. Also he exhibited a discoloured 
eve At all of which his father rejoiced, but his mother 
w-as sorrowful, feeling that he had passed without the 
cloister of her heart. But in this she was mistaken. 
In due time he reached the dizzv heights of the Sixth 
and became a prefect with the right to turn his trousers 
up and to wear brown boots, which is only permitted to 
the elect Also he won his cap as centre forward in the 
School riftcen. Small boys imitated lum. big boys 
envied him, and he had a retinue of clients like a I'Loman 
oatron. He put down bulking in his house with a strong 
iand— and other things. By this time he had learnt 
"^o turn out a good hexameter and a neat iambic ; also 
:o put Burke into a Latin prose that was stately without 
being pompous. . , 
rhencc he went to Oxford. His name was alreadv 
on the books of his father's old college but, as it turned 
out he needed no precedence, for he took a classical scholai - 
ship There he learned the same lesson that he had 
learnt at school— namelv, that the first thing to do is to 
live down an outside reputation : the greater the reputa- 
tion the more modest it behoves you to be. He found 
that a first vear man does not call on a second year man, 
but waits to be called on. No ! not though llic one be a 
scholar and the other a commoner. Also that one is 
never elected into the best clubs or college societies in 
one's first term'. But not being a pushful person he liad 
really no need to learn these things, for he knew them by 
instinct. But men sought him out and discovered his 
worth so that in his second term, when he lavishly re- 
turned the hospitalities of the lirst. the size of his battels 
drew a mild rebuke from the Uean. But be.yond 
occasionally getting gated, he managed to keep on good 
terms with" the Dons, who can rarely resist the man wiio 
is at once an athlete and a scholar. After tubbing in the 
Alorrison fours, he rowed seven in the Torpids, and hi^ 
boat did a bump every night near the " gut t.ieat 
faggots blazed in the quad the last night, and for (mce m 
his life Tonv got rather drunk and was with ditficultv 
restrained from mounting the pyre, having to be put to bed 
by his frieud>. loudlv protesting that he was Joan of Mc 
He cot ploughed in Divinity Mods for a character-sketch 
of St Peter which the Examiners voted learned but 
profane : vour Anglican don does not like to hear the 
disciple described as " the enfant terrible of the Twelve. 
Also he entertained a Socialist chimney-sweeper in. his 
moms like a man and a brother and (what was far worse 
in the eyes of Anglican dons), a Nonconformist draper 
with whom he insisted on discussing the right of entry 
in single-school areas. For it was his fa^hlon to try all 
thinsi- In long walks over Shotover and Cumnor, m 
high talks at night in the quad c*r in his rooms, he dis- 
Februafy b, 1917 
cussed in the manner of Plato's dialectics, the Nature of 
the State, the Responsibilities of the Empire towards 
Subject-races, the Meaning of Good, the Nature of Truth, 
and the Ornaments Rubric. For of such things do men 
talk at Oxford, plumbing the depths of speculation in a 
world where specuUition takes the place of experience 
and men sec Life, like the dwellers in the cave of Plato's 
myth, by the shadows that the outer world throws upon 
its enchanted walls. 
His first long vacation was less than half-way through 
\vhen a cloud no bigger than a man's hand rose upon the 
horizon. It first appeared when his father opened the 
newspaper at breakfast one morning and read out that 
an Archduke had been assassinated in a tiny satrapy of 
the Austrian liminre. " Another of those Balkan melo- 
dramas" he said lightly as he turned to the stock markets. 
But in a few days the cloud grew bigger. The bank-rate 
went up like a rocket, dark hints of " Mobihzation 
appeared, the word ultimatum was repeated in the papers, 
one read curiously of an encounter between patrols 
on the Franco-Gei-man frontier and noted with con- 
sternation that a man had been killed. And then the 
storm burst. The King called for men. 
The cornfields were brilliant with scarlet pimpernel 
and rest-harrow, and the wheat, changing from sea-green 
to gold and heavy in the ear, gave i)romise of an early 
harvest. But father and son ceased to talk of days 
among the stubble ; the boy was silent, until one day 
he announced his intention of " doing his bit." His 
mother turned pale but said nothing. That night she 
entered his room, according to her habit, to kiss him 
good-night. She went down on her knees beside him 
and with her arms round his neck said " Don't — you are 
all I have." He looked straight into her face and said 
reproachfully, " Mummy ! who was it told me— do 
vou remember ?— never 'to fear ApoUyon ? " And from 
that moment she knew it was useless, nor did she try 
to dissOtide him, for she would not have had it otherwise. 
They remained in long communion as he told her all 
the secrets of his heart, and when she rose to go her eyes 
were dry, for in that hour she knew, as she had not known 
since he was a httle child, that he and she were one. 
He joined the O.T.C. He learnt section drill, platoon 
drill, company driirand many other things. And then, 
one day he applied for a commission. He duly filled up 
nil the interrot;atorics on M.T. 392 and against " uni}; ' 
preferred" he'wrote the name of a well-known \\ est 
Country regiment in whose officers' mess his family 
name was a household word. And he sent it to his old 
Head for the usual certificate of moral character. He- 
blushed when it came back and was slightly annoyed, 
for the Head, not content with the words, " I certify, 
had added an after thought : " He is an excellent ivWow ; 
one of the best." 
At the School of Instruction he learnt the art of war, 
his tutor being a Major invalided home from the front 
Mho tauglit him all that can be learnt by oral instruction 
on rationing, patrols, relief by sections, and the making 
out of work-tables. And when all home-keeping folk 
were in bed he marched them out in column of fours to 
a lacerated field were they practised^' Night (3p," with 
the aid of a trip-wire, a flare pistol, and implements of 
husbandry. The Major was a wise man ; he had drilled 
with the" recruits of his own regiment on the square 
when he had been first gazetted from Sandhurst, and he 
held that the best training for an officer is to learn to do 
what you want done. Wherefore he made his cadets 
learn their job by the sweat of their brow, chg their own 
trenches, and throw out their own saps— always re- 
membering, when vou begin to dig a sap, to put up a sand- 
bag on the end" of a fork first, otherwise you may 
never live to finish it. 
The palms of their hands became as hard as a cobblers, 
but it was good schooling;, for it taught them the" most 
\-aluable of all lessons ; to know w-hen they were giving 
orders exactly how much thev were asking of their men 
to do. And" in dealing with men this is the beginning 
of wisdom. Also he gave them two pieces of advice, 
one of wliich was that at Mess you are practically on 
parade and should behave accordingly : the other that 
the first duty of a young officer is to place the comfort 
and well-being of- his men before his own. But Ix'ing a 
gentleman Ton\- 'M not need to learn the one ; and 
having been head of his house he had alr<'ady learnt 
