-everywhere the leading
force of the nation--have done just as finely, and of course in far
greater numbers. Never shall I forget my visit to Oxford last May--in the
height of the summer term, just at that moment when Oxford normally is at
its loveliest and fullest, brimming over with young life, the streets
crowded with caps and gowns, the river and towing-path alive with the
"flannelled fools," who have indeed flung back Rudyard Kipling's gibe--if
it ever applied to them--with interest. For they had all disappeared. They
were in the trenches, landing at Suvla, garrisoning Egypt, pushing up to
Baghdad. The colleges contained a few forlorn remnants--under age, or
medically unfit. The river, on a glorious May day, showed boats indeed,
but girls were rowing them. Oriel, the college of Arnold, of Newman, of
Cecil Rhodes, was filled with women students, whose own college,
Somerville, had become a hospital. The Examination Schools in the High
Street were a hospital, and the smell of disinfectants displaced the
fragrance of lilac and hawthorn for ever associated in the minds of
Oxford's lovers with the summer term. In New College gardens, there were
white tents full of wounded. I walked up and down that wide, deserted lawn
of St. John's, where Charles I once gathered his Cavaliers, with an old
friend, an Oxford tutor of forty years' standing, who said with a
despairing gesture, speaking of his pupils: "So many are gone--so
_many_!--and the terrible thing is that I can't feel it as I once did--as
blow follows blow one seems to have lost the power."

Let me evoke the memory of some of them. From Balliol have gone the two
Grenfell brothers, vehement, powerful souls, by the testimony of those
who knew them best, not delightful to those who did not love them, not
just, often, to those they did not love, but full of that rich stuff which
life matures to all fine uses. The younger fell in the attack on Hooge,
July 31st, last year; the elder, Julian, had fallen some months earlier.
Julian's verses, composed the night before he was wounded, will be
remembered with Rupert Brooke's sonnets, as expressing the inmost passion
of the war in great hearts. They were written in the spring weather of
April, 1915, and a month later the writer had died of his wounds. With an
exquisite felicity and strength the lines run, expressing the strange and
tragic joy of the "fighting man" in the spring, which may be his last--in
the night heavens--in the w