Barnet saw the last days of the coal-steam engines upon the English railways and the gradual cleansing of the London atmosphere as the smoke-creating sea-coal fires gave place to electric heating.  The building of laboratories at Kensington was still in progress, and he took part in the students’ riots that delayed the removal of the Albert Memorial.  He carried a banner with ‘We like Funny Statuary’ on one side, and on the other ’Seats and Canopies for Statues, Why should our Great Departed Stand in the Rain?’ He learnt the rather athletic aviation of those days at the University grounds at Sydenham, and he was fined for flying over the new prison for political libellers at Wormwood Scrubs, ‘in a manner calculated to exhilarate the prisoners while at exercise.’  That was the time of the attempted suppression of any criticism of the public judicature and the place was crowded with journalists who had ventured to call attention to the dementia of Chief Justice Abrahams.  Barnet was not a very good aviator, he confesses he was always a little afraid of his machine—­there was excellent reason for every one to be afraid of those clumsy early types—­and he never attempted steep descents or very high flying.  He also, he records, owned one of those oil-driven motor-bicycles whose clumsy complexity and extravagant filthiness still astonish the visitors to the museum of machinery at South Kensington.  He mentions running over a dog and complains of the ruinous price of ‘spatchcocks’ in Surrey.  ‘Spatchcocks,’ it seems, was a slang term for crushed hens.

He passed the examinations necessary to reduce his military service to a minimum, and his want of any special scientific or technical qualification and a certain precocious corpulence that handicapped his aviation indicated the infantry of the line as his sphere of training.  That was the most generalised form of soldiering.  The development of the theory of war had been for some decades but little assisted by any practical experience.  What fighting had occurred in recent years, had been fighting in minor or uncivilised states, with peasant or barbaric soldiers and with but a small equipment of modern contrivances, and the great powers of the world were content for the most part to maintain armies that sustained in their broader organisation the traditions of the European wars of thirty and forty years before.  There was the infantry arm to which Barnet belonged and which was supposed to fight on foot with a rifle and be the main portion of the army.  There were cavalry forces (horse soldiers), having a ratio to the infantry that had been determined by the experiences of the Franco-German war in 1871.  There was also artillery, and for some unexplained reason much of this was still drawn by horses; though there were also in all the European armies a small number of motor-guns with wheels so constructed that they could go over broken ground.  In addition there were large developments of the engineering arm, concerned with motor transport, motor-bicycle scouting, aviation, and the like.