Bermondsey was gay, and after we had gone the “Student” perpetuated the fact in a water-colour drawing which he sent to his cousin afterwards.

In the evening, however, the sounds would be more discordant, also the Student was running a Boys’ Club, taking several Sunday services at the Mission, visiting some very sick people, and attending to a multifarious list of duties which left me breathless when I saw it, knowing too how many casual appeals always came to him and that he never was known to refuse a helping hand to any one!  Nevertheless it was there, and in six weeks, that the Lord of All Good Life was written!

“Then came the war,” and the Student shall tell us in his own words what it meant to him.  Writing still to Tom Allen, who had also enlisted, and afterwards also gave his life in the war, he says: 

“For myself the war was, in a sense, a heaven-sent opportunity.  Ever since I left Leeds I have been trying to follow out the theory that the proper subject of study for the theologian was man, and had increasingly been made to feel that nothing but violent measures could overcome my own shyness sufficiently to enable me to study outside my own class.  Enlistment had always appealed to me as one of the few feasible methods of ensuring the desired results....

“I was interested to hear that you found the ——­ so illuminating as regards human potentialities for bestiality.  I think that I plumbed the depths between sixteen and a half and twenty-two.  I have learned nothing more since then about bestiality.  In fact I am hardened, and, I am afraid, take it for granted.  Since then I have been discovering human goodness, which is far more satisfactory.  And oh, I have found it!  In Bermondsey, in the stinking hold of the Zieten, in the wide, thirsty desert of Western Australia, and in the ranks of the 7th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade.  I enlisted very largely to find out how far I really believed in the brotherhood of man when it comes to the point—­and I do believe in it more and more.”

Donald Hankey enlisted in August, 1914, and after a period of training, part of which was certainly the happiest time of his life, he went to the front in May, 1915, coming home wounded in August, when he wrote for the Spectator most of the articles that were published anonymously the following spring under the title of A Student in Arms.  Before he left hospital he received a commission in his old regiment, the R.G.A., but still finding himself with no love for big guns, he transferred to his eldest brother’s regiment, the Royal Warwickshire, hoping that by doing so he might get back to the front the sooner.  He did not, however, leave until May, 1916, after he had written his contribution to Faith or Fear.

Most of the numbers of the present volume were written in or near the trenches, and a fellow-officer gave his sister an interesting description of how it was done.  “Your brother,” said he, “will sit down in a corner of a trench, with his pipe, and write an article for the Spectator, or make funny sketches for his nephews and nieces, when none of the rest of us could concentrate sufficiently even to write a letter.”