Well, the emergency came.  These youths of the classes, heirs to titles and estates, or just younger sons of the old squirearchy of England, so far as it still survives, went out in their hundreds, with the old and famous regiments of the British line in the Expeditionary Force, and perished in their hundreds.  Forty-seven eldest sons, heirs to English peerages had fallen within a year of the outbreak of war—­among them the heirs to such famous houses as Longleat, Petworth, and Castle Ashby—­and the names of Grenfell, Hood, Stuart, Bruce, Lister, Douglas Pennant, Worsley, Hay, St. Aubyn, Carington, Annesley, Hicks Beach—­together with men whose fathers have played prominent parts in the politics or finance of the last half century.  And the first ranks have been followed by what one might almost call a levee en masse of those that remained.  Their blood has been spilt like water at Ypres and La Bassee, at Suvla and Helles.  Whatever may be said henceforward of these “golden lads” of ours, “shirker” and “loafer” they can never he called again.  They have died too lavishly, their men have loved and trusted them too well for that—­and some of the working-class leaders, with the natural generosity of English hearts, have confessed it abundantly.

And the professional classes—­the intellectuals—­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.”