“The attack had failed.  There was never any hope of its succeeding, for the machine-guns of the Germans were still in full play, with their fire unimpaired.  The body had to lie there where it had fallen.  Only, his brother could not endure to let it lie unhonoured or unblessed.  After a day and a half of anxious searching for exact details, he got to the nearest trench by the ‘murdered’ wood, which the shells had now smashed to pieces.  There he found some shattered Somersets, who begged him to go no farther.  But he heard a voice within him bidding him risk it, and the call of the blood drove him on.  Creeping out of the far end of the trench, as dusk fell, he crawled through the grass on hands and knees, in spite of shells and snipers, dropping flat on the ground as the flares shot up from the German trenches.  And, at last, thirty yards away in the open ... he knew that he was close on what he sought.  Two yards farther, he found it.  He could stroke with his hand the fair young head that he knew so well; he could feel for pocket-book and prayer-book, and the badge and the whistle.  He could breathe a prayer of benediction ... and then crawl back on his perilous way in the night, having done all that man could do for the brother whom he had loved so fondly; and enabled, now, to tell those at home that Gilbert was dead indeed, but that he had died the death that a soldier would love to die, leaving his body the nearest of all who fell, to the trench that he had been told to take.”

Again, of Charles Alfred Lister, Lord Ribblesdale’s eldest son, an Oxford friend says:  “There were almost infinite possibilities in his future.”  He was twice wounded at the Dardanelles, was then offered a post of importance in the Foreign Office, refused it, and went back to the front—­to die.  But among the hundreds of memorial notices issued by the Oxford Colleges, the same note recurs and recurs, of unhesitating, uncalculated sacrifice.  Older men, and younger men, Don, and under-graduate, lads of nineteen and twenty, and those who were already school-mastering, or practising at the Bar, or in business, they felt no doubts, they made no delays.  Their country called, and none failed in that great Adsum.

Cambridge of course has the same story to tell.  One takes the short, pathetic biographies almost at random from the ever-lengthening record, contributed by the colleges.  Captain J. Lusk, 6th Cameronians, was already Director of an important steel works, engaged in Government business when war broke out, and might have honourably claimed exemption.  Instead he offered himself at once on mobilisation, and went out with his battalion to France last spring.  On the 15th of June, at Festubert, he was killed in volunteering to bring what was left of a frightfully battered battalion out of action.  “What seems to me my duty as an officer,” he once wrote to a friend, “is to carry my sword across the barriers of death clean and bright.”  “This,” says the friend who writes the notice, “he has done.”  Lieutenant Le Blanc Smith, of Trinity, machine-gun officer, was struck in the forehead by a sniper’s bullet while reconnoitring.  His General and brother officers write: