He was a very fine young officer....  Every one loved
     him....  His men would do anything for him....

And the sergeant of his machine-gun brigade says: 

     Although only a non-commissioned officer myself, I feel I
     have lost my brother, because he was so awfully good and
     kind to me and us all.

Lieutenant Hamilton, aged twenty-five, says in a last letter to his father: 

Just a line while the beginning of the great battle is going on.  It is wonderful how peaceful one feels amid it all.  Any moment one may be put out of action, but one does not worry.  That quiet time alone with God at the Holy Communion was most comforting.

Immediately after writing these words, the writer fell in action.  Captain Clarke, a famous Cambridge athlete, President of the C.U.A.C., bled to death—­according to one account—­from a frightful wound received in the advance near Hooge on September 25th.  His last recorded act—­the traditional act of the dying soldier!—­was to give a drink from his flask to a wounded private.  Of the general action of Cambridge men, the Master of Christ’s writes:  “Nothing has been more splendid than the way the young fellows have come forward; not only the athletes and the healthy, but in all cases the most unlikely men have rushed to the front, and have done brilliantly.  The mortality, however, has been appalling.  In an ordinary way one loses one killed to eight or nine wounded; but in this war the number of Cambridge men killed and missing practically equals the number of wounded.”  Of the effect upon the University an eye-witness says:  “Eighty per cent of the College rooms are vacant.  Rows and rows of houses in Cambridge are to let.  All the Junior Fellows are on service in one capacity or another, and a great many of the Seniors are working in Government Offices or taking school posts”—­so that the school education of the Country may be carried on.  Altogether, nearly 12,000 Cambridge men are serving; 980 have been wounded; 780 have been killed; 92 are missing.

As to one’s friends and kinsfolk, let me recall the two gallant grandsons of my dear old friend and publisher, George Murray Smith, the original publisher of Jane Eyre, friend of Charlotte Bronte, and creator of the Dictionary of National Biography.  The elder one, who had just married before going out, fought all through the retreat from Mons, and fell in one of the early actions on the Flanders front.  “He led us all the way,” said one of his men afterwards.  All the way!—­All through the immortal rear-guard actions of August—­only to fall, when the tide had turned, and the German onslaught on Paris had been finally broken!  “In all my soldiering,” writes a brother officer, “I have never seen a warmer feeling between men and their officer.”  “Was he not,” asks a well-known Eton master, “that tall, smiling, strong, gentle-mannered boy at White-Thomson’s?”—­possessing