proportion of Etonians of killed to wounded is greater than that of any
other public school--which is saying a great deal. They go back across
the channel and back again until their names appear on the last and
highest honour list of the school and nation.

In one of the hospitals I visited lay a wounded giant who had once been
a truckman in a little town in Kent. Incidentally, in common with his
neighbours, he had taken no interest in the war, which had seemed as
remote to him as though he had lived in North Dakota. One day a Zeppelin
dropped a bomb on that village, whereupon the able-bodied males enlisted
to a man, and he with them. A subaltern in his company was an Eton boy.
"We just couldn't think of 'im as an orficer, sir; in the camps 'e used
to play with us like a child. And then we went to France. And one night
when we was wet to the skin and the Boschs was droppin' shell all around
us we got the word. It was him leaped over the top first of all,
shouting back at us to come on. He tumbled right back and died in my
arms, 'e did, as I was climbin' up after 'im. I shan't ever forget 'im."

As you travel about in these days you become conscious, among the people
you meet, of a certain bewilderment. A static world and a static order
are dissolving; and in England that order was so static as to make the
present spectacle the more surprising. Signs of the disintegration of
the old social strata were not lacking, indeed, in the earlier years of
the twentieth century, when labour members and north-country radicals
began to invade parliament; but the cataclysm of this war has accelerated
the process. In the muddy trenches of Flanders and France a new
comradeship has sprung up between officers and Tommies, while
time-honoured precedent has been broken by the necessity of giving
thousands of commissions to men of merit who do not belong to the
"officer caste." At the Haymarket Theatre I saw a fashionable audience