Sir HENEY
NEWBOLT claims that the tradition of the public schools is the direct
survival of the mediaeval training for knighthood, and incidentally
defends flannelled and muddied youth from hasty aspersions. ROLAND and
his OLIVER, RICHARD LION-HEART, EDWARD the Black Prince and CHANDOS,
DU GUESCLIN and BAYARD, if they revisited this tortured earth, would
be dismayed by the procedure and the chilling impersonality of modern
war. Perhaps in the glorious single combats of the Flying Corps they
might recognise some faint semblance of their ancient method. Sir
HENRY, rightly from his point of view, chooses to ignore the wholesale
horrors of to-day's warfare and to emphasize the ideal of fighting
service as a fine discipline and proof of manly worth. He shows an
obvious, honest, aristocratic bias, but he does not forget another
side of the matter, as a fragment of an imaginary conversation
between a young lord and a squire present at the great tourney at St.
Inglebert's between the Gentlemen of England and of France pleasantly
shows. The Englishmen were worsted and took their defeat in a fine
sporting spirit. "How is it we're beaten? We always win the battles,
don't we?" asks the boy. "The archers win them for us," says the
Squire. Quite a characteristic little touch of subaltern modesty! One
thought occurs to me especially.
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