Tell England: A Study in a Generation

Chapter I RUPERT RAY BEGINS HIS STORY II RUPERT OPENS A GREAT WAR III AWFUL ROUT OF RAY IV THE PREFECTS GO OVER TO THE ENEMY V CHEATING VI AN INTERLUDE

I THE ETERNAL WATERWAY II PADRE MONTY AND MAJOR HARDY COME ABOARD III "C. OF E., NOW AND ALWAYS" IV THE VIGIL V PENANCE VI MAJOR HARDY AND PADRE MONTY FINISH THE VOYAGE

"I'm the best-looking person in this room," said Archibald Pennybet. "Ray's face looks as though somebody had trodden on it, and Doe's--well, Doe's would be better if it had bee...

Poor Mr. Cæsar, with the weak eyes! He had left his class-room door unlocked. _Golly_, so he had! And since the bell had only just ceased to echo, and Mr. Cæsar would certainly...

The following afternoon I was looking rather glumly out of a window at the broad playing fields which, in the greyness of a rainy day, seemed as deserted as myself. From my plac...

What more exciting than for the whole school to learn by rumour the next morning that all the prefects of Bramhall House had been mysteriously withdrawn from their Olympian clas...

Time carried us a year nearer the shadow of the Great War. It brought us to our fourteenth year, at which period Doe's mysterious intrigue with Freedham still awaited solution,...

In the summer holidays of that year I received a letter from Doe inviting me to spend a few days with him at his Cornish home on the Fal. Radley, he told me, was already his guest.

I am sixteen now, and the marks on the dormitory wall show me that I am many inches nearer the height of my ambition, which is the height of Radley. Second in importance, Kensin...

The next half-holiday I was walking towards the tuck-shop and gloomily deciding that Doe's wilful estrangement from me was fast being frozen into tacit enmity, when I felt an ar...

One June morning of the following year all we Bramhallites were assembled in the Preparation Room for our weekly issue of "Bank" or pocket-money; we were awaiting the arrival of...

While I was recovering there fell the first thunderdrops of mutiny. A youth at the back of the gallery, on intercepting the flying message that Fillet had demanded my disqualifi...

The next year was 1914. It found Pennybet at Sandhurst; Doe brilliantly high in the Sixth Form, and, since he was a classical scholar and a poet, first favourite for the Horace...

It was on the day when those two pistol shots were fired at an Austrian Archduke in the streets of Serajevo that the Masters' match was played out at Kensingtowe. By the early e...

The most clearly marked moment of my life was when I passed the fat policeman who was standing just inside the great gateway of Devonport Dockyard. I was to embark that morning...

Doe and I have often looked back on our first glimpse of Padre Monty and wondered why nothing foreshadowed all that he was going to be to us. We had entered the Transport Office...

Awaking at 5.30 the next morning, I heard a noise as of the anchor's cable being hauled in. The engines, too, were throbbing, and overhead there were rattling and movement. I tu...

Night or day, the ship ploughed remorselessly on. It was steered a bewildering zigzag course to outwit the submarines. The second day of the voyage saw us in the Bay of Biscay,...

Upon the rail leaned Doe and I watching the waves break away from the ship. It was morning, and we were troubled--troubled over the awful difficulty of making our life confessio...

But I must hurry on. Here am I dawdling over what happened indoors in the minds of two boys, while out of doors nations were battling against nations, and the whole world was in...

The motor-launch beat away from the _Rangoon_. Monty, standing in the stern, lit a pipe, and stared over the match-flame at the empty troopship. Jimmy Doon, sitting in the bows,...

The story of our two-months' delay at Mudros is largely the story of Monty's eccentricities. As for Doe and myself, we just watched with growing pride our knees burning in the s...

"Look here, Doe," said I, with my finger on a map of the Island of Lemnos. "If you've guts enough to walk with me over these five miles of hills to this eastern coast, it strike...

The morning sun was up as we lay in Suvla Bay. It lit the famous battlefield, so that we saw in a shining picture the hills, up which the invading Britons had rushed to win the...

One evening, three days later, I was sitting, inconceivably bored, in my new dug-out on the notorious Fusilier Bluff. This dug-out was a recess, hewn in damp, crumbling soil, wi...

On a certain morning Doe and I in our dug-out on Fusilier Bluff felt the pull and the fascination, coming over five miles of scrub, of the magical Cape Helles. It was but a scor...

One thing I shall always believe, and it is that Doe found on the Peninsula that intense life, that life of multiplied sensations, which he always craved in the days when he sai...

The grand incident in the last act of the Gallipoli Campaign--the grand _motif_--was the Germans' successful break through Servia. They had driven their corridor from Central Eu...

"Of course," replied I uncivilly. Did he think _he_ would visit Doe and _I_ wouldn't--I who had known him ten years? The man was presuming on his six-months' acquaintance with m...

On the following day we buried Doe at sundown. In a grave on Hunter Weston Hill, which slopes down to W Beach, he lies with his feet toward the sea.

Wandering down the Gully Ravine one morning, I encountered a long line of men marching up it in single file. I passed as close to them as possible, so that, by a glance at their...

Let Monty have the last word, for he spoke it well. He spoke it a few days ago, in the late autumn of 1918, that is to say, as the war breaks up, and nearly three years after we...