one sentence in those half dozen lines that lingered in my mind:

He was probably the greatest Rugby three-quarter-back of all time.

He was; and he was much more.

And as I puzzled it all out-our hopes, his opportunities, this sudden catastrophe - I found myself dully butting my head against the hard wall of the simple facts:

Ronald was no more. He had not died. He had been killed deliberately - this boy who never had an enemy, and who so loved his life.

'C'est trop bête, la guerre,' say the wise French peasants in their simple way, as they till their fields up to the very trenches. And surely they are right. It is the stupidity of the thing, and not its wickedness, that staggers the modern mind.

And of all the stupidities of the war this for the moment seemed to me the most crass.

Here was a beautiful creature

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave once her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blessed by suns of home, with the youth in his limbs, the light in his face, the hope in his heart, stopped: dead.

As I revolved the matter in my mind, the occasion on which I had last seen him kept recurring to me.

It was at the time of the Welsh match in the April before the war. He was captain of the English team. I think the King was present. But I forget the King; though I have a hazy memory of seeing Ronald tripping down the steps from the dressing-room at the head of his team, and standing in his football shorts and blue jersey shaking hands with a little man in a round hat before the grand stand.

It was very much Ronald's game that day. The thirty thousand gathered to watch him were all agreed on

that. His playing was, as always, original. It was as different from that of other men as he was different from them. It was spiritual; and its quality, effortlessness. The strain, the ferocity, the contortions and grimaces of others who indulge in that heroic and elemental tussle which is Rugby football were not for him.

one

Nobody ever saw him gnash teeth upon the football field; I doubt if anybody ever knew him cross; certainly nobody ever heard him swear. And I for one rarely knew him to issue a command mand certainly never a hortatory though he was usually captain. A steady brilliance pervaded his play and personality alike. Always master of the game, he was consummately master of himself. And he handled his men with the same unconscious ease with which he swooped and swerved through the enemy toward the goal.

An incident in the game comes back to me. It spoke to me at the moment of Ronald and his capacity for winning men. He had tackled an enemy threequarters in full career. The pack was on them in a moment as they struggled, and had smothered them. The two men emerged from beneath the worry at last; and the enemy three-quarters, as he withdrew toward his own line, gave an intimate little pat on the shoulder to the man who had wrought his headlong ruin and crushed in a moment the fruition of his plans.

I love you, it said.

And it was not only on the football field that his genius for government appeared. At Rugby, at Oxford, in those camps of workingmen by the sea which he loved, in boys' clubs in mean quarters of great towns, it was always the same. He led, I think as much as anything, because he never sought to lead. Authority clothed him naturally as the grass the field. Men and boys acknowledged allegiance to a power they could

not define and of which the user was unconscious. The root of the matter lay perhaps in this: that there was no egotism in the man. He was one of the humble of heart, without a trace of morbid diffidence.

Therefore some believed that he had in him a power for bettering the affairs of men which none of his more brilliant Balliol contemporaries, greedy of power, voraciously ambitious, wearisomely successful, possessed.

Three months after his last International, war was declared.

At Oxford he had joined the Officers' Training Corps; but when the authorities urged him to become an officer, he refused. Later, when he had left Oxford, it seemed to him his unpleasant duty to accept a commission in his county Territorial battalion.

The adventure and romance of war made no appeal to him. It was a dirty business that had to be got through.

It may have been because his mother came of Quaker and his father of Nonconformist stock; it may have been that he had been brought up in the academic and not the imperial tradition; whatever the cause, it is surely worthy of record that perhaps the greatest athlete of his generation hated soldiering from his heart, though he died in battle.

He hated soldiering and never took his sport in killing. As a tiny boy he protested against what seemed to him the wanton destruction of flies. Later in life, when he was one of the richest young men of his day, and the owner of a great estate, the pursuits of the jeunesse dorée only bored him. He never hunted, never shot; and never wished to do so. "The horse was very fierce,' he writes in his simple way of a ride he once took.

It was not that he thought killing for pleasure wrong; it was that he disliked it.

He loved life himself and in his large and sunny way he wished others to enjoy what he found so dear the lower creatures too.

And it is a bitter commentary on things as they are that this young man, whose heart was brimming with lovingkindness, never killed anything deliberately save other men.

All through the hot and terrible days of August, 1914, Oxford and Cambridge poured their best into the ranks of Kitchener's Army.

The Expeditionary Force was flung into France. The Territorial battalions were mobilized, and might follow at any moment.

Ronald was an officer in one of these. As such he had enlisted for home service alone, and had therefore the right to refuse to serve abroad.

At the outbreak of the war his father and mother were abroad; and two of his friends embassied half across England to urge him to consider his responsibilities and exercise his rights.

He was furious with them.

In fact his battalion did not leave for the front for another six months. And that six months did not make the profession that had been forced upon him any dearer.

'I had rather be making biscuits,' he wrote to a friend.

In those days he changed. Something of the old radiance was departing from his face, and, little wonder. His friends were falling like autumn leaves. The boys who had stormed across Bigside at Rugby in his victorious wake, the men who had followed him to victory in many a university match, were going down in swathes. It was the platoon-leaders, the men of his own age, who were catching the full blast of lead and steel that was sweeping over Europe. And his turn would come. He never doubted it.

'It's not what I should have wished,' he admitted just before he went.

For he was happy in his life, happy in his opportunities, as are few.

His uncle, a great captain of industry, had made him his heir. And laboring as a common hand, among the workingmen he understood so well, in the immense biscuit factory which he was one day to control, he was quietly dreaming of the work to which he meant to devote his life.

He had the chance, and he had the capacity and the desire to make the most of it. For his heart was set, not on adding to his fortune or going into Parliament, but on adjusting the relations between master and men. Here was the task; and here apparently a soul supremely adapted by nature and opportunity to undertake it with suc

cess.

A casual bullet at midnight, as he stood on the parapet of a trench directing a fatigue-party, ended his dreams and our expectations.

'We shall win in this war,' said a soldier friend to me the other day, 'because in the end Love always wins.' It does; and the price is Calvary.

II

And he does not stand alone.

In the minds of many his name will be recorded with that of another youth, so like him, and yet so unlike.

The two were at Rugby together; of singular beauty and athletic excellence.

I do not know if they were friends at school. I should say probably not. For Rupert from boyhood was a poet, and Ronald a man of action. The names almost betray the men and the difference between them.

After school-days I doubt if they ever met, for the poet went to Cambridge, and the engineer to Oxford.

And it was typical that the one be

came a Fabian and lectured on the Minority Report, while the other plunged into the practical labors of Boys' Clubs. Ronald remained a stout Churchman while Rupert was writing ironical verse about the creed of his fathers.

Again, after they had left their universities the one was sweating as a mechanic in the engine-room of a factory, while the other was sailing the South Seas and bursting into song in honor of dusky maidens.

Of the two youths it was difficult to say which was the more beautiful. Certainly I know no two young Englishmen who would have been more loved by the Greeks.

Rupert I saw but once; but I recall him well- his fair hair, rather longer than that of other men, his collar rather lower, his attire rather more négligé sitting with his blue eyes and spiritual face in the window of a room overlooking the river at Chelsea, reading to a little Bohemian gathering a paper on what appeared to him the most urgent of social reforms — the guaranteeing by the state of a pension of five hundred pounds a year to every minor poet.

BORDEAUX, June 16, 1915.

THE FUND1 has sent out to me Mr. A., and he brings a powerful Panhard, a sort of two-seated car with big rumble accommodation - a hunting car, in fact. He brings with him a friend, Mr. N., who, if he thinks it advisable, will also join us with his car. Mr. A. is a land-owner and local magnate from near Oxford, and, not content with caring for twenty-five Belgian refugees, has offered to help us. He is not strong or would be at the front.

1 The French Wounded Emergency Fund, established in London to aid the smaller and remoter French hospitals, but managed in part by Americans and largely supplied with money and commodities by the American Branch at 38 West 39th Street, New York City, and its numerous sub-committees in New England and other parts of the country. Recently this Branch has separated from the English organization. It is now called the American Fund for French Wounded, and has its own depot in Paris. THE EDITORS.

We are now getting some fifty-seven hospital bales through the customs, and will deliver to the places I have visited and then go on to others up and down the coast, in the Charentes and possibly Vendée. I visit hospitals, of which I have a big list: the poorer smaller military hospitals which are established and supported mostly by local 'little' people, and where, after all these months of war and strain, a friendly lift in the line of clothing or dressings or instruments will cheer the heart of many a weary nurse, surgeon, or blessé; and some big ones too, where they learn that I have permission to go into the wards, and confide to me that such and such things are a serious lack, and that, though the government is willing to give, it has not enough material to give everywhere, and waits are long.

Some of the hospitals are clean,

others less so; but through it all the health of the men is wonderful. The surgeon says that his records show seven deaths in 700 cases in his care, and that he has never lost an amputation. At the Croix Rouge in C. they have had eleven deaths in over 1500 cases.

At S. in a big hospital, 300 beds, there was a very able surgeon, but his amputation saw was old and worn and they needed shirts. We have sent the saw and the shirts and some other garments. At another place in the same town, 270 beds, the chief surgeon told me that he could send out twenty men, but could not secure crutches. They are made locally at Bergerac in the Dordogne; the government has placed an order for 30,000, which for lack of workmen could not be delivered; so my surgeon friend said that his hands were tied. He had some made in the town, but the wood was not suitable, and, being green, was dangerous for the men, and he did not like to let them take them away.

I wonder where all the artificial arms and legs and glass eyes are coming from! One officer after another in the government offices here has lost a leg. One sees strings and strings of men in the streets pour prendre l'air, and it is heartrending to see them. And all as cheerful as can be imagined. At C. in the Red Cross hospital a big burly man on a lounge in the open arcade (an exschoolhouse) bragged of having all his toes amputated (gangrène gazeuse, the result of frost-bite) that same morning, and said, ‘At all events they have left me my feet. Vive la France!' He talked and talked to us and said he wondered whether, toeless, they would let him go back. They treat frozen feet now with hot air from an electrical machine.

COGNAC, July 3, 1915.

Off in the far countryside I went in the gate of a small country school

house. An elderly woman and her husband- nice true people, ex-schoolteachers and their daughter met me and showed me their twenty-bed hospital, in the two classrooms. They were lucky above others, for they told me they had their pensions to spend on the hospital, 1 fr. 25 a day for each man from the state, and what the villagers and peasants bring in kind, and a roast once a day from the butcher, or a ragoût. The mother cooked and served the meals and, you may be sure, did a good deal of mothering besides; the father did the hard cleaning, and a village woman cleaned the floors; the daughter got up early and did the dressings, and taught school a few hours in the little room in the village where it had moved, and then came back to the men and made dressings and clothes when she was not caring for them! I left them a bale of clothing, and I never felt more touched than when the old lady tried to kiss my hand. And it was all neat and clean.

Again, another place, dusty and dreary beyond description, down on the coast beyond R. A peasant, who was M. le maire, showed me his mairie, fitted out with beds and a few chairs, all loaned and of a nondescript type impossible to describe. 'N'est-ce pas c'est bien, madame?' Impossible not to agree; but you should have seen the attic cobwebs, for I climbed a rickety stair and saw the last salle under the rafters, and a weird little room where a contagieux could be lodged awaiting removal to a separate hospital. The woman in charge of the linen was the schoolmistress, a rheumatic heavy person of the village, teaching in her class, whence I routed her and explained my errand. I left her a bale of clothing, some 200 items,-shirts, pants, vests, socks, towels, handkerchiefs and so forth,- and she burst into tears as she thanked me. The next one, a bit in