TheCompleteMemoirsOfGeorgeSherston

scientious objector was the antithesis of an officer
and a gentleman, and no other point of view would
have been possible for him. The Army was the frame-
work of his family tradition; his maternal grandfather
had been a Scotch baronet with a distinguished
military career in India—a fact which was piously
embodied in the Memorial Tablet to his mother in
Butley Church, As for his father—"old Captain Hux-
table"—(whom I could hazily remember, white-
whiskered and formidable) he had been a regular
roaring martinet of the gouty old school of retired
officers, and his irascibilities were still legendary in
our neighbourhood. He used to knock his coachman's
hat off and stamp on it. "The young Captain," as he
was called in former days, had profited by these
paroxysms, and where the parent would have bel-
lowed "God damn and blast it all" at his bailiff, the
son permitted himself nothing more sulphurous than
"con-found", and would have thought twice before
telling even the most red-hot Socialist to go to the
devil.

Walking round the garden after tea—Aunt Evelyn
drawing his attention to her delphiniums and he
waggishly affirming their inferiority to his own—I
wondered whether I had exaggerated the "callous
complacency" of those at home. What could elderly
people do except try and make the best of their in-
ability to sit in a trench and be bombarded? How
could they be blamed for refusing to recognize any
ignoble elements in the War except those which they
attributed to our enemies?

Aunt Evelyn's delphinium spires were blue against
the distant blue of the Weald and the shadows of the

Irish yews were lengthening across the lawn-----Out

in France the convoys of wounded and gassed were

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