PART III

LIST OF PLATES

WAR LETTERS
OF A
PUBLIC-SCHOOL BOY

INTRODUCTORY

These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy ...
And those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

Rupert Brooke.

In deciding to publish some of the letters written by the late Lieutenant H. P. M. Jones during his twenty-seven months' service with the British Army, accompanying them with a memoir, I was actuated by a desire, first, to enshrine the memory of a singularly noble and attractive personality; secondly, to describe a career which, though tragically cut short, was yet rich in honourable achievement; thirdly, to show the influence of the Great War on the mind of a public-school boy of high intellectual gifts and sensitive honour, who had shone with equal lustre as a scholar and as an athlete.