One of the last events that I remember at Charterhouse was a debate with the motion that ‘this House is in favour of compulsory military service.’ The Empire Service League, or whatever it was called, of which Earl Roberts of Kandahar, V.C., was the President, sent down a propagandist to support the motion. There were only six votes out of one hundred and nineteen cast against it. I was the principal speaker against the motion, a strong anti-militarist. I had recently resigned from the Officers’ Training Corps, having revolted against the theory of implicit obedience to orders. And during a fortnight spent the previous summer at the O.T.C. camp at Tidworth on Salisbury Plain, I had been frightened by a special display of the latest military fortifications, barbed-wire entanglements, machine-guns, and field artillery in action. General, now Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson, whose son was a member of the school, had visited the camp and impressed upon us that war against Germany was inevitable within two or three years, and that we must be prepared to take our part in it as leaders of the new forces that would assuredly be called into being. Of the six voters against the motion Nevill Barbour and I are, I believe, the only ones who survived the war. My last memory was the headmaster’s good-bye. It was this: ‘Well, good-bye, Graves, and remember this, that your best friend is the waste-paper basket.’ I used to speculate on which of my contemporaries would distinguish themselves after they left school. The war upset my calculations. Many dull boys had brief brilliant military careers, particularly as air-fighters, becoming squadron and flight commanders. ‘Fuzzy’ McNair, the head of the school, won the V.C. as a Rifleman; young Sturgess, who had been my study fag, distinguished himself more unfortunately by flying the first heavy bombing machine of a new pattern across the Channel on his first trip to France and making a beautiful landing (having mistaken the landmarks) at an aerodrome behind the German lines. A boy whom I admired very much during my first year at Charterhouse was the Hon. Desmond O’Brien. He was the only Carthusian in my time who cheerfully disregarded all school rules. He had skeleton keys for the school library, chapel and science laboratories and used to break out of his house at night and carefully disarrange things there. The then headmaster was fond of O’Brien and forgave him much. O’Brien had the key of the headmaster’s study too and, going there one night with an electric torch, carried off a memorandum which he showed me—‘Must expel O’Brien.’ He had a wireless receiving-station in one of the out-of-bounds copses on the school grounds, and he discovered a ventilator shaft down which he could hoot into the school library from outside and create great disturbance without detection. One day we were threatened with the loss of a Saturday half-holiday because