some member of the school had killed a cow with a catapult, and nobody would own up. O’Brien had fired the shot; he was away at the time on special leave for a sister’s wedding. A friend wrote to him about the half-holiday. He sent the headmaster a telegram: ‘Killed cow sorry coming O’Brien.’ At last, having absented himself from every lesson and chapel for three whole days, he was expelled. He was killed early in the war while bombing Bruges. At least one in three of my generation at school was killed. This was because they all took commissions as soon as they could, most of them in the infantry and flying corps. The average life of the infantry subaltern on the Western front was, at some stages of the war, only about three months; that is to say that at the end of three months he was either wounded or killed. The proportions worked out at about four wounded to every one killed. Of the four one was wounded seriously and the remaining three more or less lightly. The three lightly wounded returned to the front after a few weeks or months of absence and were again subject to the same odds. The flying casualties were even higher. Since the war lasted for four and a half years, it is easy to see why the mortality was so high among my contemporaries, and why most of the survivors, if not permanently disabled, were wounded at least two or three times. Two well-known sportsmen were contemporaries of mine: A. G. Bower, captain of England at soccer, who was only an average player at Charterhouse, and Woolf Barnato, the Surrey cricketer (and millionaire racing motorist), who also was only an average player. Barnato was in the same house as myself and we had not a word to say to each other for the four years we were together. Five scholars have made names for themselves: Richard Hughes as a B.B.C. playwright; Richard Goolden as an actor of old-man parts; Vincent Seligman as author of a propagandist life of Venizelos; Cyril Hartmann as an authority on historical French scandals; and my brother Charles as society gossip-writer on the middle page of _The Daily Mail_. Occasionally I see another name or two in the newspapers. There was one the other day—M ... who was in the news for escaping from a private lunatic asylum. I remembered that he had once offered a boy ten shillings to hold his hand in a thunderstorm and that he had frequently threatened to run away from Charterhouse. IX