The change in the character of the officer class is not confined to the RAF, although it is most noticeable there. There has been a change, too, in the composition of the commissioned ranks of the Army. When World War II ended, the "military families," which for generations had sent sons into the local county regiments, found that the second war, following the terrible blood-letting of the first, had almost wiped them out. Perhaps one son in three or four survived. And he, surveying the post-war Army and the post-war world, was disinclined to follow tradition and devote the remainder of his working life to the service. He might gladly have served another twenty years in the "old" Army with its horses and hunting, its tours of duty in India, its social importance. But now tanks and armored cars had replaced the horses, India was gone, and a bunch of shirking Bolshies from the Labor Party were running things. Above all, the two wars had swept away many of the private fortunes with which young officers eked out their miserable pay and allowances. So the survivor of the military family became a personnel manager in a Midlands factory, and elderly men said to elderly wives: "Do you know that for the first time since '91 there's no Fenwick serving with the Loamshires?" But the Second World War also raised to officer rank thousands of young men whose social and educational background would not have been considered suitable for commissioned rank in peacetime. They came from the state's secondary schools, from technical colleges, or from the ranks, and they did remarkably well. Many of them are still serving as officers. At the war's end many of them remained in the service. I was always interested during the maneuvers of the British Army of the Rhine to find how many of the young officers in the infantry and tank regiments had served in the ranks or had come to the Army with a sound education and a proletarian accent from one of the state schools. The technical branches of the Army, such as the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, draw an increasing number of their officers from the noncommissioned officers and from among the graduates of technical schools. Nowhere is the middle class's ability to assimilate new groups and thus perpetuate itself more striking than in the Army. The officers from the ranks or from a state school assume the social coloration of the established officer class. Manners, accent, turns of phrase, and dress alter to conform with those of the old officer class. At present the new group is in a minority. There naturally are many members of the old officer class still serving. With the return of prosperity the upper middle class has resumed the tradition of sending its sons into the Army as a matter of course.