The whole battalion left that place the day after Oscar’s death; he told us they were going to, but it was God’s Will that he should stay behind. But if against our enemies there is one hand still lifted that we long to grasp, one elbow to which we wish more power, they are those of the gallant[62] Sergeant-Major, who was our dear boy’s guide and friend in the day of battle, and in the hour of death. ‘Trusty and well beloved’ were the words that reached us almost in that hour; and almost in the next came a gracious human message from the King and Queen themselves, even as it were in tender confirmation of the stately phrase. And yet, could words apply more closely to all our glorious boys—above all to Oscar’s ‘one class who are enjoying themselves in this war’? In any other country, by one means or the other, the men were to be had: it is only our Public Schools which could have furnished at once an army of natural officers, trained to lead, old in responsibility, and afraid of nothing in the world but fear itself. Their teaching will not be forgotten by those of us whose strange fate it is to inherit our sons’ great names, to follow humbly in the steps we thought to guide. We shall remember that each was also the son of some great school which shares our sorrow and our pride, and which perhaps did more than we ourselves to make him what he was. Besides Oscar, I am thinking of two who were here to mourn him last July. Robin Blacker was his old friend’s brilliant young brother—so young[63] that he had once been Oscar’s fag. He had left Eton long before his time, yet full of Eton honours. He might have been First Keeper of the Field this very half: he preferred to play for England, and, in the Guards’ great hour at Loos, fell most gloriously, thirty yards ahead of his platoon, with none between him and his last goal. In the same hour and the same attack John Kipling was last seen alive. He was even younger than Robin Blacker, but the gap between him and Oscar, two equally independent characters, had long been filled by the love of brothers. It is said that after Oscar fell John’s scheme of war included the personal vendetta, just as one younger than any of them is already preparing ‘to avenge John as he avenged Oscar.’ John’s lot was not to spend many weeks under shell-fire, like Oscar and his merry men; but he lived to lead a platoon of the Irish Guards in such fighting as Oscar never saw. God send that he is living still, and restore him even yet to the world our dear boys loved so well, and surrendered without a sigh!