These early impressions are perhaps the deeper for that there was so little in those early days, before each man had taken up his new work, to disturb a course of general reflection. When the morning and evening papers had been read, there was nothing to do but to brood over this spectacle of a world gone mad. Everywhere in England there was the same chatter and speculation, the same spy-rumours and epidemics of hoarding; the same competition in war-economies and rivalry in war-services. Every day brought news of new recruits to the army, the civil service and a score of services no less unexpected, until, at the end of September, one who was equally without training or aptitude for teaching returned to Westminster with cap and gown, to become a temporary schoolmaster. II There would be a smaller public-school literature if the privilege of describing or criticising public schools were restricted to those who had seen them from both the form-room and the common room.[28] "Ian Hay" speaks somewhere of the schoolmaster's life as being the worst paid and the most richly rewarded; and, if no remuneration compensates the damage to nerves, temper and faith when a man tries simultaneously to maintain order, to excite interest and to impart instruction to fifty or sixty boys of fourteen to seventeen, reward comes from contact with the minds of boys first stirring to wakefulness and with the characters of boys who, for all their mischief and resourcefulness of attack, are lovable in their ingenuousness, their humour, their chivalry, their conservatism, their strict and strictly-circumscribed honour. And, if faith is sometimes tried, faith in public-school education was justified in the years from 1914 to 1918. If it be granted hypothetically that the war was won for England and, further, that it was won by soldiers in the field rather than by ministers, munition-makers, bankers and military correspondents, it was won by the leadership of the officers and by the fighting quality of the men; and the leaders were supplied first to the old army and then to the new, for the first years of the war, almost wholly by the public schools. When, at the end, the net was thrown more widely, the quality of the officers deteriorated; though they lacked nothing of courage, they could furnish no substitute for something indefinable but recognisable--never so quickly recognised as by the men they led--which only a public school provides.