Between 1909 and 1914 a few married; but, as the necessity for earning a living was their first concern in those days, the majority were for the present as much debarred from matrimony as from public life. A few went utterly to pieces, ranging in their downfall from the squalor of touting among their friends for insignificant loans to the supreme waste of suicide. One or two flashed meteorically to the highest plane of their professions. The rest followed an average course and in diplomacy or in the civil service, in the army or in holy orders, in commerce or at the bar, in medicine or in journalism worked with what patience they could muster through the unproductive years of early plodding. By 1914 the original fortunate three or four who had entered public life as soon as they came down from Oxford were reinforced by a dozen more who had made enough progress in five years to fight an election or at least to nurse a constituency; and five years were long enough to enable the rest to decide whether they had made wise choice of a career. Some of those who had been called to the bar now abandoned their wearisome inactivity in order to make a livelihood in the City; the young soldiers who had been sent into the army to be kept out of mischief now assumed that they had reached years of discretion and resigned their commissions; and any one who had obstinately cherished the ambition of a literary life might well, after five years, be deemed incurable. It was the fate characteristic of nearly all that generation that, as their training neared completion, they were called away for ever from the work for which they had been trained and lost to the peaceful service of mankind. By 1914 their seniors had completed their apprenticeship and made their transition; though their uprooting was greater, they had at least found for a moment their place in the uncaring void. The apprenticeship of their juniors had not yet begun: they passed from school or university to their war-service, and the survivors postponed until the end of the war their practical preparation for civic life. This is not to say that one is to be envied more than another; in every country at the outbreak of every war, one generation is more violently dislocated than the rest; when all loss of life is waste of a nation's resources, it may be felt that the most grievous waste is among those who have completed their scholastic education and prepared themselves for work which they can never fulfil. "Childhood makes the instrument, youth tunes the strings, and early manhood plays the melody." The vanished generation never played upon the instrument; it was hardly tuned before it was struck to the ground, and music of another kind was heard.