thing was the greatness of their generous hearts...." JOHN MASEFIELD: _Gallipoli_. I "For various reasons," wrote William Glynne Charles Gladstone to General Sir Henry MacKinnon,[25] "I feel the time has come when I ought to enlist in His Majesty's Army. Heaven knows, so far from having the least inclination for military service, I dread it and dislike it intensely; consistently with that I have no natural aptitude for it, and what is more, no training of any sort. I have never done a single minute's military training in my whole life, I am a rank although not a very robust civilian; even my love of shooting has somehow never led to my learning to shoot with a rifle. I recall all that to your mind because I want to put it to you that under these circumstances there is only one thing for me to do, and that is to begin at the beginning and enlist as a private. I am not prepared to face the possibility, however remote, of being put in some post of responsibility without knowing the ropes very well and from the beginning.... I have decided not to enlist in any force which is confined to home defence, but one which in its turn will be called upon to go to the front." Had William Gladstone been elected spokesman of the men under thirty, he could not have expressed their collective and individual attitude to the war in apter terms than those which described his own mingled sense of diffidence and duty. All who had loved and followed him at Eton, at Oxford and at Westminster shared his hatred for a war which arrested human progress and destroyed human life, as they shared his ignorance of warfare and his dread of assuming inexpert responsibility for the lives of other men; all, or at least all who mattered, living or dead, offered themselves, no less resolutely than he did, in the first hours of war for any purpose to which the government might put them. The rank civilians who were even less robust than he was laid siege to the doors of any organisation that would make use of them and, with no more training in their whole life than he had of military training, enlisted as substitutes in place of those who were accepted for the army. Before the government, with its counsel of "business as usual," attempted to set going again the arrested pulse of the national life, those who had time, energy or aptitude, how little so ever, to place at the service of the community were already absorbed in new work or awaiting a call to fresh duties.