The Winslow mail., 1914-09-12
Copyright. 1914. by II. C. Wells.

great hardship, and was then caught
up by the war and had a year of sol
diering, first as an officer in the Eng
lish infantry and then in the army Of
pacifcation. His book tells all these
things so simply and at the same time
so explicitly that it remains, as it We're,
an eye by which future generations
may have at least one mans vision of
the yearAo the great change.
And he' was, he tells us, a "modeIn
state" man, "by instinct from the be
ginning He breathed in these ideas
IN the classrooms and laboratories Of
the Carnegie Foundation school that
rose, long and deicately beautiful
facade along the south bank of the
Thames opposite the ancient dignity
of Somerset house. Such thought was
interviewer with the very fabric Of
that pioneer school insthe educational
renascence in England. After the
customary exchange years in Heidel-
berg and Paris, he went into the cIassi-
cal school Of London university. The
older so called classical" education of
the British pedagogues, probably the
most paralyzing, ineffective and foolish
routine that ever wasted human life,
had already been swept out Of this
great institution in favor Of modern
methods, and he learned Greek and
Latin as we'll as he had learned German,
Spanish and French, so that he wrote
and spoke them freely and used them
with an unconscious ease in his study
of the foundation civilizations of the
European system to which they were
the key. CThis change was still so
recent that he mentions an encounter
in Rome with an oxford don" who
spoke Latin with a Wiltshire accent
and manifest discomfort, wrote Greek
letters with his tongue out. and seemed
to think a Greek sentence charm
when it was quotation and an i'm
propriety when it wasn't.''J
Ba1net saw the last days of the coal
steam engines upon the English rail
ways and the gradual cleansing of the
London atmosphere as the smoke Gre
ating sea coal fires gave place to cleo
trio heating. The building Of labora-
tories at Kensington was stillsin prog
ress, and he took part in the students
riots that delayed the removal of the
Albert memorial He carried a banner
with "We Like Funny Statuary" on
one side and on the other Seats and
Canopies For Statues. Why Should
Our Great Departed Stand In the
Rain?" He learned the rather athletic
aviation of those days at the uniyer-
sity grounds at Sydenham, and he was
| fined for flying over the new prison for
political libelers at Wormwood Scrubs
'in manner calculated to eXhilarate
the prisoners while at exercise" That
was the time Of the attempted sup
preston OF any criticism of the public
judicature and the place was crowded
With journalists who had ventured to
| call attention to the dementia of Chief
Justice Abrahams. Barnet was not a
very good aviator He confesses he
was always a little afraid of his MAJ
| chine-there was excellent reason for
every one to be afraid of those clumsy
! early types-and he never attempted
/ steep deseents or very high flying He
/ also. he records, owned one Of those
oil driven motor bicycles whose clum-
sy complexity and eXtraYagant filth
/ ness still astonish the visitors to the
/ museum of machinery at South Ken
sington. He mentions running over a
dog and complains of the ruinous
price of "spatchcocks" in Surrey
"Spatchcocks, it seems, was a slang
/ term for crushed hens.
He passed the examinations neces-
sary to reduce his military service to
a minimum, and his want of any spe-
cial scientific or technical qualification
and a certain pTecoctous corpGlence
that handicapped his aviation indicated
the infantry of the line as his sphere
of training That was the most gen
eralized form of soldering. The de-
velopment Of the theory Of war had
been for some decades but little assist
ed by any practi al experience, What
fighting had occurred IN recent years
had been fighting in minor or uncivi-
lied states with peasant or barbaic
soldiers and with but a small equip
ment Of modern contrivances. and the
great powers OF the world were con
tent for the most part to maintain
armies that sustained in their broader
organization the traditions of the Eu-
ropean wars of thirty or forty years
before There was the infantry arm to
which Barnet belonged and which was
supposed 70 tight on foot Will the rifle