A.S.C. 120

WAR LETTERS
OF A
PUBLIC-SCHOOL BOY

INTRODUCTORY

These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy ...
And those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

Rupert Brooke.

In deciding to publish some of the letters written by the late Lieutenant H. P. M. Jones during his twenty-seven months' service with the British Army, accompanying them with a memoir, I was actuated by a desire, first, to enshrine the memory of a singularly noble and attractive personality; secondly, to describe a career which, though tragically cut short, was yet rich in honourable achievement; thirdly, to show the influence of the Great War on the mind of a public-school boy of high intellectual gifts and sensitive honour, who had shone with equal lustre as a scholar and as an athlete.

My choice of the title of this book was determined by the frequent allusions made by my son in his war letters to his old school. He spent six and a half years at Dulwich College. His career there was gloriously happy and very distinguished. On the scholastic side, it culminated in December, 1914, in the winning of a scholarship in History and Modern Languages at Balliol College, Oxford; on the athletic side, in his carrying off four silver cups at the Athletic Sports in March, 1915, and tieing for the "Victor Ludorum" shield.

As a merry, light-hearted boy in his early years at Dulwich, his love for the College was marked. It waxed with every term he spent within its walls. After he left it, that love became a passion, sustained, coloured and glorified by happy memories. Everybody and everything connected with it shared in his glowing affection. Its welfare and reputation were infinitely precious to him. Like a leitmotif in a musical composition, this love of Dulwich College recurs again and again in his war letters. Every honour won by a Dulwich boy on the battlefield, in scholarship or in athletics gave him exquisite pleasure. The very last letter he wrote is irradiated with love of the old school. When he joined the Tank Corps, stripping, as it were, for the deadly combat, he sent to the depôt at Boulogne all his impedimenta. But among the few cherished personal possessions that he took with him into the zone of death were two photographs—one of the College buildings, the other of the Playing Fields, this latter depicting the cricket matches on Founder's Day. In death as in life Dulwich was close to his heart.

Paul Jones was a young man of herculean strength—tall, muscular, deep-chested and broad-shouldered. But he had one grave physical defect. He was extremely short-sighted, had worn spectacles habitually from his sixth year and was almost helpless without them. In fact, his vision was not one-twelfth of normal. Much to his chagrin, his myopia excluded him from the Infantry which he tried to enter in the spring of 1915, and he had to put up with a Commission as a subaltern in the Army Service Corps. His first three months in the Army were spent at a home port, one of the chief depôts of supply for the British Army in the field. Eagerly embracing the first chance to go abroad, he left Southampton for Havre in the last week of July, 1915. A few days after his arrival in France, he was appointed requisitioning officer to the 9th Cavalry Brigade—a post for the duties of which he was specially qualified by his excellent knowledge of the French language. After 11 months in this employment, he was appointed to a Supply Column, and subsequently, during the protracted battles on the Somme, was in command of an ammunition working party. In October, 1916, he was again appointed requisitioning officer, this time to the 2nd Cavalry Brigade.

Though his duties were often laborious and exacting, his relative freedom from peril and hardship while other men were facing death every day in the trenches sorely troubled his conscience. Feeling that he was not pulling his weight in the war and seeing no prospect of the Cavalry going into action he resolved, at all hazards, to get into the fighting line. After two abortive efforts to transfer from the A.S.C., he succeeded on the third attempt, and was appointed Lieutenant in the Tank Corps, which he joined on 13th February, 1917. His elation at the change was unbounded, and thenceforth his letters home sang with joy. He took part as a Tank officer in the battle of Arras in April, and when the great offensive was planned in Flanders he was shifted to that sector. In the battle of 31st July, when advancing with his tank north-east of Ypres, he was killed by a sniper's bullet. He seemed to have had a premonition some days before that death might soon claim him. In a letter to his brother, a Dulwich school boy, dated 27th July, he wrote:

The eagerness to subordinate self displayed in this letter was very characteristic of its author. He was by nature altruistic, and this propensity was intensified by his career at Dulwich and his experience of athletics, both influences tending to merge the individual in the whole and to subordinate self to the side. Death he had never feared, and he dreaded it less than ever after his experience of campaigning. His last letter shows with what serenity of mind he faced the ultimate realities. He greeted the Unseen with a cheer.

His Commanding Officer, in a letter to us after Paul's death, wrote:

"No officer of mine was more popular. He was efficient, very keen, and a most gallant gentleman. His crew loved him and would follow him anywhere. He did not know what fear was."

From the crew of his Tank we received a very sympathetic letter which among other things said:

"We all loved your son. He was the best officer in our company and never will be replaced by one like him."

A gunner who served in the same Tank company