No man can have sat in the present House of
Commons without becoming conscious, as Cartland became conscious, of the damage done to us by the loss of those who fell in the First German War. We have been unable, as Hitler and Mussolini have been able, to fill the thinned ranks of the middle-aged by a phalanx of young men and women trained to a fanatical purpose and welded by a ruthless discipline. Our younger generation have been given neither the exhilaration of personal opportunity nor a compelling sense of function ; and those who might have served as the interpreters of the past to the future were decimated at Gallipoli or on the Somme. How often have I sat there in the Chamber, peopling the benches with those of my own contemporaries who were killed. The Balliol generation of 1909-1913 has become almost legendary, nor do I feel on looking back that their legend was unmerited. They possessed talent, courage and beauty, and their autumn might well have proved as rich and lovely as their spring. Charles Lister, Patrick Shaw- Stewart, Edward Horner, and the two Grenfells, each one of these, either by talent or personality, appeared to us exceptional men. Lister, with his untidy body and his tidy mind, would assuredly have made for himself a great position in political life. Shaw-Stewart, whose gifts of scholarship and imagination had already been applied to high finance, would certainly have exercised power. Edward Horner remains in our memory as a figure of almost unimaginable grace. And when I close my eyes I can still see Julian Grenfell striding sunlit with his greyhound down the Turl. Is Ronald Cartland also to join these inheritors of unfulfilled renown?
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