On August 3, 1914, twenty-two of England’s best public school cricketers gathered for the annual schools’ representative match. The game ended the following evening. Britain’s ultimatum to Germany expired a few hours later. Seven of those twenty-two would be dead before the war was over. Anthony Seldon and David Walsh’s fine new history of the public schools and the First World War bears the subtitle “The Generation Lost” for good reason.1
Britain neither wanted nor was prepared for a continental war. Its armed forces were mainly naval or colonial. The regular army that underwrote that ultimatum was, in the words of Niall Fergusson, “a dwarf force” with “just seven divisions (including one of cavalry), compared with Germany’s ninety-eight and a half.”
Britain’s more liberal political traditions, so distinct then—and now—from those of its European neighbors, had rendered peacetime conscription out of the question, but manpower shortages during the Boer War and growing anxiety over the vulnerability of the mother country itself led to a series of military reforms designed to toughen up domestic defenses. These included the consolidation of ancient yeomanry and militias into a Territorial Force and Special Reserve. The old public-school “rifle corps,” meanwhile, were absorbed into an Officers’ Training Corps and put under direct War Office control.
Most public schools signed up for this, and by 1914 most had made “the corps” compulsory. Some took it seriously. Quite a few did not. Stuart Mais, the author of A Public School in Wartime
