Note Back to Main Text — PART II WAR LETTERS

I was horrified to see in a recent casualty list among the killed the name of Second Lieutenant H. O. Beer. I remember him as a rather clever, quiet, inoffensive, distinctly popular fellow in Doulton's House. He left at the end of July, 1914, without getting any colours, but after doing quite well in all games. He won a Junior Scholarship, but failed to get a Senior. He was made a School Prefect in September, 1913, and you will see him in the very middle of the back row of the photo of the Prefects that we have—a markedly good-looking fellow, with light hair brushed across his forehead. What a wealth of tragedy and yet also of honour is expressed in the last line of his obituary notice in The Times—"He fell leading his platoon, aged twenty years." Only yesterday, as it were, we were at school together—I remember handing him off with great vigour on the football field—and now! It was just the same with poor Reynolds[2] and Bray.[3] But I mustn't go on in this strain.