War Letters of a Public-School Boy

Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

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• Publié par: voev
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 35
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of War Letters of a Public-School Boy, by
Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
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Title: War Letters of a Public-School Boy
Author: Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
Release Date: July 6, 2009 [EBook #29333]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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Produced by Geetu Melwani, Sigal Alon, Christine P. Travers
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Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected. Hyphenation
and accentuation have been standardised, all other inconsistencies are as in
the original. The author's spelling has been maintained.Lieut. Paul Jones.
(From a Photograph by his Brother.)
WAR LETTERS
OF A
PUBLIC-SCHOOL BOY
BY
PAUL JONES
Lieutenant of the Tank Corps
Scholar-Elect of Balliol College, Oxford: Head of the Modern Side and Captain of Football, Dulwich College,
1914WITH A MEMOIR BY HIS FATHER
HARRY JONES
He was the very embodiment in himself of all that is best in the public-school spirit,
the very incarnation of self-sacrifice and devotion.
A DULWICH MASTER.
WITH EIGHT PLATES
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1918
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 1
PART I. MEMOIR
Chapter
1. CHILDHOOD 9
2. AT DULWICH COLLEGE 14
3. FOOTBALL 28
4. CRICKET 37
5. EDITOR OF THE ALLEYNIAN 41
6. PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND THE WAR 47
7. TASTES AND HOBBIES 52
8. MUSIC 59
9. LITERATURE AND ETHICS 72
10. HISTORY AND POLITICS 85
11. IN THE ARMY 98
12. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 110
PART II. WAR LETTERS
AT A HOME PORT 121
WITH THE 9TH CAVALRY BRIGADE 131
WITH A SUPPLY COLUMN 186
IN THE SOMME BATTLEFIELD 202WITH THE 2ND CAVALRY BRIGADE 212
WITH THE TANK CORPS 229
PART III
EPILOGUE 257
INDEX 277
LIST OF PLATES
H. P. M. JONES AS 2ND LIEUT. A.S.C. Frontispiece
To face page
PAUL AS AN INFANT 8
IN HIS 6TH YEAR 12
WINNING THE MILE, MARCH 27, 1915 22
DULWICH COLLEGE FIRST XV, 1914-15 28
DULWICH MODERN SIDE XV, 1914-15 32
PAUL JONES IN HIS 19TH YEAR 110
AS A SUBALTERN IN THE 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
shortsighted, 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:
Have you ever reflected on the fact that, despite the horrors of the war, it is at least abig thing? I mean to say that in it one is brought face to face with realities. The follies,
selfishness, luxury and general pettiness of the vile commercial sort of existence led by
nine-tenths of the people of the world in peace time are replaced in war by a savagery
that is at least more honest and outspoken. Look at it this way: in peace time one just
lives one's own little life, engaged in trivialities, worrying about one's own comfort, about
money matters, and all that sort of thing—just living for one's own self. What a sordid
life it is! In war, on the other hand, even if you do get killed, you only anticipate the
inevitable by a few years in any case, and you have the satisfaction of knowing that you
have "pegged out" in the attempt to help your country. You have, in fact, realised an
ideal, which, as far as I can see, you very rarely do in ordinary life. The reason is that
ordinary life runs on a commercial and selfish basis; if you want to "get on," as the
saying is, you can't keep your hands clean.
Personally, I often rejoice that the war has come my way. It has made me realise
what a petty thing life is. I think that the war has given to everyone a chance to "get out
of himself," as I might say. Of course, the other side of the picture is bound to occur to
the imagination. But there! I have never been one to take the more melancholy point of
view when there's a silver lining to the cloud.
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 g