Prefatory Note
Victorian age was still a living force in the second decade of the present century. Many articles in this volume relate to men and women whose characters matured and whose convictions were fully formed before 1870. Some of these illustrious survivals may owe a part of their current reputation to the fact that they survived so long. But a career must be judged as a whole; the effect of a life’s work is cumulative; and a man’s personal influence must be gauged, in some degree, by its duration as well as by its intensity. The Nestors of any period are to be remembered as links between the vivid present and the dissolving past, as the repositories of unwritten tradition, and faithful critics of their innovating juniors.
A biographical dictionary which covers four years and a half of European war might be expected to abound in names taken from that glorious, heart-rending roll of honour which records the names of 946,000 citizens of the British Empire. But the loss which that list represents to the Empire at large, and to Great Britain and Ireland in particular—since these sister islands contributed to the roll of honour more than 748,000 names—is not to be measured by those careers which a Dictionary of National Biography can chronicle. In the war years the hopes of the future were sacrificed to meet the imperious necessities of the present, and every battle took heavy toll of the, young, more especially of those who had proved their powers of leadership in thought and action; so that we may say, with Pericles: ἡ νεότης ἐκ τῆς πόλεως ἀνῇρηται ὥοπερ τὸ ἔαρ ἐκ τοῦ ἐνιαυτοῦ εἰ ἐξαιρεθείν.[1] Such biographies as those of Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, Francis Ledwidge, Henry Moseley, and Frederick Septimus Kelly illustrate | the richness and variety of the promise which sympathetic observers could perceive in that devoted generation.
Other aspects of the war, and national losses of other kinds which it occasioned, are revealed in the lives of Admirals Sir Robert Arbuthnot, Sir Christopher Cradock, Sir Horace Hood, and Captain Fryatt; of Lord Kitchener, drowned at sea, and Lord Lucas, killed by a fall from the air; of Generals Sir Thompson Capper, Sir Beauchamp Duff, Charles Fitzclarence, V.C., John Gough, V.C., Sir James Grierson, Sir Stanley Maude; of Nurse Edith Cavell, Sir Victor Horsley, Dr. Elsie Inglis, Arthur Wavell. The lives of Albert Ball, V.C., William Leefe Robinson, V.C., and Reginald Warneford, V.C., are included to illustrate the brilliant audacity which characterized the Royal Air Force in the war.
The acknowledgements of the Editors are due in particular to the following, for valuable criticisms and suggestions: Sir Hugh P. Allen, Sir Hugh K. Anderson, Sir Vincent Baddeley, Mr. C. F. Bell, Mr. E. I.
- ↑ The youth have been taken away out of the city, as if the spring were taken out of the year.
vi
