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. 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.
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.
In deciding to publish some of the letters written by the late Lieutenant H. 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, , 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 p.
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.
