Memory Hold-The-Door by John Buchan — Read

Father Knox, in the dedication which he never published to his _Spiritual Aeneid_, has told of the bright company which was scattered by the War. I hesitate to make such a survey for my own time, since it is all so long ago, and to-day most of the names would have little meaning. But one or two I may select from that old world where "the sun rose over Magdalen and set over Worcester."

Cuthbert Medd, who died in 1902 just as he was about to join me in South Africa, had in some ways the most powerful mind I have ever known in a young man, and Lord Rosebery was of my opinion. He was a Northumbrian and therefore in some sense a fellow-Borderer, and together we tramped over most of Scotland. Aubrey Herbert, gentle, whimsical, utterly courageous, lived to be a Member of Parliament and to have a fantastic record in various terrains of the War. He was taken prisoner in the retreat from Mons, when, armed with an alpenstock, he must have presented a figure like Don Quixote's; and, knowing Turkish, during a truce at Gallipoli he is said to have taken command of a Turkish unit and escorted it back to its trenches. To go tandem-driving with him at Oxford required fortitude, for he was very blind; to mountaineer with him deserved a Victoria Cross, for he was both blind and desperate. Then there was always with us the stalwart figure of Hilaire Belloc, who preached exotic doctrines in his great gusty voice -- a man full of gnarled wisdom and also of a youthfulness younger than ours -- who warmed the air about him and whose kindliness and charity were of the early Christian pattern. He founded a so-called Republican Club, and it became necessary to correct its extravagance by starting a rival institution, the S. G. D. F. P., or the Society for Grinding Down the Faces of the Poor! Let me record my conviction that much of his output in letters is as likely to live as any work of our time; no man has attained more perfectly to the "piety of speech" of the seventeenth-century lyrists; no man has written purer and nobler prose in the great tradition.