“There is yet another form of “national service” which calls for special comment, particularly as it is not one which is glorified elsewhere. If half the men in Europe between the ages of 20 and 40 are to be wiped out of existence, what can be more vital than the education of those who will have a double burden of duty in after life, the present schoolboys? Many young schoolmasters without any very bright future before them must have found the path of enlistment the easier course in the last few weeks; they may also have felt it to be the way of duty, and for that reason none would wish to find fault with these; but others have felt that their duty now, more than at any other time in their lives, was to the generation that is not touched by the war now, but which will need still greater strength to carry on the better life of man in the future. To such men every European State to-day owes the deepest debt of all. They are educating the men who will direct the course of the new Europe which we believe will arise when the war is done.”
From ‘Bootham’ magazine, December 1914