The Henson Journals

[578]

Thursday, June 8th, 1916.

675th day

I received the Holy Communion at 8 a.m. in S. Gregory's Chapel. The morning was frittered away in futile essays at sermon composition. At 2 p.m. I presided at the election of King's Scholars. There was a very poor field, only eleven boys being examined: we gave scholarships to 3 of them. Maxwell Backhouse and his brother Kendal: and Leslie Ward. The brothers are the sons of the Wolsingham Schoolmaster, and the other's father is a 'Printer & Publisher'. Then I went to the Town Hall, and attended a meeting in the Mayor's Parlour in the interest of the Lord Roberts Memorial Workshops for the disabled soldiers & sailors. Miss Carey was fluent & eloquent but vague. I suggested that the money she pleaded for (£100,000) might well be voted by the Prince of Wales's Fund. Lord Durham concurred, & promised to ascertain whether the Fund would make a grant.

I wrote to Reggie Still, who is still at Cambridge training. It is these many months with the colours at home that brings so severe a strain on the character of these young soldiers. The first fervours burn themselves out, and are followed by a moral lassitude which itself constitutes a situation of great danger. They are besieged by women & girls, many of whom are swept along by a wave of sentiment, but some of whom are definitely corrupt in mind or habit, or both. The tone of conversation & conduct among the regulars, who have the handling of these youths, are in respect to women painfully low: and the entrance into vice is facilitated in a hundred ways. I have no doubt at all, from what I learn from Ernest and many others, that the War has broken down, and is breaking down, that personal chastity which was distinctive of the general body of middle–class Englishmen.

---