Eton and Balliol will agree that there could be no biographer better
fitted to record the life, as happy seemingly as it was fated to be
short, of one who combined success with popularity at both these places,
was caught by the War on the threshold of a wider career, served his
country with very notable distinction and was killed in the winter of
1917. Though he met death in France, the most of Shaw-Stewart's
war-service was on the Eastern front; in particular he saw more than
most soldiers of the whole Gallipoli adventure, to which he went as a
member of that amazing company--surely the very flower of this country's
war contribution--the _Hood_ Battalion of the R.N.V.R. Here he was the
comrade of many of those whom England has especially delighted to
honour: Rupert Brooke, Denis-Browne, Charles Lister and others, all of
whom figure in these vivid and most attractive letters; from which also
one gathers an engaging picture of Shaw-Stewart himself, a generously
admiring, humorous and entirely independent young Tory in a band of
brilliant revolutionaries. In fine a book (despite its theme of promise
sacrificed) full of laughter and a singularly charming character-study
of one who, in his biographer's phrase, was assuredly "not one of the
passengers of his generation.
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