IN the last years of WWI so many officers had been killed or injured that the Army faced a crisis of command. And many of the dead were the products of public schools. More than 500 of the nearly 2,500 former pupils of Winchester College who served their country lost their lives (www.winchestercollegeatwar.com). The story nationwide is told in Public Schools in the Great War by Anthony Seldon and David Walsh, who challenge such productions as the 1960s Oh! What a Lovely War and the 1980s TV series Blackadder Goes Forth. In a bid to set historical scholarship against popular entertainment, they point to Journey’s End by R.C. Sherriff, a play based on personal experience on the front line. Whatever the reality, there was definitely a shortage of officers in the later years of the war, which required taking other ranks ‘from the trenches’.