Tell England
Tell England: A Study in a Generation is a novel written by Ernest Raymond and published in February 1922 in the United Kingdom.
He writes affectionately and retrospectively of the three boys Rupert Ray, Edgar Doe and Archibald Pennybet as they were in childhood.
Rupert himself is a shy boy, lacking in courage and in need of moral guidance in the absence of a father figure.
Both boys are heavily influenced by the older Archibald "Penny" Pennybet, who enjoys wielding youthful power over others by stirring up acts of mischief.
Rupert's school career includes an ongoing feud with his housemaster (known as "Carpet Slippers"), receiving beatings and punishments, learning to do what is right, and – his greatest hour – winning the school relay swimming race, only to be disqualified, but then made a prefect on account of his maturity in dealing with the disappointment.
In one episode, the entire class has been cheating in Carpet Slippers' history lessons, only for Rupert to admit his guilt by recording a mark of zero after Radley's prompting.
For example, at the end of a triumphant cricket match the masters at Kensingstowe consider what England will do with the young men they are moulding.
[4] There is a bitter irony in this passage, for all three possessed promising lives that were snuffed out the moment they landed on the beaches.
They are both junior subalterns, the rank that suffered the greatest losses in the Great War, owing to their courage and visibility as leaders of the front line.
As the Germans break through Serbia, and British and French troops at Gallipoli begin to withdraw, Doe and Ray's unit is ordered to launch an attack as a diversion.
We are asked to believe that he is happy because he has lived, experienced beauty, known the purest of friendships and had twenty glorious years.
[citation needed] A major theme of the novel is religious redemption, and in the second half of the book Padre Monty becomes to Ray and Doe what Radley was at Kensingtowe.
Padre Monty views the pair as his greatest triumph, and is happy to be sending them out to battle "white" and pure.
When first informed that their battalion is being posted to the Gallipoli front, the Colonel explicitly paints the campaign in terms of a crusade: Now boys, follow me through this.
You're not over-religious, I expect, but you're Christians before you're Moslems, and your hands should fly to your swords when I say the Gallipoli campaign is a New Crusade.
Thus Christendom United fights for Constantinople, under the leadership of the British, whose flag is made up of the crosses of the saints.
[11]There is an underlying homoerotic flavour to much of the novel – especially Book I – with vivid descriptions of boys as magnificent creatures, God's highest form of creation and Britain's greatest accomplishment.
[18] One of the final messages in the book is given by Padre Monty to Rupert Ray as a means of consoling him to Edgar's death.
[22] Rose Macaulay, writing in the Daily News, thought it "apparently by a rather illiterate and commonplace sentimentalist", and considered that the book had "no beauty, and its silliness and bad taste are not the work of a writer".
Among more recent commentators, Samuel Hynes in 1990 found the novel imbued with a "spirit of Brookeish, schoolboy patriotism".
[26] Hugh Cecil in 1995 considered that Raymond's account "of golden youth going through what he innocently, but appropriately, called 'Five Gay Years at School' before meeting their ends in a state of moral purity at Gallipoli, seems now absurd".
[29] It is to be found engraved on all the obelisks at Wagon Hill Cemetery and at other battlefield monuments, surmounting the graves of officers and troopers in the Imperial Light Horse who fell during the Second Boer War.
[28][30][31] In the immediate decades after the Boer War it was well known and it was the inspiration for the title of Raymond's book and the slightly differently worded epitaph contained within its covers.
