Donald Hankey was a writer who saw himself as a student of human nature and peacetime Edwardian Britain as a society at war with itself. Wounded in a murderous daylight infantry charge near Ypres, Hankey began sending despatches to The Spectator from hospital in 1915. Trench life, wrote Hankey, taught that the gentleman is a type not a social class. In one calm, humane, eyewitness report after another under the byline A Student in Arms, Hankey revealed how the civilian volunteers of Kitchener s Army, many with little stake in Edwardian society, put their betters to shame nonetheless. A...