John Buchan had a good thing to say about everybody he knew, even those, as Milner, who Buchan served in South Africa, who bequeathed the Nazis the idea and practice of the concentration camp; as Haig, who insisted on cavalry in an era of barbed wire and ignored the airplane, who lost 20,000 men in one day in adherence to the single file walk advance in an era of the machine gun. Yes, even "the butcher."

The Great War shattered those it did not butcher, and their societies. Indeed, it shattered modernity. It drove people, including Buchan, away from all involvement in civic affairs. Those, like Buchan, who could afford it, left the cities for the seclusion of the peaceful pastoral life.

Those who could not afford it, those who remained involved in civic life, who remained in the cities, those drew the only bitter words in Pilgrim's Way. It is a grave failing of John Buchan. It reveals his constitutional toryism. That so kindly a man thought and wrote so contemptuously of the "lost generation" shows his bedrock reactionism. He would not abandon the principles of an order that had admitted him to its perch of ruling privilege, of intellectual, moral, and material supremacy, even when that order had smashed itself against the rock of its own making. Instead, he turned bitter pen on those, raised by him and his generation to belieF in and reliance upon that old order who now stood agape amidst the wreckage.