So much had happened to Herbert Butterfield since those early years in the heart of the Brontë Country that one too readily forgets how immature and unformed was the youth preparing to take the most important examinations of his life in 1918. Examinations frightened him to the point of nausea, though he came to see that the adrenalin played a crucial role in providing sparkle. Besides, there were bigger things than examinations to worry about. Wider perspectives surrounding the crisis on the Western Front could hardly escape anyone during the last spring of the war. Herbert had taken an enormous interest in it from the start. He had collected all the newspapers during the first three weeks in order to have the basis of an historical account of the conflict. He had repined, during his theological period, that the centre of Western civilization had somehow become an enemy to be despised – the country not only of Harnack but of Bach and Beethoven. But now he worried about imminent defeat. The push mounted by the German army during April 1918 seemed more threatening then than in retrospect: it was far from obvious that the war would be over in November. Cambridge, if ever he were to reach there, would be a ghost town while the war lasted. It in fact boasted a total of 235 undergraduates in 1916, which hardly suggested a metropolis of the mind.