³⁸ ‘It seemed otherwise to the gods.’ Laurence Bertrand Johnson was elected a Scholar of Queens’ College, Oxford, in 1917 but he was sent to the Front with the Somerset Light Infantry before he could matriculate. Jack says of Johnson in Surprised by Joy (ch. XII): ‘In him I found dialectical sharpness such as I had hitherto known only in Kirk, but coupled with youth and whim and poetry. He was moving toward Theism and we had endless arguments on this and every other topic whenever we were out of the line.’ Johnson was killed by the shell which wounded Jack.