In November, 1914, he joined up as lieutenant in the Welsh regiment with which these pages deal, and he obtained a temporary captaincy in the following spring. When he went out to the front in October, 1915, he resumed his lieutenancy, but was very shortly given charge of a company, a position which he retained until he was wounded in June, 1916, when he returned to England. He only went out to the front again on January 31st of this year. In the afternoon of February 26th he was wounded while leading his men in an attack and died the following day in the field hospital.
These few sentences record the bare landmarks of a career which, in the judgment of his friends, would have been noteworthy had it not been so prematurely cut short. For instance, here is what his friend, T. R. Glover, of St John’s, wrote in _The Eagle_ (the St John’s College magazine) and elsewhere:
“Bernard Adams was my pupil during his Classical days at St John’s, and we were brought into very close relations. He remains in my mind as one of the very best men I have ever had to teach--best every way, in mind and soul and all his nature. He had a natural gift for writing--a natural habit of style; he wrote without artifice, and achieved the expression of what he thought and what he felt in language that was simple and direct and pleasing. (A College Prize Essay of his of those days was printed in _The Eagle_ (vol. xxvii, 47-60)--on Wordsworth’s _Prelude_.) He was a man of the quiet and reserved kind, who did not talk much, for whom, perhaps, writing was a more obvious form of utterance than speech.
It was clear to those who knew him that he put conscience into his thinking--he was serious, above all about religion, and he was honest with himself. Other people will take religion at secondhand; he was of another type. He thought things out quietly and clearly, and then decided. His choice of Economics as a second subject at Cambridge was dictated by the feeling that it would prepare him for his life’s work in the Christian ministry. There was little hope in it of much academic distinction--but that was not his object. A man who had thought more of himself would have gone on with Classics, in the hope (a very reasonable one) of a Fellowship. Adams was not working for his own advancement. The quiet simple way in which, without referring to it, he dismissed academic distinction, gives the measure of the man--clear, definite, unselfish, and devoted. His ideal was service, and he prepared for it--at Cambridge, and with his Indian students in London.