OXFORD IN WAR TIME

On week-ends they sometimes come back to us, in khaki or with bare knees and a tartan plaid, bronzed and fit and glowing from the exposure of the training camp, happy to occupy their college room another night, and eager to get out to the front and to put an end to the waiting. These were our "dons" and fellow-undergraduates of last year; they come back to us as boyish as ever, still typical university students in spite of uniforms, and incipient moustaches, unpretentious, unheroic, but made of a stuff which knows no danger, officers whom the British "Tommy" would follow to certain destruction. But we see them rarely, and for the rest of the time Oxford is very empty. As time goes on we shall lose more and more of them; already the quickest to arm are in Egypt and in India, and, alas, in Belgium and France, and half-masted flags on various college barges tell of the deaths of oarsmen among the sixteen who have already fallen.

This is not the first time Oxford has seen war. The gray towers and the chipped quadrangles, and the blear-eyed gargoyles that peer down from so many eaves and cornices of this ancient university have often enough in six centuries seen the ranks of cap and gown depleted because the best and strongest have trooped away in the uniforms of His Majesty's forces. So one does not feel that this is a unique experience in the life of Oxford, and one knows that over in Cambridge the same sort of things are happening, and that in the universities of the Continent, even if they have been fortunate enough to escape devastation, student life has received still more paralyzing blows. One realizes too that, given this struggle for national existence, all this is as it should be. But these philosophic reflections cannot take away the pain which the absence of those who have gone inflicts, nor lessen the sadness with which one must expect the departure of many who still remain.

One should have known Oxford in time of peace in order to appreciate her in time of war. The change is difficult to lay hold of, so much is it a matter of spirit and of atmosphere rather than of externals. For Oxford is making a brave show of keeping everything going as in times of peace, so that, except for the übiquitous khaki uniform which has largely superseded academical dress, one is not impressed at once by the change in appearances.

Of course the thing which has laid hold of our hearts most continually, this epochal Michaelmas term, is the growing emptiness of the colleges of Oxford. By November twenty-first over half the student body which was in residency last spring,—including, therefore, those who received degrees in June,—were serving somewhere with His Majesty's forces. More are going every day. The proportion of its membership contributed by each of the twenty-odd colleges and halls which make up the University, varies greatly. Magdalen College is probably the hardest hit of all: from this college three out of every four of those who would normally be now in residence have "gone down" into the army, and among them the Prince of Wales, who has now left for the front. Of those who remain throughout the University all but the merest handful are in uniform, and are drilling daily in the Officers' Training Corps,—popularly known as the "Q. T. C.",—which means that they must accept commissions when they come, as come they will, one by one. So eventually we must arrive at an Oxford tenanted only by Americans, Indians, a handful of Quakers, and the decrepit or otherwise unfit.

Perhaps you can imagine the effect all this would have on life in Dartmouth, —if the fittest half of the student body were scattered abroad, in the firing line or in training camps; if almost all the rest were continually in uniform, drilling every morning from nine o'clock until ten, and every other afternoon until dark, with frequent lectures on tactics, and occasional arduous "night operations"; if few had any reasonable hope of getting a degree, and almost all were merely waiting for the inevitable summons to the modern ordeal of fire. There would not be much work done, and undergraduate activities, particularly those of track and field and gridiron, would have come to a full stop.

Yet such is the force of habit, the obstinacy and the activity among these English university men, that everything struggles on after a fashion. Lectures are well attended,—although there is no compulsion about the Oxford lecture-system; tutors still get essays written for them,— and this, of course, is the Oxford substitute for the recitation room; even the characteristic fall sports continue, so little do athletics in Oxford depend on the presence of "athletes." I here will be no University teams to contend with Cambridge, but this is after all the least important and least characteristic part of the sporting life of the English varsity. The really significant fact is that the athletic fields of the colleges, and the college-barges on the river Isis, are not altogether deserted, m spite of the demands of the drill-sergeant.

What this means may perhaps be shown by examples from Magdalen and other colleges. Rowing "is the premier sport at Magdalen, and claims the best part of the athletic material of the college,—and athletic material in Oxford means everybody not decrepit. So clean a sweep had the war made, however, that although some ten or a dozen men volunteered for rowing, there was no old oar to teach them the game; all had gone, from the old rowing "blues" among the dons" down to the crews of the "fresher fours" of last year. Now New College is also famous as a rowing institution, and New College by good fortune still possessed a "blue" and a varsity cox. So the boat-clubs of the two colleges joined forces under the presidency of the cox, with the "blue" as coach. And rowing proceeded as of yore. Ultimately a Magdalen "blue" returned from the hospital, whither he had gone to have an operation performed which might fit him to pass the army tests; St. Johns joined the union with its sole remaining coach; and the would-be oarsmen stuck at it until two fours" were produced which were considered worthy of crossing oars with a small school down the river. Unkind truth compels the admission that they were both defeated. But the object had been attained: rowing had been continued for those who wanted it for exercise, and a considerable number of new men had had the chance to learn the rudiments.

So under varying circumstances it goes in all the colleges and with all the sports. A white-haired "don" and professor of considerable note appeared to coach the Balliol oarsmen. Oriel Col, lege, none too large and hard hit, under the leadership of a Rhodes scholar who is now almost the only man left in Oriel of his year, has kept "rugger", "soccer", and rowing alive, by playing at them all in turn. The Magdalen and New College pack of beagles still runs after hares twice every week, and drills are so arranged for these colleges as to make possible a large following.

In spite, however, of all this devotion to the sports which are as essential as food and drink to the normal English lad in public school or university, it is sadly broken, that procession of barekneed cyclists headed for river and field that used to crowd High Street,— "the High",—as soon as ever lunch was over. One even hurries along to one's sport almost furtively, for the weight of an omnipresent question rests on one's shoulders: if one is able-bodied, why is one not in the khaki-clad throng bound for the drill-field? Is this surely one's day off? Why, indeed, is one at Oxford at all if not as a candidate, through the medium of the Officers' Training Corps, for a commission in His Majesty's Forces?

This brings us to consider this all-important organization which has been the means of transforming so large a part of a non-military university into second lieutenants and better. It exists in times of peace, and is designed to fit undergraduates to take commissions in time of need. Although purely voluntary, it has long attracted the most active part of the University, which was astonishingly prone to rise early on certain days of the week and startle the rooks by drilling in college parks and gardens before breakfast. At present, of course, it is fairly over-worked, although it is now open only to those willing to take commissions. It is scarcely too much to say that the University now exists for the "O. T. C.", that the universities would have hesitated to open in October had it not beep for the work of the "O. T. C.", so valuable in the creation of the continuous supply of officers which must be sacrificed to the modern Moloch. Members of the Corps wear officers' service uniforms without the insignia, and when in uniform, are excused from the little black gown which the Oxford undergraduate must ordinarily wear in Chapel,"at lectures, before his tutor, on the streets after dark, and at the formal evening meal, the dinner "in Hall". So universal is membership in the "O. T. C." that one no longer starts when the lesson in Sunday evening chapel is read by an officer in uniform, or when the elevated dais which overawes the mighty debates of the Oxford Union is occupied, not by a punctilious dresssuit, but by a khaki service kit.

So much for the externals of the subject. I fear this has been but an inadequate picture of a great university struggling to conduct '"business as usual" under a war-tax which has already taken from her some eighteen hundred of her stoutest undergraduate sons, to say nothing of forcing her to prepare the rest to follow. Add to it the picture of an old English city, thronged with Belgian refugees; ringing with the bugles and drums of "Kitchener's New Army," many soldiers of which are billeted in private houses and college "quads;" and witnessing the frequent arrivals of strings of ambulances before her public buildings, all of which, from the Odd-Fellows' Hall to the University Examination Schools, are flying red-cross flags;—-add these details for the City of Oxford through which the colleges are scattered, and perhaps one may imagine what Oxford is like in war time.

One cannot so easily picture the spirit of it all. Even here it is difficult not to be deceived by the lack of seriousness, the light-hearted jest and the laugh, that sit so well on the English undergraduate. It well-nigh hides the real patriotism, the sacrifice of career, the heroism, that lie beneath the careless surface. The war and his own part in it he accepts as a necessity, adds that it is a "beastly bore", and goes about his duty as though there were no alternative, and the best course could only be to have it over with as soon as possible. That there is anything heroic in his attitude he has not the slightest suspicion, and it would be too bad to disabuse him.

It is important to note that England looks unhesitatingly to the educated class to supply the leaders under whom the nation shall go forth to battle. The university man becomes a commissioned officer at once, generally a second lieutenant. At this particular point in the service the casualty rate is very high. The English undergraduate accepts this dangerous honor without question: it is at once his privilege and his duty. The British "Tommy" accepts the principle with the same spirit with which he accepts his own duty to serve in the ranks. Many of us have wondered at die stratifications in British society, and have condemned the social distinctions implied by the expressions "gentlemen" and "lower classes". We must at least observe with approval that the "gentlemen of England" recognize in the privileges of intellectual opportunity and social standing something connoting a duty of larger sacrifice for the nation in its need. There is no holding back, and when the war is done, and the figures are counted up, I believe it will be found that a far heavier toil has been exacted from this class than from the proletariat.

All this will be quite meaningless and futile if it has failed to carry to you across the seas a little breath of the inspiration which this war has brought to those of us who have seen its workings first-hand. Awful as it is beyond comparison, its horror alone should not fascinate us. It should impel us to look up from our busy ambitions and prospects of happiness, from our peace and sincerity and selfishness, and observe what personal sacrifices, what qualities of constancy and heroism one's country may on occasion demand. We must hope that Dartmouth will never be called upon to repeat her sacrifices of '61, nor to emulate those of Oxford in 1914, but we may at least draw inspiration from these examples for a larger spirit of patriotism and a greater readiness to sacrifice personal comfort and material gains on the altar of national well-being.

Conrad E. Snow '12, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University