The Undergraduate Chair

Autumn Foliage on Hanover Hills Offers Unchanging Aspect of College as Students Uncertainly Watch World Crisis

THIS WILL BE a long March mud season." The editor's words of the July issue are still true. The leaves were never brighter, but the New England autumn this year remembers the uncertainty of mudtime. Robert Frost says:

The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day When the sun is out and the wind is still, You're one month on in the middle of May. But if you so much as dare to speak, A cloud comes over the sunlit arch, A wind comes off a frozen peak, And you're two months back in the middle of March.

This fall in Hanover we lose ourselves in the big show up on the hillsides, the way we always have, and we feel the leaves dropping down the wind are really the only important things, the changing hills behind the stadium really the only changeless things. But "if you so much as dare to speak" or even to think or especially to laugh, then bingo you're a lifetime back in the middle of the "long March mud season. . . .of despairing hopes."

In Montreal a few days ago a friend volunteered for the army and the recruitingofficer pointed to the two of us standing bythe wall and said, "What about them?""Oh, they have to go back and finish college." The officer smiled, politely, as if trying to find importance in it.

Of course there is importance in it, going to college and trying to find out where the solid ground is. If you could only find solid ground; then you could stand on it and act. Meanwhile there is the uncertainty of mud time, the disappearance of assurance, the questioning which never seems to find an answer. The excitement over the World Series, the rush of football on the campus, not even the familiar smell of leaves burning in the late afternoon shouts down, rubs over or blots out the one non-stop question: what about the war?

I could be wrong about this. Being awriting-man in the class after Tom Bradenis like being president after Lincoln. Mostof your stuff is bad by comparison andwhat's good you steal from him. People willalso probably remember you (if at all) asAndrew Johnson, or some name equally remote from Bolte. Braden '4O knew whatpeople thought; he also said a good thingin his class notes last month, which I paraphrase, steal and corrupt to my own uses:

"Any resemblance whatsoever betweenThe Undergraduate Chair and the story ofwhat happens to 2400 students of Dartmouth College is virtually an act of God "

When I talk about indecision and a longmud time I don't guarantee everyone inHanover is in those unhappy states. I alsolaugh quietly at the editor's suggestion towrite about undergraduate opinion on thewar. I constitute an undergraduate opinion, and if either of my roommates consti-tutes an opinion like mine it is purely coincidental and no resemblance to any otheropinion living or dead is intended.

I do think this about most students: They try to bury the question of war under football week-ends and study because they're shaken in their beliefs. The easy answers of last spring are out. Very few are talking about moral issues and how they force us to aid Britain; equally few hold to the idea that the war is another imperialistic struggle of conflicting economies which we mustn't touch.

Everyone seems to be sitting tight and waiting. People seem reluctant to talk. "The Ramparts We Watch" filled the Nugget for two days, and after the show there were cautious comments. "Pretty welldone" is typical. It was unsettling, that picture; it asked questions. It was an obvious propaganda job which superficially made the one answer "we go to war now," but it raised implicit questions which it didn't answer. Slowly in the bull-sessions the questions came into the open: What do we fight for? Where will we attack? What is our war aim? What kind of peace do we want? Can we be sure this is a world revolution? Does Germany really threaten us? Are we fighting England's war again? Can we live in the same world with Nazism? Do we want to? How do we know we won't be trapped into another fascist-breeding peace like Versailles? Can we even beat the Nazis?

One thing the picture accomplished was to show Hanover the honesty of the intentions of the people who went to war in 1917. It showed the thing as it looked to the people in it; not with the historian's hindsight, as Archibald MacLeish said. It made evident once more the similarity between that time and this time. It made evident that the source of the disillusion was not the entrance into the war, but the results of the war: the breakdown of the peaceful "new world order" into the old story of nationalism and another war as soon as the conquered became strong. It did not mention the destruction the actual fighting performed upon the men's bodies and minds. It did not hint that a man dying in front of a passionless war-machine does not smile with the martyr's sacrifice but curses all machinery.

Some of the young men remember these things from what they have been taught and what they have read, and they still questions, growing more involved as thei, emotions, instincts and facts become more interlocked.

It's very difficult to untie a Gordian knot; and we have been taught to think that merely cutting it straight across is cheating. Besides, you might sever a % line.

Much of the confusion is concealed by an apparent slackening of interest in the war. It is again difficult to size up the situation because in addition to this artificial covering there is probably a genuine slackening of interest, just as there was last winter when the military action slowed down. Now for more than a month TkDartmouth has been running nearly the same Associated Press dispatch from Lot], don. It is not a lessening of sympathy, onk a deadening by repetition.