TIME FOR FAREWELLS
The end of June will be a time of last farewells for many of us. The hundred or so '46s in the Unit will go on to training at other stations after examinations are over. Hanover things which once went largely unnoticed have taken on sudden importance, and although we never really knew the College of old, Dartmouth must mean to us on these last spring evenings, as much as it ever meant to anyone.
It doesn't seem very long ago that we came here as freshmen, 600 of us, in the summer and fall of 1942. I don't think we kidded ourselves about what college in wartime was going to be like. Most of us knew that time was short, and as the two years went by, the class became smaller and smaller as men left for war service. Those of us who are still here see a Dartmouth remarkably changed from the school of two years ago. But in uniform and out, it has been Dartmouth for us. We haven't had it for very long. We've had to grow up here very fast. Wherever we go after this, for most of us these two years will have been the biggest part of our lives that we can remember, and that will be important.
If it weren't for the healthy cynicism that Dartmouth seems to foster about public college spirit, most of us would probably be spending these last weeks grieving the passing of the happy days and singing tearful songs. No one has. The real Dartmouth spirit that we know, and the town and College which will soon be in our memories, are, as they should be, best kept in our own hearts.
The College we knew on the surface had too little resemblance to the Dartmouth of peacetime. It's hard to say exactly how we are able to feel as we do. The best expression of it I know is a quote from a quote. In his Convocation address in 1937, President Hopkins quoted Mallet's History ofOxford, substituting the word "Dartmouth" for the word "Oxford." In a way, it explains much of what we feel on leaving Dartmouth in 1944:
Through all the changes, greater thanthe traditions gathered round her, wiserthan the prejudices she has outgrown,saved constantly by the new blood everflowing through her strongly as the watersflow beneath her walls; still young in heartand ineffaceable in beauty, Dartmouthlives, sharing her treasures ungrudginglywith those who seek them, her spirit withthose who understand.
