Our Own Class Notes

Secretary-Treasurer,

WHAT WITH THE Class of ' holding the unparalleled record of 100 per cent of its members in military service, and all Majors, too, our class notes of late have necessarily been few and far between. One thing you can say about ' , though; we stick" together. No matter where we may be, the Aleutians or China or (currently) the Philippines, we are always able to hold a class reunion at the drop of a tin-hat, and have our entire membership present. Let a ' er jump into a foxhole anywhere, and he'll find his whole class right in there with him. It gives us a nice feeling of solidarity.

We've been holding reunions with fellow Hanoverians lately in a lot of foxholes around this Girdled, as Herb West has it in his excellent monthly department, Earth. Maj. Bob McKennan in Alaska, Lt. Ev Wood in Iceland, Lt. Dan Holland in the Pacific, Lt. Rod Hatcher, Lt. Dave Camerer, Maj. Ort Hicks (of our godfather class of 'ai), Col. Dave Schilling, Capt. Von Oehmig, Lt. Steve Bradley, Walt Prosser, Monty Sayce, Russ Fette—all are on a special Dartmouth Short Snorter bill we carry on our person at all times, or pay one buck in forfeit.

A STORY OF BATAAN

But there is one Dartmouth man we have not met. We don't know his name, and we doubt very much if he is even living now. You see, he was one of the weary beaten thousands who were captured when Bataan fell in 1941, and who were held by the Japs in the pestilential prison-camps of the Philippines. We heard the story from some of his fellow-prisoners who escaped recently, and we thought that other Dartmouth men might like to hear it, too. It was back in December, 1942, in the grim Jap prison-camp of Davao. It was hard even to think of Christmas in that atmosphere of barbed wire and bayonets, they said. They were sick and starved and lonely and forgotten. There were no Christmas letters, no packages, no tree; no hope even. They tried to put Christmas out of their minds. But very early on that Christmas morning, before it was light, the camp wakened to the-unaccustomed sound of singing. A handful of men had gathered in the dark outside the barracks, and as their fellow-prisoners listened they sang, very softly, the Dartmouth Winter Song. The homesick Americans lay on the bare filthy boards and listened to that universal song of the north wind and snow and the great white cold, the beech wood and the bellows and the pledge of fellowship, and it brought some things close that had been very far away. They listened in silence, and the only sound in the dark was when a man began to cry.

We wonder if Dartmouth's great song was ever greater than at that moment.