law.

XXVII

HIGHER EDUCATION

British Headquarters must, I think, be the biggest Military Academy in
the world. It has its Sandhurst and its Woolwich and even its Camberley.
It ought long ago to have been incorporated by Order in Council as a
University with Sir John French as Chancellor. It has more schools in
the Art of War than I can remember, and every School has an Instructor
who deserves to rank as a full-time Professor. To graduate in one of
those schools you must get a fortnight's leave from your trenches or
your battery, at the end of which time you return to do a little
post-graduate work of a very practical kind with the aid of a
machine-gun or a trench-mortar. At the beginning of the war higher
education at G.H.Q. was somewhat neglected, and the company officer who
desired to improve himself in the lethal arts had to be content with
private study. Company officers went in for applied chemistry by making
flares out of a test-tube full of water, delicately balanced in a
bully-beef tin containing sodium. The tins were tied to the barbed-wire
entanglements in front of our trenches, and when the stealthy Hun,
creeping on his stomach, bumped against the wire the test-tube
overflowed into the tin and a lurid patch of greenish flame revealed the
clumsy visitor to our look-outs. That was before we were supplied with
calcium flares. Then, too, the sappers went in for experimental research
by making trench-mortars out of old stove-pipes.

To-day all that is changed. A chemical corps has come out to join the
sappers, and the gunners have received some highly finished
trench-mortars from Vickers's. A trench mortar is a kind of toy howitzer
and very useful when you want to try conclusions with a neighbouring
trench at short range. The mortars are not exactly things to play with,
and so two "schools" of mortars have been instituted to teach R.G.A. men
how to handle them. Every morning at nine o'clock two young subalterns
meet their class of fifty pupils in a chateau, and explain with the aid
of a diagram on a blackboard the internal economy of the mortar and its
50-lb. bomb, the adjustment of angles of elevation to ranges, and the
respective offices of fuse, charge, and detonator. When the class have
had enough of this they go off to a neighbouring field to simulate
trench warfare and hold a demonstration. This is real sport. They have
dug a sector of trenches, duly traversed, and at some two or three
hundred