War Classics by Flora Johnston

as I waded knee-deep through the mud, only hoping that the wind would not blow me headlong into it the next minute. I arrived at the tent – the guttering oil lamps had gone out and by the light of a single candle, the solemn-faced young man was propounding theories of the most advanced Socialism, thinly veiled as Social Economics. He regarded my arrival as inopportune. To do the men justice, they were just as ready to ridicule his points as to praise. They knew it was a forbidden subject, so human nature being what it is, they flocked to hear. To tell the truth, they never liked men instructors at any rate, and ours were never plums.
    The solemn young man was hastily withdrawn and the Camp Commandant, being now very prickly – and righteously so – the Chief decided to send him Miss Mordaunt. It was a masterstroke and we had no more trouble there. When next I visited that camp, I crossed to the tent by a neat path of duckboard: there were chairs and a stove in the tent and oil lamps burning brightly – another tent next door served as lecture room, and both tents would have been huts, had not Miss Mordaunt intimated to the Camp Commandant that as long as the men were in tents, she preferred to be too.
    Besides sending Instructors to the camps, we advertised ourselves and our classes at the School. Base Routine Orders were all very well, but they were the official organ and we were not at all likely to get eager students through them. So we made out bills – red and blue and green bills, with pictures, most enticingly got up. No such thing as English literature figured on those. I had learnt something from Private Nobbs. ‘Come and Learn how to Write a Story,’ and under that head I read or told how the few best stories in English had been written. ‘French’ did not need to be camouflaged as everybody – even the WAACs – wanted to learn it. But equally everybody thought a senseless language like that should be mastered in at most a fortnight. It was a clean waste of time to spend longer than that on it. ‘German’ at this stage nobody wanted to learn, though, when the occupation began, we had floods of applicants for even a week’s course. The Irish Guards indeed, sent up unpremeditatedly to Cologne, wrote eagerly back to Miss Mordaunt for German grammars, so anxious were they to learn. Bookkeeping and shorthand drew well – a very practical and prosaic audience this. Nothing exciting was ever known to happen there, except once when a Pitman shorthand class was provided temporarily with a Gregg shorthand teacher and the resultant tangle had to be unravelled by main force by the wrathful and returning Pitmanite. Then there was the singing class. No shyness to come forward here. The Base Commandant led the way and the entire Base seemed ready to follow him. It is not often you get the chance of yelling louder than your Commander and not being punished for it. So the choir grew and multiplied with a will, both as regards numbers and lung power, until in the end we had to borrow a hall for it, as no single room in School – to our relief – would hold the singers. ‘History’ did not figure on any of the Bills under any disguise as nobody at the Base would ever consent to learn that. You see history consisted mostly of war and of that, past, present or future, they never wanted to hear again. The only exception was a small squat man, who came one late afternoon and asked for a lecture on Frederick the Great, to be delivered at once. That stumped us all. Eventually the Chief took it on as he had, in the remote past, done History at Oxford. He said that the man listened stolid and unmoved during the whole hour’s discourse, and at the end, equally stolidly, picked up his cap and departed. We never fathomed why he had asked for it.
    One item on the bills was ‘Commercial Geography’ and though the lecturer for it was one of the best and a