This term has been altogether strange. We are chastened and quite different. Young boys are now prefects, heads of Houses, captains of games: the Corps has ousted athletics. It seems wrong to be chasing up and down a "Rugger" field while our brothers and dearest friends are being killed within a few hundred miles. We have done an amazing amount of Corps work this term: everybody is as keen as mustard to make himself really fit. Boys are reading their Stonewall Jackson, and Haking, and John Buchan, and everything that they can lay their hands on to inform themselves of what is going on across the Channel and how they shall best occupy their time here in preparation. By a very quaint irony, for the first time in my life I have noticed that boys are becoming really anxious to learn. Somehow intellectual pursuits seem to be worth striving after: there is a perceptible wish in every boy's mind to explore the garner-house of wisdom. Never have I felt that the schoolmaster's job was so important as I do now. Many of these boys will, please God, not have to fight, but they will all have to take an active part in the reconstruction of England. Every hour of every day we shall have to keep before them the ideals which we mean to see put into practice by the next generation. Last year we were in danger of getting sloppy: we were too rich, we were chasing after every kind of new pleasure, not a thought was given to the myriad problems of capital and labour, of poverty, of housing, of health, of education. We are all trying our best at last to see which of us can do the most for the sake of England: the name didn't mean much to us so long as she was safe; now that she is in deadly peril we are beginning to realize all that she is to us. Our new activity in the Corps is a beginning: we are drilling, digging, scouting, signalling, lecturing, bombing, bridge-building, range-finding, entrenching--learning up tactics and strategy. So far as actual military skill is concerned we are doing our best, but there is an enormous amount of leeway to be made up in other departments of life. For one thing, I believe the school is far more devout than it was. Suffering has sent us back to the Cross. We have weekly Intercession Services for our old boys. These are voluntary, but very few boys absent themselves. Our preachers seem almost inspired. It must be much easier to preach now than it used to be: we are all only too anxious to know what to do: "Here am I, send me" is the cry of every one in chapel. Our religion is a much more vital thing than it ever used to be. We are all working at top speed all the time. I only hope we don't break down as the newspapers have. Every one of the papers except the _Daily Telegraph_ has lost its head not once nor twice since war broke out. It is almost painful to read the leading articles at present. They blame everybody in authority for failure to cope with the present situation. How the German Press must gloat.