So I was sent to Oxford, to Somerville College, which, like the Examination Schools, had been converted into a hospital. It occurred to me here that I was probably through with the war, for it could not last long now. I both liked and disliked the idea. I disliked being away from the regiment in France and I liked to think that I would probably be alive when the war ended. As soon as I was passed fit Siegfried had got boarded toe and tried to follow me to the Second Battalion. He was disappointed to find me gone. I felt I had somehow let him down. But he wrote that he was unspeakably relieved to know that I was back at Oxford. I liked Oxford and wanted to stay there. I applied, on the strength of a chit from the Bull Ring commandant at Havre, for an instructional job in one of the Officer-Cadet Battalions quartered in the men’s colleges. I was posted to the Wadham Company of No. 4 Battalion. These battalions had not been formed long; they had grown out of instructional schools for young officers. The cadet course was only three months (later increased to four), but it was a severe one and particularly intended to train platoon commanders in the handling of the platoon as an independent unit. About two-thirds of the cadets were men recommended for commissions by colonels in France, the remainder were public-school boys from the officers’ training corps. Much of the training was drill and musketry, but the important part was tactical exercises with limited objectives. We used the army textbook S.S. 143, or ‘_Instructions for the training of platoons for offensive action_, 1917,’ perhaps the most important War Office publication issued during the war. The author is said to have been General Solly-Flood, who wrote it after a visit to a French army school. From 1916 on the largest unit possible to control in sustained action was the platoon. Infantry training had hitherto treated the company as the chief tactical unit.