Though the quality of the officers had deteriorated from the regimental point of view (in brief, few of the new officers were now gentlemen), their deficiency in manners was amply compensated for by their greater efficiency in action. The cadet-battalion system, in the next two years, saved the army in France from becoming a mere rabble. We failed about a sixth of the candidates for commissions; the failures were sometimes public-school boys without the necessary toughness, but usually men who had been recommended, from France, on compassionate grounds—rather stupid platoon sergeants and machine-gun corporals who had been out too long and were thought to need a rest. Our final selection of the right men to be officers was made by watching them play games, principally rugger and soccer. The ones who played rough but not dirty and had quick reactions were the men we wanted. We spent most of our spare time playing games with them. I had a platoon of New Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans, two men from the Fiji Island contingent, an English farm-labourer, a Welsh miner and two or three public-school boys. They were a good lot and most of them were killed later on in the war. The New Zealanders went in for rowing; the record time for the river at Oxford was made by a New Zealand eight that year. I found the work too much for my lungs, for which the climate of Oxford was unsuitable. I kept myself going for two months on a strychnine tonic and then collapsed again. I fainted and fell downstairs one evening in the dark, cutting my head open; I was taken back to Somerville. I had kept going as long as I could. I had liked Wadham, where I was a member of the senior common-room and had access to the famous brown sherry of the college; it is specially mentioned in a Latin grace among the blessings vouchsafed to the fellows by their Creator. My commanding officer, Colonel Stenning, in better times University Professor of Hebrew, was a fellow of the college. The social system at Oxford was dislocated. The St. John’s don destined to be my moral tutor when I came up was a corporal in the General Reserve; he wore grey uniform, drilled in the parks, and saluted me whenever we met. A college scout had a commission and was instructing in the other cadet battalion. There were not, I suppose, more than a hundred and fifty undergraduates at Oxford at this time; these were Rhodes scholars, Indians, and men who were unfit. I saw a good deal of Aldous Huxley, Wilfred Childe, and Thomas Earp, who were running an undergraduates’ literary paper of necessarily limited circulation called _The Palatine Review_, to which I contributed. Earp had set himself the task of keeping the Oxford tradition alive through the dead years; he was president and sole member, he said, of some seventeen undergraduate social and literary societies. In 1919 he was still in residence, and handed over the minute-books to the returning university. Most of the societies were then reformed.