At that moment some companies of the battalion returned to barracks from a route-march; the drums and fifes drew up under my window, making the panes rattle with _The British Grenadiers_. The insistent repetition of the tune and the hoarse words of command as the parade formed up in the square, company by company, challenged Banbury Cross and Babylon. _The British Grenadiers_ succeeded for a moment in forcing their way into the poem: Some speak of Alexander, And some of Hercules, but were driven out: But where are there any like Nancy and Jenny, Where are there any like these? I had ceased to be a British grenadier. So I decided to resign my commission at once. I consulted the priority list of trades for demobilization and found that agricultural workers and students were among the first classes to go. I did not particularly want to be a student again. I would rather have been an agricultural worker (Nancy and I spoke of farming when the war ended), but I had no agricultural background. And I found that I could take a two years’ course at Oxford with a Government grant of two hundred pounds a year, and would be excused the intermediate examination (Mods.) on account of war-service. The preliminary examination (Smalls) I had already been excused because of a certificate examination that I had taken while still at Charterhouse. So there only remained the finals. The grant would be increased by a children’s allowance. This sounded good enough. It seemed absurd at the time to suppose that university degrees would count for anything in a regenerated post-war England; but Oxford was a convenient place to mark time until I felt more like working for my living. We were all so accustomed to the war-time view, that the only possible qualification for peace-time employment would be a good record of service in the field, that we took it for granted that our scars and our commanding-officers’ testimonials would get us whatever we wanted. A few of my fellow-officers did manage, as a matter of fact, to take advantage of the patriotic spirit of employers before it cooled again, sliding into jobs for which they were not properly qualified.