The University was very quiet. The returned soldiers had little temptation to rag about, break windows, get drunk, or have tussles with the police and races with the bulldogs as before the war. The boys straight from the public schools were quiet too. They had had the war preached at them continually for four years, had been told that they must carry on loyally at home while their brothers were serving in the trenches, and must make themselves worthy of such sacrifices. The boys had been leaving for the cadet-battalions at the age of seventeen, so that the masters had it all their own way; trouble at public schools nearly always comes from the eighteen-year-olds. G. N. Clarke, a history don at Oriel, who had been up at Oxford just before the war and had meanwhile been an infantryman in France and a prisoner in Germany, told me: ‘I can’t make out my pupils at all. They are all “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” They seem positively to thirst for knowledge and they scribble away in their notebooks like lunatics. I can’t remember a single instance of such stern endeavour in pre-war days.’ The ex-service men—they included scores of captains, majors, colonels, and even a one-armed twenty-five-year-old brigadier—though not rowdy, were insistent on their rights. At St. John’s they formed what they called a Soviet, demanding an entire revision of the college catering system; they won their point and an undergraduate representative was chosen to sit on the kitchen-committee. The elder dons whom I had often seen during the war trembling in fear of an invasion of Oxford, with the sacking and firing of the colleges and the rape of the Woodstock and Banbury Roads, and who had regarded all soldiers, myself included, as their noble saviours, now recovered their pre-war self-possession. I was amused at the difference in manner to me that some of them showed. My moral tutor, however, though he no longer saluted me when we met, remained a friend; he prevailed on the college to allow me to change my course from Classics to English Language and Literature and to take up my £60 Classical Exhibition notwithstanding. I was glad now that it was an exhibition, though in 1913 I had been disappointed that it was not a scholarship: college regulations permitted exhibitioners to be married, scholars had to remain single.