It did not last long: within a week the numbers were diminished by a half; they then sank to a quarter, then an eighth. Within a month no class numbered more than half a dozen, which was just as well, for really people do not want to be taught things. Educational experts who spend years working out theories do not make a sufficient point of this. It is not enough to form a system, and expect the world to fit into it. Only a very few desire knowledge, and those few should be catered for. They will profit by instruction. But those who are taught things against their will, speedily forget whatever they have learnt. There are, it is true, those men who can inspire a love of work, who can produce results from any material, but they are not schoolmasters. There is rarely more than one in each school. For the profession presents insufficient attractions to the really brilliant man, with the result that schoolmasters are drawn from the ranks of mediocrity; and as long as this state of things continues, all that the average schoolmaster can hope to do is to keep the lazy in order, and impart his knowledge to those who want to learn. For the masses education can only mean information, and information by itself has little value. And so within a month the educational life of the camp had assumed modest limits; but, as those who remained were genuinely keen, the classes became infinitely more efficacious. Conversational French, for instance, was possible as it would never have been in a gathering of thirty. For the enthusiasts the decreased numbers were in every way advantageous, but it gave no pleasure to Colonel Westcott. Colonel Westcott was one of those delightful persons whom captivity had turned into a burlesque. He was as extravagant as a character out of Dickens, and it was hard to believe in his reality. He was so exactly the type of army officer that is caricatured on the music-hall stage. He had all the foibles and loyalties of his caste. He believed fearlessly in discipline, in the Anglo-Saxon race, in an Utopia made not with hands but with muskets. In the time when his enthusiasms had been kept in control by the business of war, he had been an excellent soldier; but once captured, he had no outlet for his temperament. Looking down on the court from the window of his room, he was horrified at the thought of so many subalterns passing out of his hands, out of the hands of discipline back into the individual energies of civilian life. And Colonel Westcott hated individualism: he liked to see humanity moving forward in one compact body, with himself at its head. He loathed, and was frightened by, the small bodies that went their own way and in their own time. During the four years of war nothing had given him more pleasure than to watch the slow conscription of England. In it he saw unity and safety. He was with the majority and was therefore safe.