Never, in its varied and not always unqualifiedly successful career, had the school been in a state of such utter disorganization and prostration, as in the Easter term, 1917. In France & Flanders, our thinly guarded, inadequately munitioned lines, were quite incapable of successfully resisting the menaced German “push,” every paper brought news of further mis-management and ill-success, every post news of some friend or relation who had been killed. At school, the houses had mostly been taken over, in the absence of their younger housemasters, by well meaning but incompetent elderly assistant masters; the prefects were young, and knowing that in a few weeks, at the most a few months, they would be “called up” to go to possible death, almost certain mutilation, cared little for school or house affairs. All over the country nerves were strained to the breaking point. This must be borne in mind when reading a story which at any other period would have been utterly impossible.
Every house, of course, claims to be the best, and in all probability has hypnotized itself into believing so, but there is one House that is more exclusive, more arrogantly self-confident, more self-contained, than any other. The House has many exclusive points of etiquette that the out-houses look on with contempt or resentment. They have largely their own slang, a great many of their own customs, and above all an unshakable contempt for the corps and all its machinations. Every flight of Inspection-day oratory leaves them the same, and even when all over the country militarism was all powerful, when soldiers drilled on the Christ Church quads at Oxford, they kept up their contempt with unmitigated bitterness. And then came Ross. A prefect, an excellent all round athlete, with a high place in the Classical sixth, he had remained quite a nonentity until he returned at the beginning of the Easter term to find himself head of the House, now demoralized and bereft of all its earlier dignity.
He had to take the entire management of the House into his own hands, and very soon he made himself felt. He stopped people getting “orders” for confectionery from their temporary housemaster, he stopped people getting leaves off Clubs & Parades without consulting the matron at all, he generally raised the house to something like its former standard and on the whole people liked it, for fundamentally men rather like being kept in order if it is done in the right way.
For the first three weeks all went well—too well really. Then came the Monday afternoon parade in which the corps started organizing for the House Platoons Shield. Ross delivered a violent little speech and, as in most of his speeches, he said rather more than he meant to. “Stand easy and pay attention. The display that you have given so far has been perfectly monstrous. I’ve never seen such marching in my life before—might be a whole lot of boy scouts. I can tell you, that if you think that because this House has been disgustingly slack in the past, you are going to be disgustingly slack now, you are quite wrong for once in your lives. You’re going to sweat for this—sweat your guts out—and I’m going to make you! Got that?” and he called the platoon up.
The House looked on him with undisguised amazement and disgust and slowly meandered through the platoon drill with their customary negligence.
Next Tuesday’s uniform parade saw the House with tarnished buttons, mud caked boots, and fouled rifles as usual. Next day saw the whole platoon doing “defaulters.”
And so it went on, and gradually the House began to give way to his personality and even attained a certain sullen efficiency when suddenly a few days after the House Trials, an occurrence happened which altered the whole complexion of affairs.
One afternoon Ross was sitting in the house captain’s room reading, when Stewart burst in, in running change, rather dirty, obviously just returned from a run.
Stewart was captain of Running and certain, people said, to be, at any rate, in the first three in the Five Mile—very possibly a winner.
He sat down on the window seat and began idly fingering the congealing mud on his knees. Then he looked up. “Ross,” he said in the drawl always affected by prefects & house captains in the House, “I suppose you know that you are playing hell with the House, with your corps-mania?�............