The disaster of the great war came to Sanderson as a tremendous distressful¹ stimulant², a monstrous³ and tragic⁴ turn in human affairs that he had to square with his aims and teaching. He had had our common awareness⁵ of its possibility, and yet when the crash came it took him, as it took most of us, by surprise. At first he accepted the war as a dire⁶ heroic necessity. This aggression⁷ of a military imperialism⁸ had to be faced valiantly⁹. That was how he saw it. Both his sons joined up at the earliest possible moment, and the school braced¹⁰ itself up to train its senior boys as officers, to help in the production of munitions¹¹, to produce aviators¹², gunners and engineers for the great service of the war.  
[Pg 98]
 
The practical quality of the old boys from Oundle became apparent at once. They stepped from laboratory and factory and office into commissions; they returned from all over the world to prepare for the battlefields. By 1918 over a thousand Oundle boys had gone into the fighting services, three had V.C.'s, many had been mentioned in despatches, awarded the Military Cross and the like.
 
He did his best to find God and creative force in the world convulsion. Here is a part of an address to the Church Parade of the Cadet Corps¹³ which shows his very fine and very human struggle to impose a nobility of interpretation¹⁴ upon the grim distressful last stages of the war.
 
'It is a pleasant thing to wander about these fields and watch the cadets who are told off to instruct their squads¹⁵. It is a splendid illustration of the power of co-operation in education—where boys and men, or where a community work together, teaching one another, learning one from the other, where all are teachers and scholars, a body of co-workers, helping¹⁶, encouraging, stimulating¹⁷ each other. This community method is

Join or Log In! You need to log in to continue reading

Create a new account   I have a account already

	Create an New Account
Email:  (User Name)
Password:	Letters and numbers only. 6-20 characters.
Retype Password:
Screen Name:	Letters and numbers only. 6-50 Characters.
Confirmation Code:	(Please type in the characters in the green image.)

	Login into Your Account
Email:
Password:
	Remember me on this computer.