The 'Orrible Tale of a Corps

It has arrived. With the erection of the new wing the College is complete. It has been re-invested in its old glory. For us "C" Company has ceased to be of interest. For us the Garrison Hall is but a name. The "Dandy Fifth," the old fighting fifth which in 1919 swung into eight hundred strong, has passed from our ken. The demi-gods are raised above the constellations, we have attained the aristocracy of arms—we have an O.T.C.!

It arrived in confusion and a welter of application forms. Its arrival was almost unheralded, and was strictly Spartan in its ceremony. Pompey himself, before his first triumph, could not have been more modest. One officer attempted to explain the inexplicable, another unpacked a valise and—Oddsfish! The College was peopled no longer by inoffensive students but by potential officers though, it was remarked, there was no need to inform other people of this because "what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them."

The evening of the first parade was just like other evenings. We have seen better weather, just as we have seen worse. The raindrops spattered the tennis courts with their usual catholicity, and Venus winked a wicked eye behind the College ventilators. A thin stream of khaki disentangled itself from various satchels, note books and law volumes, and endeavoured to find its way across to the Gymnasium without losing its puttee-strings on the way. There several loud-voiced individuals descended upon the alarmed crowd which strove to huddle itself in various corners of the Gym., and, as the result of some energy and a munificence of bad language, the huddlers were hauled from under sundry forms and tables and forced into three roughly cast groups. An irate person attired in a "Samuel Brown" informed these groups that they represented the Military Law Section, the Topography "Tourists" (who never travel save as Burton in map or card), and the mysterious "No. 3 Section," which at present is investigating at first hand the inner workings of "right turn."

The Military Law Section, we understand, are kept busy explaining why a man should be shot for stealing three eggs from an incubator. Certain members of it anticipate being sufficiently far advanced in 1925 to give an opinion upon the trial of Lieutenant Crampton. The Topography Section are at present engaged in reconstructing the frontiers of Europe in accordance with President Wilson's principles, while some members of it are also employed in what Chesterton calls "that innocent game for children" of painting the map (as well as the town) a brilliant red.

Urgent information has also just been received that the corps is not an officers' training corps, but an experiment. Let us hope that as such it will be a success, though one is dubious of the capability of the Defence Department to repeat, isolate, and vary the phenomena.