Original Contributions

To the Editors of " The Peterite," Dear Sirs,

Through the medium of your pages I wish publicly to thank all those who have contributed to the successful existence of the Boat Club this term. In particular, Mr. Ping, Mr. Rhodes, and Mr. Greem.vay deserve our thanks for the many hours they have spent in the rather difficult, and often unpleasant, task of coaching crews, while Mr. Rhodes' attentions have caused many a battered boat to become once more Ouse-worthy. Yours sincerely, E. A. G. HARROP, Captain of Boats.

Original Contributions. C.E.C.: l 1Retrospect.

" The keenness and spirit was very marked The esprit de corps and standard of this contingent is a high one . . . There are, in this contingent, the makings of good officers." —Extract from War Office Report.

Like most institutions, the O.T.C. comes in for a good deal of criticism from public schoolboys ; as is generally the case, such criticism goes far beyond what is reasonable, but, sifted, weighed, and analysed, it becomes reduced to two major complaints. The first of these is that it is hard work ; the second, that it is a bore.

The first may be dismissed without much cothment, for two reasons : the O.T.C. does not entail much hard work, and, even if it did, nobody would object to it on that ground alone. People who spend their off hours pushing in a rugger scrum, or rowing in a boat, or being made to stop unpleasantly hard balls, do not mind work so long as it has some interest for them.

This brings us to the second criticism, which has a lot more reason behind it.

The O.T.C. is intended as a means of producing a reserve of good officers ; it is also, officially, a voluntary institution. The first essential is, therefore, that it should hold people's interest ; this object achieved, the work of training these people as officers can proceed.

The position is entirely different from that obtaining at Sandhurst, or in the regular army ; there, there is a direct incentive to good work, if only the threat of penalties for inefficiency. The

O.T.C. has no such direct incentive, and relies on interest and esprit de corps, which is really only interest on a large scale in the same thing.

It seems that many of those responsible for the training of the O.T.C. neglect the first essential entirely, and attempt to treat the corps as though it were part of the army ; then they are surprised and annoyed when people slack, and have a few stiff parades to " brace their ideas up," when what they want is something to keep up their interest and persuade them in their own minds that the O.T.C. is a voluntary occupation, and not a compulsory nuisance. That a normal person should slack on parade reflects more on the person responsible for the scheme of training than on the person who slacks—I say the normal person, because there are some who would slack under any circumstances.

There is a great deal of real interest in a liberal programme of training ; too much attention is, at present, paid to drill—the drill parades should never be more than half the total number after the first year ; to spend one year in the corps learning drill, and the rest revising it, is, obviously, the wrong policy for an O.T.C., however well it may suit the regular army.

Some subjects of interest are never touched—rifle bombing, signalling, M.G.'s, Lewis Gun mechanism--all these contain material for lecture-demonstrations. Last term the writer, as Acting C.S.M., was given a programme of training, made out by the Depot, at Fulford ; with all the resources at its disposal, the most interesting thing they could think of was—Company Drill ! This was not entirely satisfying to most of those concerned.

On the other hand, quite recently, the writer spent some two hours one evening demonstrating, and endeavouring to teach, the subject of rifle bombing to a squad. of five people— none of them enthusiasts over ordinary O.T.C. work ; they failed to register any complaints as to the length of time involved, and appeared really interested, in spite of the fact that the information imparted was culled entirely from " Small Arms Training, Vol. II," and the " grenades " were some Woolworth balls, and'a wooden dummy ! Just one instance, but it points a moral.

If those responsible for our training gave a little more attention to the first essential of O.T.C. training, the rest would come much more easily ; a little keenness in an O.T.C. is worth a lot of practice, and one drill parade with drill well done does more good than a dozen half-hearted ones. When drill becomes slack, it is not so much that people cannot be smart, as that they do not want to, and that state of affairs cannot be remedied by all the practice in the world.