Into the question of details, design and cost it is not for us to enter.  We confine ourselves to appealing with all the force at our command to Winchester, fortunate, as The Times reminds us, in the choice of an architect of genius and ingenuity, to persevere, to rise to the occasion, to cast compromise to the winds and above all to remember that the greatest compliment which can be paid to the architects of the past is to remove their buildings to sites where they look better than ever and do not suffer from the immediate neighbourhood of the masterpieces of their successors.  Architecture has been defined as “frozen music.”  But on great occasions such as this it needs to be taken out of its cold-storage and judiciously thawed.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  THE SOFT ANSWER.

Navvy (to person who has accidentally bumped him).  “GO TO BLANKETY—­BLANK—­BLANK—­BLAZES.”

Person.  “GENTLE STRANGER, YOUR LIGHTEST WISH, EXPRESSED IN SUCH COURTEOUS LANGUAGE, IS TO ME A COMMAND.”

(Ambulance call.)]

* * * * *

    “Lost, sulky inflate.”—­Glasgow Citizen.

* * * * *

CIVIL EDUCATION FOR SOLDIERS.

When the armistice was signed and the close season for Germans set in, it occurred to the authorities that it would be a waste of labour to continue to train some few million good men for a shooting season that might never re-open, and the weekly programme became rather a sketchy affair till some brain more brilliant than the rest conceived the idea of giving a good sound education in the arts of peace to this promising and waiting multitude.  The idea was joyfully accepted, and gradually filtered through its authorised channels, suffering some office change or other at each stage till it finally reached one of our ancient seats of learning.  It arrived rather like the peremptory order of a newly-gazetted and bewildered subaltern, who, having got his platoon hopelessly tied up, falls back on the time-honoured and usually infallible “Carry on, Sergeant.”

There were some six-hundred white-hatted cadets stationed at this spot, all thirsting (presumably) for information on gas, and Mills bombs, and studs on the cocking-piece, and forming fours, and vertical intervals and District Courts-martial; and when the order came to “carry on” with education it caused something like a panic.  A council of war nearly caused Head-quarters to cancel a battalion parade, but they pulled themselves together and held the drill, and the appointed Jack as “Battalion Education Officer,” and empowered him to draft a scheme of work.

When produced it consisted of fourteen paragraphs, each of which finished up with the sentence, “This is obviously a problem for the Company Commander.”  Jack had nothing to learn as to the duties of a battalion specialist and realised that his responsibility lay simply in providing Company Commanders, and then finding problems for them to solve.  As the Company Commanders were already in being his work was simplified.