The Gentleman Cadet Part 26

I saw my young acquaintance, who was sent for at my request, as I declined to be made a parade of in the schoolroom, and bidding Mr Hostler farewell, I left his establishment, which I never entered again, and never saw Mr Hostler again, though the scenes through which I pa.s.sed at his school even now sometimes haunt me in the form of nightmares, when I dream I am again a boy at that place, who has failed in his Euclid, and cannot make the three sides of a triangle join, and who is waiting for his three cuts on the hand.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

FINALE.

My career at what may be termed the Academy (proper) terminated with the examinations named in the last chapter. I returned home to rest as it were on my laurels, for I had to pa.s.s no farther examinations in order to obtain my commission, and had merely to go through a practical course connected with the various branches in the a.r.s.enal, and also a course of surveying, after which there was the public examination, which was a mere farce, and we were then commissioned in the order in which we stood.

Before finally leaving the Academy I once more paid a visit to Mr Rouse and dined with him, where I met a Cambridge man who had just left Cambridge and had taken a Master of Arts degree. When I left Woolwich my coa.r.s.e in mathematics consisted of plane and spherical trigonometry, conic sections, statics and dynamics, properties of roofs and arches, hydrostatics, projectiles, and the deferential and integral calculus.

In this course I had obtained a very good decimal, and therefore might be said to have a fair knowledge of the subjects. I was, therefore, anxious to compare my mathematical knowledge with that of a Master of Arts of Cambridge, and discover, if possible, how much longer it would take me to work up to the extent requisite to become M.A. To my surprise I found that the gentleman from Cambridge knew only as much mathematics as I did when I was in the second cla.s.s, and, in fact, if I had been at Cambridge instead of at Woolwich, I should have been distinguished all my life as M.A., and should, of course, have been looked on as an authority on such matters as mathematics by people who had no other means of testing one's qualifications than by the literary annex after one's name.

I suggested to Mr Rouse that this system of conferring distinguishing honours on men from one or two Universities, which honours carried weight with the public, seemed unfair to those men who were trained at other well-known places, such as Woolwich, where no honours were given, but where they had gone beyond the course required to gain the honours at the Universities.

I had a long discussion with Mr Rouse relative to the course of training at Woolwich in my time, and from what I told him we both agreed that the course was not practical enough for a soldier, and that too much time was occupied in theoretical matters which were never likely to be of use to us in afterlife.

"It is," said Mr Rouse, "one of the most certain of all things, that men who teach any subject for any length of time gradually grow to refine, as I may term it, on that subject, and go on from theory to theory, and lose sight of the fact that to all practical men, such as soldiers must be to be useful, theory may be even a dangerous study.

Mathematicians," he continued, "are especially liable to drift into these habits, and often forget that the object of mathematics is to supply a means of obtaining results, so that they are means to an end, not the end itself. Too, as a practical man, require to know some theory, such as the general rules of mechanics, the way in which trigonometrical formulas are obtained, and so on; but I don't think it is necessary, especially in the short time you have for each subject at Woolwich, that you should devote too long a time to mere theoretical problems."

The defects that I experienced after leaving Woolwich were that I found considerable difficulty in writing a clear account of any event in a concise and grammatical manner, so that had I been called on to write a despatch, and describe officially some action or battle, my production would have been discreditable. I could solve an abstruse question in dynamics, but I could not write three sentences in English correctly.

Again, as regards the method of conducting discipline with soldiers, what their pay was, how they were paid, how men were treated for various offences, etc, I was as ignorant as a civilian, and there was then no preparatory training for an officer after joining the Artillery by means of which he could learn these matters. The Engineers had then, as now, a course of study at Chatham, after obtaining their commissions, by which such subjects were learnt.

Defects such as the above-named have since been almost entirely removed, whilst various other matters have been improved at the Academy, especially as regards the feeding of the cadets, which thirty years ago was simply disgraceful.

Bullying and even f.a.gging have ceased to exist; and although there may be, as there always will be, in large establishments, some young men who are disposed to be bullies, and some others whose manners or appearance cause them to be unpopular, yet no recognised system of senior and junior, or of f.a.gging, exists at Woolwich.

Thirty years ago the defect at the Academy was the hard life that cadets lived; their food was bad, and their punishment for small offences severe. If there is a defect at the present time at Woolwich, it is that the cadet's comfort is too much cared for, and when he has, as he surely must have, in even peace time, to rough it, he will not, as we did, say, "Well, it's better than being a cadet," but he will probably compare the damp walls of a room in some Fort with his snug room at the Academy, and the absence of many luxuries will be felt the more, because as a mere cadet they were considered essential for him. Taking it all in all, however, we may fairly claim that at the present time the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich is perfect of its kind, and the training given there will compare favourably with that of any military college on the Continent; that it was not always as well regulated this tale will probably induce many to think.

Any curious or interested person may learn all about the Academy as it is, but the strange life led by a cadet thirty years ago--the singular inconsistency of highly honourable conduct in some matters, and proceedings which can only be termed "brutal" in others--exhibits peculiarities in the character of English youths which we do not believe is entirely worn out in large educational establishments at the present day.

In this tale it has not been our object to moralise, or even to suggest, but merely to give a history of the life of a Woolwich Cadet thirty years ago, and as the cadet's career may fairly be said to terminate when he joined the practical cla.s.s, we draw the curtain over the future life of Gentleman Cadet Bob Shepard.

The End.