A SCHOOLBOY'S IMPRESSIONS OF CAMP.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 4, 28 January 1925, Page 61

A SCHOOLBOY'S IMPRESSIONS OF CAMP.

Impressions; so ingeniously set clown us the following by 0. Devlin in the last Stonyhurst Magazine, can hardly fail to arouse sympathy in the least militarist reader: There are two kinds of camp. The first is the strenuous kind, where it is baking hot, and the parade-ground is as hard as bricks, and everything moves in perfect order, with a sort of hum like an angry machine. All around you are the blares of bugles and the glares of sergeant-majors; you feel that the slightest ,mistake you make-will be received as ■ a deadly , insult, to, all the traditions * of. the British Army.' And so you stand straight and stiff , like a ramrodexcept that you

sweat copiously and swear in an undertone or, if you are of the lesser sort, like ! a pullthrough. Personally,' I love that r sort' of thins: I am never hannier thai) wlimi'-Tlrnnw that I, in my own modest little way, am functioning perfectly, as a cog or a spark-ing-plug, or something small and insignificant, in the great machine of militarism; moreover, I look such a frightful . ass whenever publicly rebuked that I'm sure every self-respecting sergeant-major must positively leap with fiendish joy when he sees me make a mistake. Yet though all the higher chords in my soul respond to the stern nobility of this call, and though I think 'quite sincerely that the Army stands for the one unsulliedly traditional institution left in this low age of commercialism, and all that sort of thing, yet I must plead guilty to a certain slinking fondness for the other kind of camp. By the other kind of camp I mean the easy-going, happy-go-lucky kind, where it's always raining, and everything is pervaded by a sense of sodden hilarity. Your soaking and lopsided pack seems to gaze obstinately up at you and assure that you're both wet and in a disordered condition, but it'doesn't really matter, because nobody minds. Moreover, everything is delightully topsy-turvy, and you encounter the most wonderful and un-dreamt-of situations. I like that enormously.