The Gentleman Cadet

Although I was nearly always on leave from Saturday to Sunday for the “whole shay,” as it was termed, yet I on one occasion did not go. The result was that I had command of the first company at church-parade, and marched past on the barrack-field before going to church. Several times I had been in the ranks when we had marched past on Sundays, but this was the first time I had ever commanded the company. There was a great crowd to see us march past and to hear the band, and the company was praised for its steadiness. I remembered well my feelings as a schoolboy when I saw a cadet in a similar position to that I now occupied, and I regretted that I had not now the same delight in being where I was that I fancied formerly I should have. It was not a want of enthusiasm, for I had still plenty of that left; but I felt as if I were performing a mere act of business, and was more occupied in seeing that the ranks kept line and proper distance than I was in the thought of commanding the company.

Somehow I had grown to understand that hard work and thought were the means to all success, and that now, when I happened to be senior corporal, it was merely in consequence of others being absent, and that I had attained this position by hard work. I must confess I felt disappointed with myself, for I did not experience one-hundredth part of the pleasure I should have felt had it been possible to transfer me instantly from a schoolboy at Hostler’s to the position I now occupied.

One little incident, however, as we were marching off, did gave me temporary gratification. As I gave to the company the words “Right turn!” “Left wheel!” and we marched across the gravel to the chapel, I passed close to three of Mr Hostler’s masters, who were there with his boys. There was not a face among the boys I recognised. All had changed; but the masters I knew, and I saw they had pointed me out to the youngsters. For a moment the misery of my life at Hostler’s came across me, and a vivid remembrance of the sneering self-sufficiency of one of these tutors, as he tried to impress upon me that I was too stupid to ever learn mathematics. I muttered to myself “Pig-headed idiot!” as I recalled this man’s proceeding, and now noticed a sort of self-complacency in his manner as he was probably explaining to Hostler’s boys that he had trained me for Woolwich.

This my fifth half-year seemed to pass more quickly than a week did when I was a neux, and we again began to talk about examinations and our vacation. To me the final trial was now coming, for although we worked at various subjects in the practical class, yet the work did not count. There was no examination, and our relative positions in the batch were unaltered when once we joined the practical class.

I had succeeded in all the drawings I had done during the half-year, and had adopted a general polishing up in the various branches of study, for our position in the class for commissions was decided by the amount of marks we obtained as a total for all subjects.

Day passed after day, and it was within a fortnight of the examination when I received a letter from Mr Rouse, asking if I would come and pass Saturday and Sunday with him.

On receipt of this letter I felt ashamed of never having once been to see the man to whom alone I was indebted for passing into the Academy. I accepted the invitation, and on Saturday afternoon found myself sitting in Mr Rouse’s drawing-room, chatting with him a sort of shoppy conversation about examinations, marks, cramming, etc.

Mr Rouse was a man who never disappointed me. Whenever I met him, as I did often in afterlife, he invariably showed himself a genius. He was one of those sound thinkers and careful reasoners who are the real discoverers of truths, and who in almost every case remain unknown and unhonoured by the world; whilst superficial men, merely veneered with science by their contact with him, would chatter in learned societies, and be reported in newspapers, and bowed down to as authorities by the ignorant, who could not tell the electro-plated from the real metal.

Even when I was a student at Rouse’s he used to amuse us by reading out from the papers descriptions of various matters supposed to be scientifically written; he would then criticise these and show us that the writer was evidently unacquainted with his subject, and had written it at so much per line.

I was glad to find what an interest he had taken in my career at the Academy; he had noted exactly how I had done at all my examinations, and he said he was very nearly writing to me daring my third half-year to come and work with him occasionally, as he feared I might not pass the probationary examination.

During the evening he put me up to what he called useful dodges in connexion with working various branches of higher mathematics, and I found my evening not only interesting, but profitable, as I made several notes which I could think over and which would be useful to me at my final examination. He gave me also great encouragement about the future, and said that he believed the time would come when the officers of both the Engineers and Artillery would take a higher position in the scientific and literary world than they then did. “You have a capital preparatory course at Woolwich,” he remarked, “and when you get your commission you could build on this. It has often struck me that it is odd how few officers of either Artillery or Engineers have ever made a mark in the world out of their profession, or have come out as leaders in science, and this in the future is sure to be remedied.”

Mr Rouse was right at the time, but since those days a change has occurred, the two corps having produced several men distinguished in subjects not strictly professional.

I returned to the Academy with a feeling of “wound-upness,” and occupied myself in thinking about my coming examination. From being very sickly as a boy (due I believe entirely to the physicking of my aunt), I had become strong and particularly healthy, and found I could stand both mental and bodily work without feeling either much. I took care, however, to follow Mr Rouse’s advice, viz, to work my body by exercise after I had worked my brain, and to get as much fresh air as possible after a long bout of “swatting.” I never attempted to learn anything when I felt tired, and never forced myself to work; by these means I felt certain I got more knowledge into my head than I should have done had I followed the same plan that several cadets followed of working nearly all night with wet cloths round their heads and a dozen books before them.

It was impossible to avoid being anxious about the examination, but I endeavoured to follow my old plan of not driving off everything to the last, and then trying to catch up time by working night and day. I had a sort of idea that the mind was like one’s digestion in some respects, and the way to treat it was to treat it reasonably, and not to expect it to digest in a week as much mental food as it ought to have in three months. Some cadets did adopt this plan, and they generally failed, and not unusually knocked themselves up.

The first day of the examination commenced, and I found the first paper contained what we should term some very dodgy questions both in mechanics and trigonometry. I saw through the catches, and brought out neat answers, which made me tolerably confident they were correct.

Our examinations took nine days altogether, and then day after day the results came out, and we added our marks together, speculating how the next list of marks would alter our relative positions. Until the drawing and mathematical marks came out, I stood twelfth of the batch, but having obtained within one mark of the full amount in drawing, and being second in mathematics, I made up a total that made me third of the batch, which consisted of twenty-five qualified for commissions, or at least for the practical class, which was to all intents the same thing as qualifying for commission.

Such a result was to me very satisfactory, and was far beyond what I dreamed of even in my most sanguine moments during my trials at Mr Hostler’s. If any prophetic genius had hinted to the young gentlemen at Mr Hostler’s that Bob Shepard, who was leaving because he was so stupid that he could not be taught mathematics, would beat all the boys in the school, and would succeed in being second in mathematics at the Academy, this prophet would have found few who put faith in him, for it would have been considered impossible except by magic. A certain kind of magic was, however, practised, and this was by means of the system which Mr Rouse adopted, viz, of calmly reasoning out problems and deliberating on them, and taking a wide and general view of a subject instead of trying to follow blindly rules and systems, uninfluenced by reason or common sense.

There was one small piece of “swagger,” as it might be fairly termed, which I could not resist, and this was to pay a visit to Mr Hostler’s now I had passed all my examinations successfully, and hear what he had to say for himself. I would not call on Hostler himself, but called to see a boy whose brother had been a cadet, and who had asked me to have a look at the youngster at Hostler’s.

I was shown into the small drawing-room that I remembered so well. There was the same table-cover, the same things on the mantelpiece, the same books, the same pictures as when I went into that room to meet Hostler, and to be told I must give up all chance of Woolwich, as I had no head for mathematics or Euclid. It flashed across me that probably scores of other boys had had their prospects rained in consequence of being put under the change of selfish and bigoted men, who had only one system of teaching, and whose method was unsuited to the mind of the boy on whom they acted. In that room a straw would have turned the scale, and I might have left that place with a stamp of stupidity on me which I should never have had the chance of removing all my life, unless, as really happened, I had gone to Mr Rouse’s, and had passed my examinations well.

As I was thus meditating, the door opened and Mr Hostler came in.

“Ah, Shepard!” he exclaimed, “I am very glad to see you. How are you?”

“Quite well, Mr Hostler. I’ve called to see young Barnes. Is he in?”

“Oh yes, he’s in. I hope you’ll come into the schoolroom and see him; it does the boys good to see a cadet there who has been prepared for the Academy by me, and who has distinguished himself as you have done. I feel very proud of it I can tell you!”

“You forget, Mr Hostler; you didn’t prepare me for the Academy, but gave me up as too stupid to learn mathematics.”

“Oh, nothing of the kind, Shepard, you’re quite mistaken. I gave you all the groundwork, and you only wanted just a little polishing up, which could be better done by a private tutor like Rouse than in a large school like mine, where we work in classes. No, don’t think I’m going to be robbed of the merit of preparing you; besides, you were not three months with Rouse, and here you were over a year. Facts speak for themselves. Depend on it, you passed and got on so well just because you were well grounded here, and saw my system of preparing, which is good.”

I was not then old enough to answer these misrepresentations of Hostler’s, but I knew how false they were, and yet how firmly they would convince the majority of outsiders that to Hostler was due the merit of having trained me for Woolwich. I found afterwards that he had told his boys that I was his special pupil, and that he had also claimed me, in his sort of advertisement list, as one who had been trained by him. Such men succeed in the world as a rule, for the general public judge from superficial evidence, and rarely have the time, if they had the inclination, to look closely into matters that do not specially affect their interests.

The case would appear thus: —

“Shepard, a cadet who stood second in mathematics at the Academy, was prepared by Mr Hostler for twelve months, and then sent to finish details at Mr Rouse’s for three months, during part of which time he was ill with hooping-cough. He passed in well, and came out well. Honour, then, is due to Mr Hostler for his excellent training, and great credit is reflected on his school.”

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 passed 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 pass 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 Arsenal, 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 coarse 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 class, 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 fagging 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 fagging, 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 class, we draw the curtain over the future life of Gentleman Cadet Bob Shepard.

The End.

notes

1

“Smashed,” in those days, was the familiar term for having broken one’s word of honour.