Those were his very words. He talked with a sort of ghastly funniness and used military terms.
He said--
"Now that our valued and honoured friends, Mr. Hutchings, Mr. Manwaring, and Mr. Meadows have answered their nation's call, with a loyalty to King and Country inevitable in men who know the demands as well as the privileges of Empire, it behoves us, as we can and how we can, to fill their places. This, then, in my contribution to the Great War. I shall fight in no foreign trenches, but labour here, sleeplessly if need be, and undertake willingly, proudly, the arduous task that they have left behind. I shall confront no cannon, but I shall face the Lower School. Henceforth, after that amalgamation of class and class which will be necessary, you may count upon your head master to answer the trumpet call and fill the breach. But I do not disguise from myself that such labours must prove no sinecure, and I trust the least, as well as the greatest, to do their part and aid me with good sense and intelligence."
Well, there it was; and we saw in a moment that you can't escape the horrors of war, even though you are on an island with the Grand Fleet between you and the foe.
When it came to the point, the Doctor was fairly friendly, but there was always something about him that was awful and solemn and very depressing to the mind. You could crib easily enough with him, for he had a much more trustful disposition than Hutchings, or Brown, or Fortescue, and was also short-sighted at near range; but the general feeling with the Doctor was a sense of weariness and undoubted relief when it was over. It was as near like being in church as anything could be.
Beginning at the beginning of subjects bored him. In fact, he often found, when he went back to the very start of a lesson, he'd forgotten it himself, moving for so many years on only the higher walks of learning; and then, finding that he had forgotten some footling trifle on the first page of a primer, he became abstracted and lost heart about it, and seemed more inclined to think than to talk.
Another very curious habit he had was to start on one thing--say Latin--and then drift off into something else--say geography. Or he might begin with algebra and then something would remind him of the procession of the equinoxes, or the nebula in Orion, and he would soar from earth and wander among the heavenly bodies until the class was over. And if he happened to be very much interested himself, he wouldn't let it be over; and then we had to sit on hearing the Doctor maundering about double stars, or comets perhaps, while everybody else was in the playground.
I think he got rather sick of the Lower School after about a month of it, and Fortescue took over a good many of the classes in his normal style, which was more business-like than the Doctor and more punctual in its working. Fortescue was cold and hadn't much use for us in school or out, but he was just, and we liked him pretty well until the mystery began. Then we gradually got to dislike him, and then despise him, and then hate him.
He was rather out of the common in a way, being an Honourable and related to the famous family of Fortescue, which has shone a good deal in history off and on. And, of course, when the war broke out, we naturally expected that the Honourable Howard Fortescue would seize the opportunity to shine also, which he could not do as an undermaster at Merivale. He was a big, fine man, six feet high, with a red complexion and a Roman nose. Certainly, he did not play games, but he was all right in other ways, and had been a lawn-tennis player of the first-class in past times at Oxford, and, in fact, got his half-blue for playing at that sport against Cambridge.
So it seemed to us pretty low down that he didn't join Kitchener's Army. As a matter of fact, he didn't even try to. He was a very sublime sort of man and not what you might call friendly to us, yet if anybody appealed to him in any sort of way, he generally thawed a bit and responded in quite a kind manner.