LIEUT-COLONEL D. BORDEN TURNER
The Army Education organisation set itself to search out teaching talent in the Army before calling in outside assistance, and it made some interesting finds. Many a University don was discovered in a very humble position. A gentleman described as "one of the most learned men in Europe" was a bombardier in a battery. N.C.O.s and rankers who were Fellows of famous colleges were common enough. Most of them were drawn into the Education organisation.
One of the officers taken by Education from G.H.Q., where he was a staff captain in the Adjutant General's Branch, was Captain Hansell, who had been the Prince of Wales' tutor in his student days. Hansell, in addition to his scholarship, is a sagacious urbane diplomat with a deep and sympathetic knowledge of French life. He would have been best placed on the Military Mission to the French Army. But that would have been a serious loss if it had taken him away from G.H.Q., where his after-dinner talk cheered the seniors and his artful unobtrusive tutelage helped the juniors. Captain Hansell took charge of the Lecturers' Headquarters for Education, and the task must have made a very heavy demand on his tact. Lecturers of all kinds were being sent out to France to address the troops, some of them with very vague notions of what was required of them in the way of kit. One lecturer vastly pleased his soldier audiences, but imposed a heavy strain on transport by always appearing on the platform in full evening dress. Another lecturer went out—in a Flanders winter—with a frock-coat as his warmest garment, "and it was the thinnest frock-coat in Christendom," observed a sympathiser. Of course a very great deal of "roughing it" was the lot of the lecturer going from unit to unit to troops living under active service conditions.
Moreover organisation was not perfect at the time. At one period a steady stream of lecturers was arriving at Lecturers' Headquarters but none was going out to lecture, because all transport for the time was absorbed in a particularly heavy phase of demobilisation. The lecturers, on whose damask periods idleness was as a cankering worm in the bud, got into a sad state of impatience and were threatening to lecture one another, or do something else desperate, when the position was saved by a timely visit to them of the Prince of Wales and his brother, Prince Albert, who had tea with them, chatted over their work, and convinced them that they were not out on a fool's errand. Shortly afterwards the transport situation was relieved, and the lecturers rushed to their audiences and peace reigned again. But it is dreadful to think of what might have happened if there had not been the urbane and diplomatic Captain Hansell smoothing over troubles. A mutiny of lecturers would have afforded some puzzling problems to the Provost-Marshal.
CAPTAIN H. P. HANSELL
Before the Army Education organisation was born a great number of men in the Army did some good solid reading. The Camps Libraries organisation in England sent out to every unit parcels of books. Most of these were of the opiate class, light magazines and light stories intended to bemuse and not to educate the mind. But a proportion of good books slipped in and were warmly appreciated by some.