CONSCRIPT SERVICE
Sta,—I am the second-in-command of a company that trains national service men in Germany, and I should like to add a few words to the problem from our point of view. In the first place, I am quite certain that not one of our men will ever complain of being bored, or of having too much time on his hands. Their complaint is quite the reverse ; they have too much to do. Indeed for the first six weeks we give them evening instruction as well. In the second place, we do very definitely work to a.planned syllabus, and I should have said it covers a fairly wide and liberal range. In addition to purely military subjects, there is a period set aside each day for education and another for P.T.; each week there is one period on current affairs and another on military history (of a very simple sort). and one whole day each week is set aside for an excursion to a place of interest or beauty.
There is, however, one difficulty that the readers of the letters so far printed might well not appreciate. That is the .average intelligence of these lads. It is all very well for educated young men to write letters so The Spectator on their boredom, but they are very much the exception. In the hundred men in my company there is only one man who can be called educated at all, and even he is only just up to the School Certificate standard. The remainder are very nice, very keen, and very very simple. Half of them can barely do more than write a coherent sentence in very uncertain spelling. For example, I tried letting my men listen to the Forces educational broadcasts on the Light Programme, but soon found they were incapable of concentrating for a quarter of an hour on subjects however excellently and simply expressed. You just cannot lift these lads on to a high level of imaginative training ; besides you have not got the people with whom to do it.
That is my second point. I should have said that the Army's greatest weakness is the rather low standard of the junior officer and the senior N.C.O., upon whom so much depends. It does not matter how wonderful the syllabus is if there are not those of sufficient ability to implement it, and I rather doubt if there are. The good N.C.O.s were promoted to (officers during the war, and the junior officers are for the most part inadequate to the job. The pay of the Army is hardly qualified to attract the best quality, and many of its pre-war attractions have disappeared. To a master at Aldenham the fate of a public schoolboy is understandably et great interest, but to us he is a very very small minority, and he suffers the fate of the fastest ship in the convoy—he dawdles. It is the curse of the age, this sinking to the lowest common denominator, and the public schoolboy just has to put up with it, just as we all have to suffer an inferior medical attention so that it can be made available to
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