AN ECLIPSE OF MARS

The decision of the University to suspend until next September the resumption of military and naval training for the undergraduate is one that will, without doubt, be applauded equally by student body and faculty. It is true that throughout the country many colleges and universities are planning to resume their old R. O. T. C. units at once, and at a time when Bolsheviks and Reds and Spartacides are destroying enormous nations this course may to some appear the wisest. But is it not a bit of misplaced enthusiasm to thrust a Krag into the hands of a lieutenant, who has just checked in a dozen machine guns at Camp Hancock, or to ask a man returning to college from France to profit by simulated battles with simulated. Huns at Fresh Pond, or to continue the training of a score or so of j. g.'s by making them paddle a converted flat boat up the Charles? Of the 2,000 odd men who will today pay their thirty-three dollars and thirty-four cents to the Bursar there will be a large number who have learned twice over in the service what they could be taught in an R. O. T. C. during the next five months. For most of the others the training would be at best a repetition. And if there was difficulty in maintaining discipline in the S. A. T. C. under war time conditions the problem would this year be doubled.

But it is not to be supposed that this suspension of military activity is to be permanent. Its chief purpose is to give the University authorities time to read-just the training program to meet the needs of a country at peace, and to replace the methods of the old R. O. T. C. and the S. A. T. C., where sudden necessity was the mother of many makeshifts, with a sound system that will become as much a part of the University as English A and the Freshman Dormitories. It is probable that this program will provide for a concentration of all field work and drill in the summer, with only classes during the rest of the year. It is also more than probable that guns and caissons will find a place in the Harvard Regiment, and that "Left two zero, down five, three thousand" may be understood by the future undergraduate. These plans must be formulated slowly, carefully, with a view to changing conditions, and it would be unwise to attempt to put them into effect before fall.