 Chapter 1 of the New Army and Training. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The New Army and Training by Rudyard Kiplen. Chapter 1, The Men at Work. The oar, the furnace and the hammer are all that is needed for a sword. Native Proverb. This was a cantonment one had never seen before and the gray-haired military policeman could give no help. My experience he spoke detachmentally is that you'll find everything everywhere. Is it any particular core you're looking for? Not in the least, I said. Then you're all right. You can't miss getting something. He pointed generally to the North Camp. It's like floods in a town, isn't it? He had hit the just word. All known marks in the place were submerged by troops. Parade grounds to their utmost limits were crowded with them. Rises and skylines were furred with them and the length of the roads heaved and rippled like bicycle chains with blocks of men on the move. The voice of a sergeant in the torment reserved for sergeants at roll call moved across a bunker. He was calling over recruits to a specialist corps. But I've called you once, he snapped at a man in leggings. But I'm Clark too, was the virtuous reply. Oh, you are, are you? He penciled the correction with a scornful mouth out of one corner of which he added, sloppy. You're all Clarks or Watsons today. You don't know your own names. You don't know what core you're in. This was bitterly unjust for they were squinting up at it by plane. You don't know anything. Hmm, said the military policeman. The more a man has in his head, the harder it is for him to manage his carcass. At first, I'm glad I never was a sergeant. Listen to the instructors, like Rook saying it. There was a mile of sergeants and instructors varied by company officers, all at work on the ready material under their hands. They grunt it, barked, yapped, expostulated and in rare cases, purred as the lines broke and formed and wheeled over the vast maiden. When companies numbered off, one could hear the tone and accent of every walk in life. It may be half the counties of England from the deep throated wound of the north to the sharp half-wistled Devonshire II. And as the instructors labored, so did the men with a passion to learn as passionately as they were taught. Presently in the drift of the foot traffic down the road, there came another gray-haired man, one foot in a bright slipper which showed he was an old soldier cherishing a sore toe. He drew alongside and considered these zealous myriads. Good said I, differentially. Yes, he said very good, then half to himself. Quite different, though. A pivot man near us had shifted a little instead of marking time on the wheel. His face clouded, his lips moved. Obviously he was cursing his own clumsiness. That's what I meant, said the veteran. Innocent, innocent. Mark you, they ain't doing it to be done with it and get off. They're doing it because they want to do it. Wake up, wake up, their issue would. This was a young subalterns reminder, flung at a back which straightened itself up. That one human name coming up out of all that maze of impersonal maneuvering stuck in the memory like wreckage on the ocean. And it wasn't hardly even necessary to caution Mr. Isherwood, my companion commented. Probably he's bitterly ashamed of himself. I asked a leading question because the old soldier told me that when his toe was sound, he too was a military policeman. Crime, crime city, they don't know what crime is. The lot don't, none of them. I mourned over them like a benevolent old Satan looking into a busy Eden. And his last word was innocent. The car worked her way through miles of men. Men route marching, going to dig or build bridges or wrestle with stores and transport. Four or five miles of men and every man with eager eyes. There was no music, not even drums and fives. I heard nothing but a distant scurril of the pipes. Trusted Scott to get his national weapon as long as there is a chief in the North. Admitting that war is a serious business, especially to the man who is being fought for and that it may be right to carry a long face and contribute to relief funds which should be laid on the national debt. It surely could do no harm to cheer the men with a few bans. Half the money that has been spent in treating, for example, the North in blue. There was a moor among woods with a pond and a hollow, the center of a wood of tents whose population was North country. One heard it from far off. Yeoman, trail to pick and to rifle at the same time. Try again, said the instructor. An isolated company tried again with set seriousness and yet again. They were used to the pick when they're living by it in fact and so favored it more than the rifle but miners don't carry picks at the trail by instinct. Though they can twiddle their rifles as one twiddles walking sticks. They were clad in a blue garb that disguised all contours. Yet their shoulders, backs and loins could not altogether be disguised and these were excellent. Another company at physical drill and shirt and trousers showed what superb material had offered itself to be worked upon and how much poison directed strength had been added to that material in the past few months. When the new army gets all its new uniforms it will gaze at itself like a new Narcissus but the present kit is indescribable. That is why English fashion it has been made honorable by its wearers. In our world in the years to come we'll look back with reverence as well as affection on those blue slops and that epileptic cap. One foreseeing commoner who had special facilities has possessed himself of brass buttons, thousands of them which he has added to his men's outfit for the moral effect of A having something to clean and B of keeping it so. It has paid. The smartest regiment in the service could not do itself justice in such garments but I managed to get a view of a battalion coming in from a walk at a distance which more or less subdued the uniform and they move with the elastic swing and little quick ripple that means so much. A miner is not supposed to be as good a marcher as a townsman but when he gets set to time and pace and learns due economy of effort his developed back and shoulder muscles take him along very handsomely. Another battalion fell in for parade while I watched again at a distance. They came to hand quietly and collectively enough and with only that amount of pressing which is caused by fear of being late. A platoon or whatever they call it was giving the whole of its attention to its signaling instructors with the air of men resolved in getting the last flicker of the last cinema film for their money. Crime in the military sense that they do not know anymore than their fellow innocents up the road. It is hopeless to pretend to be other than what one is because one soul in this life is exposed as one's body. It is futile to tell civilian lies. There are no civilians to listen and they have not yet learned to tell service ones without being detected. It is useless to sulk at any external condition of affairs because the rest of the world with which a man is concerned is facing those identical conditions. There is neither poverty nor riches nor any possibility of pride except insofar as one may do one's task a little better than one's mate. Duties and developments. In the point of food they are extremely well looked after. Quality and quantity, what canteen and dry. Drafts come in all around the clock and they have to be fed. Lake guards and sentries want something hot at odd times and the big marquee canteen is the world's gathering place where food, life's first interest to man in hard work is thoroughly discussed. They can get outside of a vast of ittles. Thus a contractor who delivers 10,000 rations a day stands by a deputy at least in the presence of just that number of rather fit, long, deep men. They are what is called independent. A civilian weakness which they will learn to blush over in a few months and to discourage among later recruits. But they are also very quick to pick up dodges and tricks that make a man more comfortable in camp life and their domestic routine runs on wheels. It must have been hard at first for civilians to see the necessity for that continuous apparently pernickety, house mating and follow-uping which is vital to the comfort of large bodies of men in confined quarters. In civil life, men leave these things to their women folk but where women are not, officers inspecting tents, feet and such like develop a she-side to their head and evidently make their non-commissioned officers and men develop it too. A good soldier is always a bit of an old maid. But as I heard a private say to a sergeant in the manner of some kit chucked into a corner, you cannot keep out, read up on a proper gate on a sand hill. To whom is superior officer? I know you cannot, but Yoman, try Billy. And heaven knows that they are trying hard enough. Men, NCOs and officers with all the massed and under voiced efforts of our peoples when we are really at work. They stand at the very beginning of things, creating out of chaos, meeting emergencies as they arise, handicapped in every direction and overcoming every handicap by simple goodwill, humor, self-sacrifice, common sense and such trumpery virtues. I watched their faces in the camp and at lunch looked down a line of some 20 men in the mess tent, wondering how many would survive to see the full splendor and significance of the work here so nobly begun. But they were not interested in the future beyond their next immediate job. They ate quickly and went out to it. And by the time I drove away again, I was overtaking their battalions on the road. Not unrelated units lugged together for foot slogging, but real battalions of a spirit in themselves which defied even the blue slops, wave after wave of proper men with undistracted eyes who never talked a word about any war. But not a note of music and they, North country men end of chapter one. Chapter two of the new army in training. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The new army in training by Rudyard Kipling. Chapter two, iron into steel. Cold iron will cut hot iron. At the next halt I fell into Scotland, blocks and blocks of it. A world of precise spoken, thin-lipped men with keen eyes. They gave me directions which led by friendly stages to the heart of another work of creation and a huge drill shed where the miniature rifles were busy. Few things are duller than Morris II practice in the shed unless it be judging triangles of error against blank walls. I thought of the military policemen with a sore toe. For these innocents were visibly enjoying both games. They sighted over the sandbags with a gravity of surveyors while the instructors hurled knowledge at them like sling stones. Man, do you see your error? Step here, man, and I'll show you. Teacher and talk glared at each other like theologians in full debate. For this is the Scots way of giving and getting knowledge. At the miniature targets, squad after squad rose from beside their deadly earnest instructors, gathered up their target cards and whisperingly compared them, five heads together under a window. Aye, that was where I loosed too soon. I misdoubt I took too much of the foresight, not a word of hope and comfort in their achievements. Nothing but Calvinistic self-criticism. These men ran a little smaller than the North country folk down the road. But in depth of chest, girth of forearm, biceps, and neck measurement, they were beautifully level and well up. And the squads at bayonet practice had their balance drive and recovery already. As the light failed, one noticed the whites of their eyes turning toward their instructors. They're reminded one that there is always a touch of the catarren in the most docile scot, even as the wolf persists in every dog. And what about crime I demanded? There was none. They had not joined to play the fool. Occasionally a few unstable souls who had mistaken their vocation tried to return to civil life by way of dishonorable discharge and think it funny to pile up the fences. The new army has no use for those people either and attends to them on what may be called democratic lines, which is all the same as the old barrack room court marshal. Nor does it suffer fools gladly. There is no time to instruct them. They go to other spheres. There was or rather is a man who intends to join a certain battalion. He joined it once, scraped past the local doctor and was drafted into the corps, only to be hove out for varicose veins. He went back to his accommodating doctor, repeated the process and was again rejected. They are waiting for him now in his third incarnation. Both sides are equally determined. And there was another Scott who joined, served a while and left as he might have left a pit or a factory. Somehow it occurred to him that explanations were required. So he wrote to his commanding officer from his home address and asked him what he recommended him to do. The CO to his infinite credit wrote back, suppose you rejoin, which the man did and no more said. His punishment, of course, will come to him when he realizes what he has done. If he does not then perish in his self-contempt, he has a good conceit of himself. He will make one first rate non-commissioned officer. With illustrations. I had the luck to meet a sergeant major who was the sergeant major of one's dreams. He had just had short information that the kilts for his battalion were coming in a few days. So after three months' hard work, life smiled upon him. From kilts one naturally went on to the pipes. The battalion had its pipes, a very good set. How did it get them? Well, there was, of course, the Duke. They began with him. And there was a Scotch lord concerned with the regimen. And there was a letty of a certain clan connected with the battalion. Hence the pipes. Could anything be simpler or more logical? And when the kilts came, the men would be different creatures. Were they good men, I asked? Yes, very good. Was to mislead them, said he. Old soldiers, I suggested, mainly enough, rejoined privates of long ago. I there might have been a few such in the beginning, but they'd be more useful in the special reserve battalions. Our boys are good boys, but you'll understand they've to be handled, just handled a little. Then a subaltern came in, loaded with regimental forms and visibly leaning on the sergeant major, who explained, clarified, and referred them on the proper quarters. Does the work come back to you, I asked, for he has been long and pleasant civil employee? I does, it just does that. And he addressed the fluttering papers, lists and notes with a certainty of an old golfer on a well-known green. Squads were at bayonet practice in the square. They liked bayonet practice, especially after looking at pictures in the illustrated dailies. A new draft was being introduced to its rifles. The rest were getting ready for evening parade. They were all in khaki, so one could see how they had come on in the last 10 weeks. It was a result the meekest might have been proud of, but the new army does not cultivate useless emotions. Their officers and their instructors worked over them patiently and coldly and repeatedly with their souls in the job and with their soul, mind and body, in the same job the men took up, soaked up the instruction. And that seems to be the note of the new army, what the army does and thinks. They have joined for good reason. For that reason, they sleep uncomplainingly double thick on barrack floors or lie like herrings in the tents and sing hymns or other things when they are flooded out. They walk and dig half the day or all the night as required. They wear, though they will not eat anything that is issued to them. They make themselves an organized and kindly life out of a few acres of dirt and a little canvas. They keep their edgy and anneal their discipline under conditions that would depress a fox terrier and disorganize a champion football team. They ask nothing in return save work and equipment. And being what they are, they thoroughly and unfainately enjoy what they are doing and they purpose to do much more. But they also think, they think it vile that so many unmarried young men who are not likely to be affected by government allowances should be so shy about sharing their life. They discuss these young men and their woman folk by name and imagine rude punishments for them suited to their known characters. They discuss to their elders who in time pass warn them of the sin of soldiering. These men who live honorably and simply under the triple vow of obedience, temperance and poverty. Recall not with envy the sort of life which well kept more or less lead in the unpicketed uncentred towns. And it calls them that such folk should continue in comfort and volubility at the expense of good man's lives or should profit greasily at the end of it all. They stare hard even in their blue slops at white colored bowler hat at young men who by the way are just learning to drop their eyes under that gaze. In the third class railway carriages, they hint that they would like explanations from the casual nut and they explain to him wherein his explanations are unconvincing. And when they are home, I leave the slack jawed son of the local shopkeeper and the rising nephew of the big banker and the dumb but cunning cortisol ad receive instruction or encouragement suited to their needs and to the nations. The older men and the officers will tell you that if the allowances are made more liberal, we shall get all the men we want. But the younger men of the new army do not worry about allowances or for that matter make them. There is a golf already opening between those who have joined and those who have not. But we shall not know the width and the depth of that golf till the war is over. The wise youth is he who jumps it now and lands in safety among the trained and armed men. End of chapter two, iron into steel. Chapter three of the new army in training. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The new army in training by Rudyard Kipling. Chapter three, guns and supply. Under all and after all, the wheel carries everything. Proverb. One had known the place for years as a picturesque old house, standing in a peaceful park. Had watched the growth of certain young oaks along a new late avenue and applauded the owner's enterprise in turning a stretch of pasture to plow. There are scores of such estates in England, which the motorist, though passing so often comes to look upon almost as his own. In a single day, the bracken turf between the oaks and the iron road fence blossomed into tents and the drives were all cut up with hoofs and wheels. A little later, one's car sweeping home of warm September nights was stopped by sentries who asked her name and business. For the owner of that retired house and discreetly wooded park had gone elsewhere in haste and his estate was taken over by the military. Later still, one met men and horses arguing with each other for miles about that countryside where the car would be flung on her brakes by artillery issuing from cross lanes. Clean batteries jingling off to their work on the downs and hungry ones coming back to meals. Every day brought the men and the horses and the weights behind them to a better understanding till in a little while, the car could pass a quarter of a mile of them without having to hoop more than once. Why are you so virtuous? She asked of a section encountered at a blind and brambly corner. Why do you intrude your personality less than an average tax card? Because said a driver, his arm flung up to keep the untrimmed hedge from sweeping his cap off because those are our blessed orders. We don't do it for love. No one accuses the gunner of model and affection for anything except his beasts and his weapons. He hasn't the time. He serves at least three jealous gods, his horse and all his salary and harness, his gun whose least detail of efficiency is more important than men's lives. And when these have been attended to, the never ending mystery of his art commands him. It was a wettish, windy day when I visited the so long known house and park. Cock pheasants docked in and out of trim, rode a dendrum, clumps, neat gates opened into sacredly preserved vegetable gardens. The many colored leaves of specimen trees pasted it themselves stickily against sodden tent walls. There was a mixture of circus smells from the horseflies and the faint civilized breath of chrysanthemums in the potting sheds. The main drive was being relayed with a foot of flint. The other approaches were churned and pitted under the gun wheels and heavy supply wagons. Great breaths of what had been well kept turf between unbrowsed trees were blanks of slippery brown wetness dotted with picketed horses and field kitchens. It was a crazy mixture of stark necessity and manicured luxury all cheek by jow in the undiscriminating rain. Service conditions. The cookhouse's storerooms, forges and workshops were collections of tilts, poles, rickcloths and odd lumber, beaver together as on service. The officer's mess was a thin soaked marquee. Less than 100 yards away were dozens of vacant well furnished rooms in the big brick house of which the staff furtively occupied one corner. There was accommodation for very many men at stables and outhouses alone. Well the whole building might have been gutted and rearranged for barracks twice over in the last three months. Scattered among the tents were rows of half-built tin sheds. The ready prepared lumber and the corrugated iron lining beside them, waiting to be pieced together like children's toys. But there were no workmen. I was told that they had come that morning but had knocked off because it was wet. I see, and where are the batteries I demanded? Out at work of course, they've been out since seven. How shocking, in this dreadful weather too. They took some bread and cheese with them. They'll be back about dinner time if you care to wait. Here's one of our field kitchens. Batteries look after their own stomachs and are not catered for by contractors. The cookhouse was a wagon tilt, the wood being damp smoked a good deal. One thought of the wide adequate kitchen ranges and the concrete passages of the service quarters in the big house just behind. One even dared to think teutonically of the perfectly good paneling and the thick hardwood floors that could. Service conditions, you see, said my guide as the cook inspected the baked meats and the men inside the wagon tilt, grated the carrots and prepared the onions. It was old work to them after all these months. Done swiftly with a clean economy of effort that camp life teaches. What are these lads when they're at home, I inquired. Londoners chiefly all sorts and conditions. The cook and churchlies made another investigation and sniffed judiciously. He might have been cooking since the peninsula. He looked at his watch and across towards the park gates. He was responsible for 160 rations and a battery has the habit of saying quite all that it thinks of its food. How often do the batteries go out? I continued about five days a week. You see, we're being worked up a little and had they got plenty of ground to work over. Oh, yes. What's the difficulty this time birds? No, but we got orders the other day not to go over a golf course. That rather knocks the bottom out of tactical schemes. Perfect shamelessness like perfect virtue is impregnable. And after all the lightnings of this war which have brought out so much resolve and self sacrifice must show up equally certain souls and institutions that are irredeemable. The weather took off a little before noon. The carpenters could have put in a good half day's work on the sheds. And even if they had been rained upon they had roofs with fires awaiting their return. The batteries had none of these things. The gunner at home. They came in at last far down the park heralded by that unmistakable half grumble, half grunt of guns on the move. The picketed horses heard at first and one of them made long and loud which proved that he had abandoned civilian habits. Horses and stables and mules seldom do more than snicker even when they are halves of separated pairs. But these gentlemen had a corporate life of their own now and knew what pulling together means. When a battery comes into camp it parks all six guns at the appointed place side by side and one mathematically straight line. And the accuracy of the alignment is like ceremonial drill with a foot. A fair test of its attainments. The ground was no treat for parking. Specimen trees and draining ditches had to be avoided and circumvented. The gunners, the rains, the horses, the ground were equally wet and the slab dropped away like gruel from the break shoes. And they were Londoners, clerks, mechanics, shop assistants and deliverymen. Anything and everything that you please but they were all home and at home in their saddles and seats. They said nothing. Their officers said little enough to them. They came in across what had once been turf wheeled with tight traces, halted, unhooked. The wise teams stomped off to their pickets and behold the six guns were left precisely where they should have been left to the fraction of an inch. You could see the wind blowing the last few drops of wet from each leather muzzle cover at exactly the same angle. It was all old known evolutions taken unconsciously in the course of their days work by men well abreast of it. Our men have one advantage set of voice. As territorial they were introduced to unmade horses once a year at training so they'd never been accustomed to made horses. And what did the horses say about it all? I asked remembering what I'd seen on the road in the early days. They said a good deal at first but our chaps could make allowances for them. They know now. Allah never intended the gunner to talk. His own arm does that for him. The batteries off saddled in silence though one noticed on all sides little quiet caresses between man and beast. The affectionate nuzzlings and nose slappings. Surely the gunner's relation to his horse is more intimate even than the Calvary man's for a lost horse only turns Calvary into infantry but trouble in a gun team may mean death all around. And this is the gunner's war. The young wood officers said so joyously as they passed to and fro picking up scandal about breast straps and breechings, examining the collars of ammunition wagon teams and listening to remarks on shoes. Local blacksmiths assisted by the battery itself through the shoeing. There are master smiths and important fairies who have cheerfully thrown up good wages to help the game and the horses reward them by keeping fit. A fair proportion of the horses are aged. It was never a gunner yet satisfied with his team or his rations till he had left the battery. But they do their work as steadfastedly and wholeheartedly as the men. I'm persuaded the horses like being society and working out their daily problems of draft and direction. The English and Londoners particularly are the kindest and most reasonable of folk with animals. If it were not our business strictly to underrate ourselves for the next few years, one would say that the territorial batteries had already done wonders. But perhaps it is better to let it all go with the grudging emission rung out of a ringing wet Bombardier. Well, it isn't so damn bad considering. I left them taking their dinner in mestins to their tents with a strenuous afternoon's cleaning up ahead of them. The big park held some thousands of men. I'd seen no more than a few hundreds and had missed the howitzer batteries after all. A cock pheasant chaperoned me down the drive, complaining loudly that where he used to walk with his ladies under the beach trees, some unsporting people had built a miniature landscape with tiny villages, churches and factories and came their daily to point cannon at it. Keep away from that place at eye or you'll find yourself in a field kitchen. Not me, he crowed. I'm as sacred as golf courses. Mechanism and mechanics. There was a little town a couple of miles down the road where one used to lunch in the old days and had the hotel to oneself. Now there are six ever-changing officers in Billet there and the astonished houses quiver all day to traction engines and high pile lorries. A unit of the Army Service Corps and some mechanical transport lived near the station and fed the troops for 20 miles around. Are your people easy to find? I asked of a wandering private with the hands of a sweep, the head of a Christian among lions and suicide in his eye. Well, the ASC are in the territorial drill hall for one thing and for another you're likely to hear us. There's some motors coming in from Bulford. He snorted and passed on, smelling of petrol. The drill shed was peace and comfort. The ASC were getting ready there for payday and for a concert that evening. Outside in the wind and the occasional rain spurts, life was different. The Bulford motors and some other crocs sat on a side road between what had been the local garage and a newly erected workshop of creaking scaffold poles and bellying, slatting rick cloths where a forge glowed and general repairs were being affected. Beneath the motors, men lay on their backs and called their friends to pass them spanners or for pity's sake to shovel another sack under their mud-read heads. A corporal who had been nine years a fitter and seven in a city garage, briefly and briskly outlined the more virulent diseases that develop in government rolling stock. I heard quite a lot about Bulford. Hollow voices from beneath the viscerated gearbox confirmed him. We withdrew to the shelter of the rick cloth workshop. That corporal, the sergeant who had been a carpenter with the business of his own and incidentally had served through the Boer War. Another sergeant who was a member of the Master Builders Association and a private who had also been fitter, chauffeur and a few other things. The third sergeant who kept a poultry farm in Surrey had some duty elsewhere. A man at a carpenter's bench was finishing a spoke for a newly painted cart. He squinted along it. That's funny, said the Master Builder. Of course, in his own business, he'd chuck his job sooner than do would work, but it's all funny. What I grudge as sergeant struck in is having to put mechanics to loading and unloading beef. That's where modified conscription for the beauties that won't roll up be useful to us. We want hewers of wood, we do, and I'd hew them. I want that file. This was a private in a hurry, coming from beneath an unspeakable bullford. Someone asked him musically if he would tell his wife in the morning who he was with tonight. You'll find it in the tool chest, said the sergeant. It was his own sacred tool chest which he had contributed to the common stock. And what sort of men have you got in this unit? I asked. Every sort you can think of. There isn't a thing you couldn't have made here if you wanted to. But the corporal who had been a fitter spoke with fervor. You can't expect us to make big ends, can you? That five ton bullford lorry out there in the wet and she isn't the worst, said the Master Builder. But it's all part of the game. And so funny when you come to think of it. Mead painting carts and certificate plumbers loading frozen beef. What about the discipline, I asked. The corporal turned a fitter's eye on me. The mechanism is the discipline, said he, with most profound truth. Jockeying a sick car on the road is discipline too. What about the discipline? He turned to the sergeant with a carpenter's chest. There was one sergeant of regulars with 20 year service behind him and the knowledge of human nature. He struck in. You ought to know. You've just been made corporal, said the sergeant of regulars. Well, there's so much which everybody knows has got to be done that while we all turn in and do it. Quote the corporal. I don't have any trouble with my lot. Yes, that's how the case stands, said the sergeant of regulars. Come see our stores. They were beautifully arranged in a shed which felt like a monastery after the windy clashing world without. And the young private who acted as checker, he came from some railway office at the thin, keen face of the cleric. We're in billets in the town, said the sergeant who had been a carpenter. But I'm a married man. I shouldn't care to have men billeted on us at home and I don't want to inconvenience other people. So I've knocked up a bunk for myself on the premises. It's handier to the stores too. The humor of it. We entered what had been the local garage, the mechanical transport were in full procession, tinkering the gizzards of more cars. We discussed chewed up gears, samples to hand and the civil populations old time views of the military. The corporal told a tale of a clergyman in a Midland town who only a year ago on the occasion of some maneuvers preached a sermon warning his flock to guard their woman folk against the soldiers. And when you think, when you know, said the corporal what life in those little towns really is, he whistled. See that old Landau said he opened in the door of an ancient wreck jammed against a wall. That's two of our chap's dressing room. They don't care to be bulleted so they sleep between the Landau and the wall. It's handier for their work too. Work comes in at all hours. I wish I was cavalry. There's some use in cursing a horse. Truly it's an awful thing to belong to a service where speech brings no alleviation. You, a private with calipers turn from the bench by the window. You die outside of a garage but what you said about civilians and soldiers is all out of date now. The sergeant of regulars permitted himself a small hidden smile. The private with the calipers had been some 12 weeks a soldier. I don't say it isn't said the corporal. I'm saying what it used to be. Well, the private screwed up the calipers. Didn't you feel a little bit that way yourself when you were a civilian? I don't think I did. The corporal was taken aback. I don't think I ever thought about it. Ah, there you are, said the private, very dryly. Someone laughed in the shadow of the Landau dressing room. Anyhow, we're all in it now, private Percy said a voice. There must be a good many thousand conversations of this kind being held all over England nowadays. Our breed does not warble much about patriotism or fatherland, but it has a wonderful sense of justice, even when its own shortcomings are concerned. We went over to the drill shed to see the men paid. The first man I ran across there was a sergeant who had served in the Mounted Infantry and the South African picnic that we used to call a war. He had been a private chauffeur for some years, long enough to catch the professional look, but was joyously reverting to service type again. The men lined up were cold out, saluted emphatically at the pay table and fell back with their emoluments. They swallied each other. And it's also funny, murmured the master builder in my ear, about a quarter, no less than a quarter of what one would be making on one's own. 50 Bob a week cottage and all found I was and only two cars to look after said a voice behind. And if I'd been asked, simply asked to lie down in the mud all the afternoon. The speaker looked at his wages with awe. Someone wanted to know Soto Voce if that was union rates. And the grin spread among the uniform experts. The joke you will observe lay in situations thrown up. Businesses abandoned and pleasant prospects cut short at the nod of duty. Thank Heaven said one of them at last. It's too dark to work on these blessed bullfords anymore today. We'll get ready for the concert. But it was not too dark, half an hour later for my car to meet a big Lori storming back in the wind and the wet from the Northern camps. She gave me London allowance, half an inch between hub and hub. Swung her corner like a Brooklyn's professional changed gear for the uphill with a sweet click in charged away. For all I know, she was driven by an X 50 Bob a week a cottage and all found her. Who next month might be dodging shells for her and thinking it all so funny. Horse foot, even the guns may sometimes get a little rest but so long as men eat thrice a day there is no rest for the Army Service Corps. They carry the campaign on their all sustaining backs. End of chapter three, guns and supply. Chapter four of the new army and training. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. The new army and training by Rudyard Kipling. Chapter four, Canadians and camp. Before you hit the buffalo find out where the rest of the herd is. This particular fold of downs behind Salisbury might have been a hump of prairie near Winnipeg. The team that came over the rise widely spaced between pole bar and wiffle trees were certainly children of the prairie. They shied at the car. Their driver asked them dispassionately what they thought they were doing anyway. They put their wise heads together and did nothing at all. Yes, oh yes, said the driver. They were Western horses. They weighed better than 1200 apiece. He himself was from Edmonton Way. The camp, why the camp was right ahead along up this road. No chance to miss it. And say, look out for our lorries. A fleet of them, hove in sight going at the rate of knots and keeping their left with a conscientiousness only learned when you come out of a country where nearly all the provinces except British Columbia keep to the right. Every line of them from steering wheel to brake shoes proclaim their nationality. Free perfectly efficient young men who were sprinkly a golf green with sifted earth ceased their duties to stare at them. Two riding boys also efficient on race horses. Their knees under their chins and their saddles between their horses ears cantered past on the turf. The rattle of the motors upset their cats meat. So one could compare their style of riding with that of an officer loping along to overtake a string of buck wagons that were trotting towards the horizon. The riding boys have to endure sore hardship nowadays. One gentleman has already complained that his private gallops are being cut up by gun wheels and irremediably ruined. Then more lorries, contractors wagons and increasing violence of the battered roadbed to once flit through a rude gate into a new world of canvas as far as the eye could see. And beyond that outline clouds of tents. It is not a contingent that Canada has sent but an army horse, foot, guns, engineers and all details fully equipped. Taking that army strength at 33,000 and the Dominion's population at 8 million, the camp is Canada on the scale of one to 240. An entire nation unrolled across a few square miles of turf and tents and huts. Here I could study a close hand of colony yearning to shake off the British yoke. For beyond question they yearned, the rank and file unreservedly the officers with more restraint but equal fervor. And the things they said about the yoke were simply lamentable. From Nova Scotia to Victoria and every city, township, distributing center and divisional point between from subtropical white river and sultry jackfish to the ultimate north that lies up beside Alaska. From Kootenay and Nelson of the Fruit Farms to Prince Edward Island where motors are not allowed, they yearned to shake it off with the dust of England from their feet at once and sometime before that. I had been warned that when Armageddon came the colonies would revolt against the mother country as one man, but I had no notion I should ever see the dread spectacle with my own eyes or the one man so tall. Joking apart, the Canadian army wants to get to work. It admits that London is some city but says it did not take the trip to visit London only. Armageddon, which so many people in Europe knew was bound to come, has struck Canada out of the blue like a noonday murder in a small town. How would they feel when they actually view some of the destruction in France, these men who are used to making and owning their homes? And what effect will it have on their land's outlook and development for the next few generations? Older countries may possibly slip back into some sort of toleration. New peoples in their first serious war like girls in their first real love affair neither forget nor forgive. That is why it pays to keep friends with the young. In such young, there ran inches above all normal standards, not in a few companies or battalions, but through the whole core and it was not easy to pick out foolish or even dull faces among them. Details going about their business through the camps much mud, defaulters on fatigue, orderlies, foot and mounted, the procession of lorry drivers, companies falling in for inspection, battalions parading, brigades moving off from maneuvers, batteries clanking in from the ranges. They were all supple, free and intelligent and moved with a lift in a drive that made one sing for joy. Camp gossip. Only a few months ago, that entire collection poured into Val Cartier camp in pink shirts and straw hats, desperately afraid they might not be in time. Since then, they have been taught several things, notably that the more independent the individual soldier, the more does he need forethought and endless care when he is in bulk. Just because we are all used to looking after ourselves in civil life, said an officer. We used to send parties out without rations and the parties used to go too and we expected the boys to look after their own feet but we're wiser now. They're learning the same thing in the new army, I said. Company officers have to be taught to be mothers and housekeepers and sanitary inspectors. Where do your men come from? Tell me some place that they don't come from, said he, and I could not. The men had rolled up for him everywhere between the Arctic Circle and the border and I was told that those who could not get into the first contingent were moving heaven and earth and local politicians to get into the second. There's some use in politics now that officer reflected but it's going to thin the voting lists at home. A good many of the old South African crowd, the rest are coming, were present and awfully correct. Men last met as privates between DR and Belmont were captains and majors now. Well, one lad who to the best of his ability had painted Cape Town pink in those fresh years was a grim non-commissioned officer worth his discipline, weight, and dollars. I didn't mind Dan of old times when he turned up at Val Cartier disguised as a respectable citizen, said my informant. I just roped him in for my crowd. He's a father to him. He knows and have you many cheery souls coming in, I asked. Not many, but it's always the same with a first contingent. You take everything that offers and weed the bravos out later. We don't weed said an officer of artillery. Anyone who has his passage paid for by the Canadian government stays with us till he eats out of our hand and he does. They make the best men in the long run he had it. I thought of a friend of mine who is now disabusing two or three old soldiers in a service corps of the idea that they can run the battalion and I laughed. The gunner was right. Old soldiers after a little loving care become valuable and virtuous. A company of foot was drawn up under the lee of a fir plantation behind us. They were a miniature of their army as their army was of their people and one could feel the impact of strong personality almost like a blow. If you'd believe it said a cavalryman we're forbidden to cut into that little wood lot yonder. Not one stick of it may we have. We could make shelters for our horses in the day out of that stuff. But it's timber, I guess, sacred tamed trees. Oh, we know what wood is. They issue it to us by the pound. Wood to burn by the pound. What's wood for anyway? And when do you think we shall be allowed to go, someone asked, not for the first time. Buy and buy, said I, and then you'll have to detail half your army to see your equipment isn't stolen from you. What, cried an old Stracona horse. He looked anxiously toward the horse lines. I was thinking of your mechanical transport and your traveling workshops and a few other things that you've got. I got away from those large men on their windy hilltop and slid through mud and passed mechanical transport and troops untold towards Larkhill. On the way I passed three fresh cut pine sticks laid and notched one atop of the other to shore up a caving bank. Trust a Canadian or a beaver within gunshot of standing timber. Engineers and appliances. Larkhill is where the Canadian engineers live in the midst of a profligate abundance of tools and carts, pontoon wagons, field telephones and other mouthwatering gear. Hundreds of tin huts are being built there but quite leisurely by contract. I noticed three workmen at 11 o'clock of that Monday, four noon as drunk as Davey's sow reeling and shouting across the landscape. So far as I could ascertain the workmen do not work extra shifts nor even but I hope this is incorrect on Saturday afternoons and I think they take their full hour at noon these short days. Every camp throws up men one has met at the other end of the earth. So of course the engineer's CO was an ex-South African Canadian. Some of our boys are digging a trench over yonder, he said. I'd like you to have a look at them. The boys seemed to average five feet, 10 inches with 37 inch chests. The soil was unaccommodating chalk. What are you, I asked of the first pickaxe. Private, yes, but before that. McGill, university understood, 1912. And that boy with the shovel? Queens, I think. No, he's Toronto. And thus the class and applied geology went on half up the trench under supervision of a corporal bachelor of science with a most scientific biceps. They were young, they were beautifully fit and they were all truly thankful that they lived in these high days. Sappers like sergeants take care to make themselves comfortable. The Corps were dealing with all sorts of little domestic matters in the way of arrangements for baths, which are cruelly needed and an apparatus for depopulating shirts which is even more wanted. Healthy but unwashed men sleeping on the ground are bound to develop certain things which at first discuss them. But later are accepted as an unlovely part of the game. It would be quite easy to make bake houses and superheated steam fittings to deal with the trouble. The huts themselves stand on brick piers from one to three feet above ground. The board floors are not grooved or tongue so there is ample ventilation from beneath. But they have installed decent cooking ranges in gas and the men have already made themselves all sorts of handy little labor saving gadgets. They would do this if they were in the real desert. Incidentally, I came across a delightful bit of racial instinct. A man had been told to knock up a desk out of broken packing cases. There is only one type of desk in Canada, the roller tub, with three shelves each side the knee hole, characteristic sloping sides, raised back and a long shelf in front of the writer. He reproduced it faithfully, barring of course the roller tub and the thing leaped to the eye out of its English office surroundings. The engineers do not suffer for lack of talents. Their senior officers appear to have been the heads and their juniors, the assistants and big concerns that wrestle with unharnessed nature. There is a tale of the building of a bridge in Valcartier camp which is not bad hearing. The rank and file included miners, road trestle and bridge men, iron construction men who among other things are steeplejacks, whole castes such as deal in high explosives for a living, local drivers, superintendents too, for all I know and a solid packing of selected machinists, mechanics and electricians. Unluckily, they were all a foot or so too tall for me to tell them that even if their equipment escaped at the front, they would infallibly be rated for their men. An unrelated detachment. I left McGill, Queens and Toronto still digging in their trench, which another undergraduate, mounted and leading a horse, went out of his way to jump standing. My last glimpse was of a little detachment with five or six South African ribbons among them who were being looked over by an officer. No one thought it strange that they should have embodied themselves and crossed the salt seas independently as so-and-so's horse. It is best to travel with a title these days. Once arrived, they were not at all particular, except that they meant to join the army and the lonely batch was stating its qualifications as engineers. They get over anyway and everywhere, said my companion, swimming, I believe. But who was the so-and-so that they were christened after, I asked. I guess he was the man who financed them or grub-staked them while they were waiting. He may be one of them in that crowd now, or he may be a provincial magnate at home, getting another bunch together. The vanguard of a nation. Then I went back to the main camp for a last look at that wonderful army where the tin-roofed messes take French conversation lessons with the keen-faced French Canadian officers and where one sees a spree decor in the making. Nowhere is local sentiment stronger than in Canada. East and west, lake and maritime provinces, prairie and mountain, fruit district and timberlands, they each thrill to it. The west keeps one cold blue open-air eye on the townful east when a peg sits between, posing alternately as sophisticated metropolis and simple prairie. Alberta, of the thousand horses, looks down from her high-peak saddle on all who walk on their feet. In British Columbia, thanks God for an equable climate in that she is not like Ottawa, full of politicians and frozen sludge. Quebec, unassailable in her years in experience, smiles tolerantly on the Nova Scotian, free as a history too, and asks Montreal if any good thing can come out of Brandon, Moustia or Regina. They discuss each other outrageously as they know each other intimately. Over 4,000 miles of longitude, their fathers, their families and all their connections, which is useful when it comes to sizing up the merits of a newly promoted non-commissioned officer or the capacities of a quartermaster. As their army does and suffers and its record begins to blaze, fierce pride of regiment will be added to local love of the national pride that backs and envelops all. But that pride is held in very severe check now, for they are neither provinces nor tribes, but a welded people fighting in the war of liberty. They permit themselves to hope that the physique of their next contingent will not be worse than that of the present. They believe that their country can send forward a certain number of men and a certain number behind that, all equipped to a certain scale, of discomforts endured, of the long learning and re-learning and waiting on, they say nothing. They do not hint what they will do when their hour strikes, though they more than hint their longing for that hour. In all their talk, I caught no phrase that could be twisted into the shadow of a boast or any claim to superiority, even in respect to their kit and outfit. No word or implication of self praise for any sacrifice made or intended. It was the rigid humility that impressed one as most significant and perhaps most menacing for such as may have to deal with this vanguard of an armed nation. End of chapter four, Canadians in Camp. Chapter five of the New Army and Training. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The New Army and Training by Rudyard Kipling. Chapter five, Indian troops. War is not sugar plums. Hindi proverb. Working from the east to the west of England, through a countryside alive with troops of all arms, the car came at dusk into a cathedral town, entirely inhabited by one type of regimen. The telegraph office was an orally jam of solid, large, made men, with years of discipline behind them and the tan of Indian suns on their faces. Englishmen still so fresh from the troop ships that one of them asked me, what's the day of the month? They were advising friends of their arrival in England or when they might be expected on short leave at the week's end. And the fresh-faced telegraph girls behind the grills worked with six pairs of hands apiece and all the goodwill and patience in the world to back them. That same young woman who with nothing to do makes you wait 10 minutes for a penny stamp while she finishes a talk with a lady friend will at a crisis go on till she drops and keep her temper throughout. Well, if that's her village, I heard one of the girls say to an anxious soul, I tell you that that will be her telegraph office. You leave it to me, she'll get it all right. He backed out and it doesn't more quietly took his place. The regiments hailed from all the old known stations of the east and beyond that into the far east again. They cursed the cool barrack accommodation. They rejoiced in the keen autumn smells and paraded the long street all filled with Europe shops while their officers and their officers' wives. And I think mothers who had come down to snatch a glimpse of their boys crowded the hotels and the little unastonished Anglo-Indian children circulated around the knees of big friends they had made aboard ship and asked, where are you going now? One caught scraps of her old gypsy talk, names of boarding houses, agents addresses. Millie stays with mother, of course. I'm taking Jack down to school tomorrow. It's past half term, but that doesn't matter nowadays. And cheer he for wells between men and calm-eyed women. Except for the frocks, it might have been an evening assembly at any station bandstand in India. Outside on the surging pavements, the small boy cried paper, even in paper, then seductively, carguss. What I said, thinking my ears had cheated me. Deco, carguss said he, look here, paper. Why on earth do you say that? Because the men like it, he replied, and slapped an evening paper, no change for a penny, into the hand of a man in a helmet. Who shall say that the English are not adaptable? The car swam bonnet deep through a mile of troops and a mile up the road one could hear the deep hum of all those crowded streets that the cathedral bells were chiming over. It was only one small block of Anglo-India getting ready to take its place in the old devouring line. Screw guns. An hour later, at blank, shall we ever be able to name people and place us outright again. The wind brought up one whiff, one unmistakable whiff of ghee. Somewhere among the English pines that for the moment, pretended to be the lower slopes of the Dun, there were native troops, a mule squealed in the dark and set off a half dozen others. It was screw guns, batteries of them, waiting their turn also at the game. Morning showed them in their immaculate lines as though they had just marched in from Jokta, little low guns with their ammunition, very big English gunners in disengaged attitudes, which nevertheless did not encourage stray civilians to poke and peer into things. And the native drivers all busied over their charges. True, the wind was bitter and many of the drivers had tied up their heads, but so does one at Keita in the cold weather, not to mention Pashar. And said an ache of drivers, it is not the cold for which we have no liking, it is the wet. The English air is good, but water falls at all seasons. Yet notwithstanding, we have this battery and all the pride men can throw into a mere number have not lost one mule. Neither at sea nor on land have we one lost. That can be shown, Said. Then one heard the deep racking tobacco cough in the lee of a tent where four or five men, kangaroo folk by the look of them, were drinking tobacco out of a cow's horn. Their own country's tobacco, be sure, for English tobacco, but there was no need to explain. Who would have dreamed to smell bizarre tobacco on a South country golf links? A large proportion of the men are, of course, Sikhs to whom tobacco is forbidden. The Haveldar, major himself, was a Sikh of the Sikhs. He spoke of all things in the strange world of the late Mr. McCullough's monumental book on the Sikh religion, saying not without warrant that McCullough, Said, had translated into English much of the holy book. The great Gunth Sahib that lives at Amritsar. He enlarged two on the ancient prophecy among the Sikhs that had it ratioed someday come out of the sea and lead them to victory, all the earth over. So spoke Bir Singh, erect and enormous beneath the gray English skies. He hailed from a certain place called Banalu, near Patiala, where many years ago two Sikh soldiers executed a striking but perfectly just vengeance on certain villagers who had oppressed their younger brother, a cultivator. They had gone to the extreme limits of abasement and conciliation. This failing they took leave for a weekend and slew the whole tribe of their enemies. The story is buried in old government reports, but when Bir Singh implied that he and his folk were Orthodox, I had no doubt of it. And behind him stood another giant who knew, for his village was but a few miles up the Shalimar Road, every foot of Lahore city. He brought word that there had been great floods at home so that the Risen Ravhai River had touched the very walls of Runjit Singh's fort. And that was only last rains. And behold, here he was now in England waiting orders to go to this fight which he understood was not at all a small fight, but a fight of fights in which all the world and our Raj was engaged. The trouble in India was that all the young men, the mere Jewans, wanted to come out at once, which he said was manifestly unjust to older men who had waited so long. However, merit and patience had secured their reward and the battery was here and it would do the hot Jewans no harm to stay at home and be zealous at drill until orders came for them in their turn. Young men think that everything good in this world is theirs by right, Sahib. Then came the big still English gunners who were trained to play with the little guns. They took one such gun and melted it into trifling pieces of not more than 150 pounds each and reassembled it and explained its innermost heart till even a layman could understand. There is a lot to understand about screw guns, especially the new kind, but the gunner of today like his ancestor does not talk much, except in his own time and place, when he is as multitudinously amazing as the blue marine. The Mule Lines. We went over to see the Mule Lines. I detest the whole generation of these parrot mouth hybrids, American, Egyptian, Andalusian or upcountry. So it gave me particular pleasure to hear a Pothon telling one chestnut beast who objected to having its mane hogged anymore, what sort of lady horse his mama had been. But qua animals, they were a lovely lot and had long since given up blowing and finicking over English fodder. Is there any sickness? Why is Yander Mule laying down? I demanded as though all the lines could not see I was a shuttering amateur. There is no sickness, Said, that Mule lies down for his own pleasure also to get out of the wind. He is very clever. He is from Hindustan, said the men with the horse clippers. And thou? I am a Pothon, said he with imputing grin and true border cock of the turban. And he did me the honor to let me infer. The lines were full of talk as the men went over their animals. They were not wearing themselves over this new country of Bel-A. It was the regular gossip of food and water and firewood where so-and-so had hit the curry comb. Talking of cookery, the orthodox men have been rather put out by English visitors who come to the cook houses and stare directly at the food while it is being prepared. Sensible men do not object to this because they know that these Englishmen have no evil intention or any evil eye. But sometimes an aerosol purist, toothache or liver makes a man painfully religious, will spy strangers and insist on the strict letter of the law. And then everyone who wishes to be orthodox must agree with him on an empty stomach too and wait till a fresh mess has been cooked. This is takli, a burden, for where the intention is good and war is afoot, much can and should be overlooked. Moreover, this war is not like any other war. It is a war of arharaj, everybody's war as they say in the bazaars. And that is another reason why it does not matter if an Englishman stares at one's food. This I gathered in small pieces after watering time when the mules had filed up to the troughs in the twilight, hundreds of them, and the drivers grew discursive on the way to the lines. The last I saw of them was in the early cold morning, all in marching order, jinking and jingling down a road through woods. Where are you going? God knows. The Inn of Goodbyes. It might have been for exercise merely, or it might be down to the sea and away to the front for the battle of arharaj. The quiet hotel where people sit together and talk in earnest strained pairs is well used to such departures. The officers of a whole division, the raw cuts of their tent circles lie, still unhealed on the links, dined there by scores. Mothers and relatives came down from the uttermost parts of Scotland for a last look at their boys and found beds, goodness knows where, very quiet little weddings too, set out from its doors to the church opposite. The division went away a century of weeks ago by the road that the mule battery took. Many of the civilians who pocketed the wills signed and witnessed in the smoking room are full-blown executors now. Some of the brides are widows. And it is not nice to remember that when the hotel was so filled that not even another pleading mother could be given a place in which to lie down and have her cry out. Not at all nice to remember that it never occurred to any of the comfortable people in the large but sparsely inhabited houses around that they might have offered a night's lodging even to an unintroduced stranger. Great Heart and Christiana. There were hospitals up the road preparing and being prepared for the Indian wounded. One of these lay a man of, say, a billok regiment, sorely hit. Word had come from his colonel in France to the colonel's wife in England that she should seek till she found that very man and got news from his very mouth, news to send to his family and village. She found him at last and he was very bewildered to see her there because he had left her and her child on the veranda of the bungalow long and long ago when he and his colonel and the regiment went down to take ship for the war. How had she come? Who had guarded her during her train journey of so many days? And above all, how had the Baba endured that sea which caused strong men to collapse? Not till all these matters had been cleared up and fullest detail did great heart on his cot permit his colonel's wife to waste one word on his own insignificant concerns and that she should have wept filled him with real trouble. Truly, this is the war of our Raj. End of chapter five, Indian troops. Chapter six of the new army and training. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The new army and training by Rudyard Kipling. Chapter six, territorial battalions. To excuse oneself to oneself is human, but to excuse oneself to one's children is hell. Arabic proverb. Billidot troops are difficult to get at. There are thousands of them in a little old town by the side of an even older park up the London Road. But to find a particular battalion is like ferreting on stopped burrows. The empty umph, were you looking for? Said a private in charge of a sidecar. Where the eti-eanth only came in last week. I've never seen the place before. It's pretty, hold on, there's a postman he'll know. He too was in khaki, bowed between mailbags and his accent was of Afar and Kohli County. I'm none too sure, said he, but I think I saw. Here a third man cut in. Yance to battalion marching into park now. Rune. Happened to catch him. They turned out to be territorial with the history behind them. But that I didn't know till later. And their band and cyclists. Very polite were these rear rank cyclists who pushed their loaded machines with one vast hand to piece. They were strangers, they said. They had only come here a few days ago. But they knew the south well. They had been in Gloucestershire, which was a very nice southern place. Then their battalion I hazarded was of northern extraction. They admitted that I might go as far as that. Their speech betraying their native town at every rich word. Huddersfield, of course, I said to make them out with it. Bolton said one at last, being in uniform the pit man could not destroy the impertinent civilian. Ah, Bolton, I return. All cotton, aren't you? Some coal, he answered gravely. There is notorious rivalry, twix coal and cotton in Bolton. But I wanted to see him practice the self-control that the army is always teaching. As I have said, he and his companion were most polite. But the total of their information, boiled and peeled, was that they had just come in from Bolton Way. Might at any moment be sent somewhere else, and they're like Gloucestershire in the south, a spy could not have learned much less. The battalion halted and moved off by companies for further evolutions. One could see they were more than used to drill in arms. A hardened, thick neck, thin flanked, deep chested lot dealt with quite faithfully by their sergeants and altogether abreast of their work. Why then this reticence? What had they to be ashamed of, these big Bolton folk without an address? Where was their orderly room? There were many orderly rooms in the little old town, most of them in bylands, less than one car wide. I found what I wanted and this was North Country all over. A private who volunteered to steer me to headquarters through the tricky southern streets. It was communicative and told me a good deal about typhoid inoculation and musketry practice, which accounted for only six companies being on parade, but surely they could not have been ashamed of that. Guarding a railway. I unearthed their skeleton at last in a peaceful, gracious, 500-year-old house that looked onto lawns and cut hedges bounded by age-old red brick walls, such a performed in dreaming places one would choose for the setting of some even-pulsed English love tale of the days before the war. Officers were billeted in the low-sealed, shiny-floored rooms full of books and flowers. And now I asked when I was told the tale of the uncommunicative cyclist, what is the matter with your battalion? They left cruelly at me, matter, said they. We're just cut off three months of guarding railways. After that, a man wouldn't trust his own mother. You don't mean to say our cyclist lets you know where we've come from last. No, they wouldn't, I replied. That was what worried me. I assumed you'd all commit at murders and had been sent here to live it down. Then they told me what guarding a line really means, how men wake and walk with only-expressed troop trains to keep them company, all the night long on windy embankments or under still more windy bridges, how they sleep behind three sleepers upended or a bit of tin, or if they are lucky, in a plate-layer's hut, how their food comes to them swapping across the square-headed ties that lie in wait to twist a man's ankle after dark, how they stand in blown cold dust of goods yards, trying to watch five lanes of trucks at once, how fools of all classes pester the lonely pickets whose orders are to hold up motors for inquiry and then write silly letters to the war office about it, how nothing ever happens through the long weeks but infallibly would if the patrols were taken off. And they had one refreshing story of a workman who at six in the morning, which is no auspicious hour to jest with Lancashire, took a shortcut to his work by docking under some goods wagons and when challenged by the sentry replied, posturing on all fours, boo, I'm a German, we're at the upright sentry fired, unfortunately missed him and then gave him the butt across his ass's head so that his humor and very nearly his life terminated. After which the sentry was seldom seen to smile but frequently heard to murmur, I should have slipped begonette into him. Pride and prejudice. So you see, said the officers in conclusion, you mustn't be surprised that our men wouldn't tell you much. I begin to see, I said, how many of you are coal and how many cotton? Two thirds coal and one third cotton, roughly, keeps the men deadly keen. Any operative isn't going to give up while a pitman goes on and very much vice versa. That's class prejudice, said I. It's most useful, said they. The officers themselves seemed to be interested in coal or cotton and had known their men intimately on the civil side. If your orderly room sergeant or your quartermaster has been your trusted head clerk or foreman for 10 or 12 years and if eight out of a dozen sergeants have controlled pit men and machinists above and below ground and 80% of these pit men and machinists are privates in the companies, your regiment works with something of the precision of a big business. It was all new talk to me, for I had not yet met a Northern territorial battalion with the strong pride of its strong town behind it. Where were they when the war came? How had they equipped themselves? I wanted to hear the tale. It was worth listening to, as told with North country joy of life and the doing of things in that soft down country house of the untroubled centuries. Like everyone else, they were expecting anything but war. Hadn't even begun their annual camp. Then the thing came and Bolton rose as one man and woman to fit out its battalion. There was a lady who wanted a fairly large sum of money for the men's extra footgear. She set aside a morning to collect it and inside the hour came home with nearly twice her needs and spent the rest of the time trying to make people take back fibers at least out of tenors. In the big hauling firms flung horses and transport at them and at the government, often refusing any price or when it was paid, turning it into the war funds. What the battalion wanted, it had but to ask for. Once it was short of say towels, an officer approached the head of a big firm with no particular idea he would get more than a few dozen from that quarter. And how many towels do you want? Said the head of the firm. The officer suggested a globular thousand. I think you'll do better with 1200 was the current answer. They're ready out yonder, get them. And in this style Bolton turned out her battalion. Then the authorities took it and strung it by threes and fives along several score miles of railway track. And it had only just been reassembled and it had been inoculated for typhoid. Consequently they said, but all officers are like mothers and motor car owners. It wasn't up to what it would be in a little time. In spite of the cyclist, I had had a good look at the deep chested battalion in the park. And after getting their musket tree figures, it seemed to me that very soon it might be worth looking at by more prejudice persons than myself. The next day I read that the battalion's regular battalion in the field had distinguished itself by a piece of work which in other wars would have been judged heroic. Bolton will read it, not without remarks in other towns who love Bolton, more or less will say that if all the truth could come out their regiments had done as well. Anyway, the result will be more men, pit men, mill hands, clerks, checkers, weirs, winders and hundreds of those sleek well groomed business chaps than one used to meet in the big Midland hotels protesting that war was out of date. These latter developed surprisingly in the camp atmosphere. I recall one raging in his army shirtsleeves at a comrade who had derided his principles. I am a blankety pacifist he hissed and I'm proud of it and I'm going to make you one before I finish with you. The secret of the services. Pride of city, calling, class and creed imposes standards and obligations which hold men above themselves out of pinch, instead of them through long strain. One meets it in the new army at every turn from the picked territorial who slipped across channel last night, to the six week old service battalion maturing itself in mud. It is balanced by the in eradicable English instinct to understate, detract and decry, to mess the thing done by loudly drawing attention to the things undone. The more one sees of the camps, the more one is filled with facts and figures of joyous significance which will become clear as the days lengthen. And the less one hears of the endurance, decency, self-sacrifice and utter devotion which have made in our hourly making this wonderful new world. The camps take this for granted, else why should any man be there at all? He might have gone on with his business or watched soccer. But having chosen to do his bit, he doesn't and talks as much about his motives as he would of his religion or his love affairs. He is eloquent over the shortcomings of the authorities, more pessimistic as to the future of his next neighborhood battalion than would be safe to print. He's in lyric on his personal needs, baths and dry rooms for choice. But when the grousing gets beyond a certain point, say at 3 a.m. and steady wet with the tent pegs drawing like false teeth, the nephew of the insurance agent asked the cousin of the baronet to inquire of the son of the fried fish fender what the stevedore's brother and the tutor of the public school join the army for. Then they sing somewhere the sun is shining until the sergeant iron monger's assistant cautioned them to drowned in silence or the lieutenant telephone appliances manufacturer will speak to them in the morning. The new armies have not yet evolved their typical private NCO and officer, though one can see them shaping. They're humorous because for all our long faces we are the only genuinely humorous race on earth. But they all know for true that there are no excuses in the service. If there were said a three month old under gardener private to me, what would become a discipline? They're already setting standards for the coming millions and have sown little sprouts of regimental traditions which may grow into age old trees. In one core, for example, though no dubbin is issued, a man loses his name for parading with dirty boots. He looks down scornfully on the next battalion where they are not expected to achieve the impossible. In another, an ex-guard sergeant brought him up by hand. The drill is rather high class. In a third, they fuss about records for route marching and men who fall out have to explain themselves to their sweating companions. This is entirely right. They are all now in the year one and the meanest of them may be an ancestor of whom regimental posterity will say they were giants in those days. The real question, this much we can realize even though we were so close to it. The old safe instinct saves us from triumph and exultation but what will be the position in years to come of the young man who is deliberately elected to outcast himself from this all embracing brotherhood? What of his family and above all what of his descendants when the books have been closed in the last bound struck of sacrifice and sorrow in every hamlet, village, parish, suburb, city, sheer, district, province and dominion throughout the empire? End of chapter six, territorial battalions. End of the new army in training by Rudyard Kiplen.