"Well,
after the F.S. corps (we've about forty of 'em) come our territorial
Volunteer battalions, and a man who can't suit himself somewhere among 'em
must be a shade difficult. We've got those 'League' corps I was talking
about; and those studious corps that just scrape through their ten days'
camp; and we've crack corps of highly-paid mechanics who can afford a two
months' 'heef' in an interesting Area every other year; and we've senior
and junior scientific corps of earnest boilermakers and fitters and
engineers who read papers on high explosives, and do their 'heefing' in a
wet picket-boat--mine-droppin'--at the ports. Then we've heavy artillery--
recruited from the big manufacturing towns and ship-building yards--and
ferocious hard-ridin' Yeomanry (they _can_ ride--now), genteel, semi-
genteel, and Hooligan corps, and so on and so forth till you come to the
Home Defence Establishment--the young chaps knocked out under medical
certificate at the Second Camp, but good enough to sit behind hedges or
clean up camp, and the old was-birds who've served their time but don't
care to drop out of the fun of the yearly camps and the halls. They call
'emselves veterans and do fancy-shooting at Bisley, but, between you and
me, they're mostly Fresh Air Benefit Clubs. They contribute to the
Volunteer journals and tell the Guard that it's no good. But I like 'em. I
shall be one of 'em some day--a copper-nosed was-bird! .
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