The Star. MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 1908. THE TERRITORIAL ARMY.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 9316, 17 August 1908, Page 2

The Star. MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 1908. THE TERRITORIAL ARMY.

Great Britain's appeal for a Territorial Army does not appear to have elicited the response that might fairly have been expected from, a country which has shown such eager and enthusiastic patriotism where its Volunteer and Yeomanry forces were concerned. A cablegram, received on Saturday states that in the second week's training there was a further serious diminution in the number of Territorials, that many battalions were 60 per cent below the previous training, and that some were mere skeletons. Tho only gratifying feature about the training, indeed, appears to have been the "fine material" which was displayed. It is to be hoped that this is only a temporary experience, and that at the next training the importance of the proper development of the Territorial Army as a line of defence will have impressed itself upon the conscience of the nation. There must be many thousands of willing men of all ages in Great Britain who would have to answer in the negative Lord Roberts's suggestive inquiry, " Am I fitted to do anything for the defence of my country should my services be required?" It was this question that moved Mr Coulson Kernahan, the wellknown writer of books, to become a "Terrier," and he has put his experiences in shape in a delightful little book, which ought to go far to show that the life of a "Terrier" is not by any means a distressful one. Mr Kernahan says frankly: —

I joined the Territorial Army from sham©. I was ashamed to think that if war came, and England were in danger, I, an able-bodied man, should have to watch others go out to take a man's part in the defence of the country, while I remained behind with the women. I am ashamed now that the shame was so long of coming — that I did not earlier in life realise the necessities of national defence.

He had set himself a high standard of efficiency, but he found his experience of the awkward squad a little humiliating. He writed : —

I admit frankly that on that first night, as well as on succeeding nights, I. was the rankest duffer of the lot. Had it been a case of head work — of grasping a plan of campaign, or some point in tactics — I might have been the quickest to learn the work. As matters stood, I was undoubtedly the slowest. To my fellow recruits, coming as one did from an engineer's shop, another from the carpenter's bench, and most, if not all, from more or lees manual occupations, the handling of a rifle came natural. To me everything was strange. When his fellow recruits blundered nobody took much, notice: —

They did not vary very greatly in height, wei'e all dressed more or less alike, and so had nothing sufficiently distinctive about them to enable the spectators to say: "There's that chap at it again !" Every time I went wrong, perhaps because of the fact that I was taller 3 older and differently dressed from the others, the grin all round was universal.

Mr Kernahan found his chief difficulty the not unnatural one of unlearning much that he had learnt at school, for the drill methods of the Territorials differ materially from those of the gymnasium. In this he was a source of continual exasperation to the drillsergeant, though he possibly gave that patient individual less concern than the recruit of whom he tells: —

A sergeant — so the story goes — was drilling a hopelessly thick-headed recruit, and addressed him, blandly, thus: "They told me before you came here as you was a dashed fool." (The recruit looked sullen.) " But you ain't nothin' of the sort/' went on the instructor. (The recruit's face brightened.) "It's downright wicked to call you a dashed fool, for you ain't that, no more than what I am." (The pleased recruit smiled.) "No," went on the sergeant-instructor, " yott ain't no dashed fool, you're only the biggest, blanket ty, blank born idiot as ever was pupped!"

Of his experience in camp Mr Kernahan has some amusing things to relate. He writes : —

To me, the experience of sleeping under canvas was not entirely new, for I had camped up-river with my old friend Mr Jerome K. Jerome, so far back as tho time when ho was writing his Ci Three Mon in a Boat." But campingoirb in some still and silent spot, heside a reach of the river, is a very different matter from camping-out on the heights of Dover, when, as happened one night. « hurricane was blowing. Being very tired, for we had done a thirty-mile march during the day, I dropped off to sleep before the wind got up. . . T awoko to find that the flap of my tent had blown open and that the wind and the rain were running a neck-and-neck race to see which could first effect itfs purpose — the purpose of the latter being to drown me where 1 lay ; that of the former to blow me out of bed.

But although he found plenty of brightness in the life it had also much seriousness. By entering the camp the Territorial undertook all the rigours of warfare without the actual bit of casualties. " The Volunteer," he says, "knows .that what to-day is 'sham' may be to-morrow sober earnest — that the role he sustains in what I may call the safety of a private rehearsal, he may before long have to play under fire." It is with a realisation of this knowledge that lie appeals to the men of the Empire to tit themselves for the defence ol : their homes should the necessity ariso.