Older Army Men have to be Tough

Camp News, Volume 3, Issue 139, 11 September 1942, Page 2

Older Army Men have to be Tough

It isn’t just the youngsters who are in khaki now. Their fathers are joining up—and they’re finding that their age doesn’t let them off stiff training. ■ The older you get, the tougher you have to be. That is the present-day armyaccording to its new recrits. In training depots of every corps and regiment throughout the Army, training has been stiffened up gradually during the past eighteen months. And now the daily programme of men just recruited to the Army, is designed to make the average man of forty as tough as the youngster of twenty who was called up a couple of years ago.. Two sessions of P.T., two more of arms drill, a couple of lectures and two more periods of foot drill — “square bashing”makes up the full and hectic day of the new recruit to Britain’s older and tougher Army. Even such staid and technical

branches of the Army as the Ordnance Corps and the Medical Corps, now have their cross-country running in full battle order, with practice in the transport of stores, equipment and “patients” over rough country, and across rivers. , Men of forty, many of them following eighteen-year-old • sons into the Army, find the easy training conditions, about which their son told them two years or so ago, very drastically revised. “My son ’ had nothing like this to go through,” is the plaintive cry of many a man now joining up, and going through the new style training. But the older men do not crack up under the strain of their . long and strenuous dayslargely because their programme has been scientifically planned in collaboration with medical officers . and civilian specialists. It was anticipated that the percentage rate of sickness would grow in proportion to the increasing age of recruits to the Army, but this has not

proved to be the case in actual practice. . “Tummies” and short-windedness soon disappear under the graduated system of P.T., now adopted by the Army Council as standard for all new recruits. y - • And men who have for years been living quiet and sedate lives, with the minimum of manual labour — are, within three or four months, as tough, if not tougher, than the lads who have led the comparatively easy lives of “old soldiers” for the past two years.