Old soldiers, having finished with foot drill (known in the barrack-room as “square”) and with riding school (which is allowed to keep its name), have a way of looking down on recruits; the chief aim of the recruit, if he be a normal man, is to get “dismissed” from riding school, square, and gymnasium, and the attitude of the old soldier encourages this ambition. Usually a recruit is placed under an old soldier for tuition in his work, and it depends very much on the quality of the old hands in a barrack-room as to what quality of trained man is turned out therefrom. Service counts more than personal worth, and in fact more than anything else in barrack-room life. The man with two years’ service will get into trouble sooner or later if he ventures to dictate to the man of three years’ or more service, whatever the relative mental qualifications of the two men concerned may be. “Before you came up,” or “before you enlisted,” are the most crushing phrases that can be applied to a fellow soldier, and no amount of efficiency atones for lack of years to count toward transfer to the Reserve or discharge from the service to pension. So far as the infantry recruit is concerned, foot drill and musketry, together with a certain amount of fatigues, comprise the day’s routine. With foot drill may be bracketed bayonet drill, in which the recruit is taught the various thrusts and parries which can be made with that weapon for which the British infantryman has been famed since before Wellington’s time. Both in the cavalry and infantry, every man has to fire a musketry course once a year; the recruit’s course of musketry, however, is a more detailed and, in a way, a more instructive business than the course which the trained man has to undergo. The recruit has to be taught that squeezing motion for the trigger which does not disturb the aim of the rifle; he has to be taught, also, the extreme care with which a rifle must be handled, cleaned, and kept. It may be said that the recruits’ course is designed to lay the foundation on which the trained man’s course of musketry is built, and at the end of the recruits’ course the men who have undergone it are graded off into first, second, and third class shots, while “marksmen” are super-firsts.