In the “review order” or full dress of modern infantrymen--and in fact of all British soldiers--there are certain buttons and fittings which serve no useful purpose, and soldiers themselves, even, sometimes wonder why these things are worn. The reason is that, in old time, all these fittings had a use; the buttons on the back of the tunic supported belts which are no longer worn, or covered pockets which no longer exist. There is a reason also in the officer wearing his sash on one shoulder and the sergeant his on another, and in the same way there is a reason for every seemingly useless fitting in a soldier’s review uniform--it perpetuates a tradition of the particular battalion or regiment concerned, or it keeps alive a tradition of the service as a whole. To the outsider, these may appear useless formalities, but they are not so in reality; the soldier is intensely proud of these things, which make for _esprit de corps_ and maintain the spirit of the Army quite as much as material advantages. The actual spirit in which the infantryman views his work is a difficult thing to assess. One noteworthy example of that spirit is the case of Piper Findlater, who, wounded beyond the power of movement at Dargai, sat up and piped--an amazing piece of courage and coolness under fire. Yet that same Piper Findlater, invalided home and out of the service, could display himself on a music-hall stage, an action which was incomprehensible to the civilian mind. But, to the average infantryman, there was nothing incongruous in the two actions--one was as much the right of the man as the other was to his credit, and Findlater was typical of the British infantryman. Under the present system, each infantry regiment is divided into two or more battalions. Under the old system, each battalion was distinguished by a number, but the numbers have been abolished in favour of names of counties or districts, and two or more battalions form the regiment of a county or division of a county. It is very seldom that these two or more portions of the same regiment meet each other, for, in the case of a two-battalion regiment, one battalion is usually on foreign service while the other is domiciled in England, and the home battalion feeds the one on foreign service with recruits as needed to keep the latter up to strength. A notable exception to this rule occurred in the case of the Norfolk Regiment a few years ago, when the first and second battalions met at Bloemfontein, one outward bound at the beginning of its term of foreign service, and the other about to start for home.