My ignorance of gunnery was monumental and it was a long time before I grasped even the first principles. The driving drill part of it didn’t worry me. The Cavalry had taught me to feel at home in the saddle and the drawing of intricate patterns on the open country with a battery of four guns was a delightful game soon learnt. But once they were in action I was lost. It annoyed me to listen helplessly while children of nineteen with squeaky voices fired imaginary salvos on imaginary targets and got those gunners jumping. So I besought the Colonel to send me on a course to Shoebury and he did. Work? I’d never known what it meant till I went to Shoebury and put on a canvas duck suit. We paraded at ungodly hours in the morning, wet or fine, took guns to bits and with the instructor’s help put them together again; did gun drill by the hour and learnt it by heart from the handbook and shouted it at each other from a distance; spent hours in the country doing map-reading and re-section; sat through hours of gunnery lectures where the mysteries of a magic triangle called T.O.B. became more and more unfathomable; knocked out countless churches on a miniature range with a precision that was quite Boche-like; waded through a ghastly tabloid book called F.A.T. and flung the thing in despair at the wall half a dozen times a day; played billiards at night when one had been clever enough to arrive first at the table by means of infinite manœuvring; ate like a Trojan, got dog-tired by 9 p.m., slept like a child; dashed up to London every week-end and went to the theatre, and became in fact the complete Shoeburyite. Finally I returned to the brigade extraordinarily fit, very keen and with perhaps the first glimmerings of what a gun was. A scourge of a mysterious skin disease ran through the horses at that time. It looked like ringworm and wasn’t,--according to the Vet. But we subalterns vied with each other in curing our sections and worked day and night on those unfortunate animals with tobacco juice, sulphur and every unpleasant means available until they looked the most wretched brutes in the world. Little by little the training built itself up. From standing gun drill we crept to battery gun drill and then took the battery out for the day and lost it round Aldershot in that glorious pine country, coming into action over and over again. The Colonel watched it all from a distance with a knowledgeable eye and at last took a hand. Brigade shows then took place, batteries working in conjunction with each other and covering zones. Those were good days in the early spring with all the birds in full chorus, clouds scudding across a blue sky, and the young green feathering all the trees, days of hard physical work with one’s blood running free and the companionship of one’s own kind; inspired by a friendly rivalry in doing a thing just a little bit better than the other fellow--or trying to: with an occasional week-end flung in like a sparkling jewel.