Despite the gloom that may sometimes come to us at happenings in these present times, my firm conviction is that so long as we can produce men of the quality of those whose names and deeds are enshrined in this Roll of Honour we can go forward joyfully and with every confidence into the unknown future. And may we all be inspired to carry out our present obligations and duties patriotically, and to live henceforth lives worthy of the example of those 2,003 Artists who died for us that we as an Empire might live. This would be the best War Memorial of all. _November 11th, 1921._ EDITOR’S PREFACE. At an Army examination in 1913 the candidates, who included a few Officers of the Artists in pursuit of the coveted “Q,” were confronted with the following conundrum:-- “_Supposing a war continues--What machinery exists in England for supplying the wastage in Officers?_” Little did any of those candidates dream how soon this question would insist on an immediate answer: that within the next twelve months the old regular Army, hopelessly out-gunned, would have been sacrificed: and that the nation would be called upon to provide, and would eventually succeed in producing, from civilians, upwards of a quarter of a million new Officers. Still less did any member of the Artists then imagine that the quota of such new Officers furnished by his own Battalion of amateur soldiers--one of the original Rifle Volunteer Corps that was raised by Painters and Art students in post-Crimean days and incorporated in 1908 in the new Territorial Force as the “28th London (Artists Rifles)”--would run into five figures. Or that within a few months of the outbreak of hostilities ex-Artists (over 1,000 in number) would have been gazetted to every regular infantry regiment in the British Army including all the Foot Guards. There is no more striking incident in the whole history of the Corps, since the day when in beards and shakos our ancestors made their first appearance on parade, than the story of the first little batch of men suddenly called out of our ranks to replace, in the field, Army Officers who had become casualties. From this small beginning, extemporised to meet an emergency, sprang the huge organisation which in the words of Earl French may be said to have laid the foundation of that Officers’ School of War whose ramifications were soon to extend, not only behind all the fighting lines, but throughout the United Kingdom. By the end of the war this Territorial unit had furnished over 10,000 Officers to our big Armies, as chronicled in detail in the following pages, and had also trained in its schools in France and in England several thousand cadets from other Regiments, in addition to maintaining latterly a fighting Battalion in the line. THE FIRST BATTALION.