Accordingly, it is useful at this point to look at events before the war from a different angle of vision. Men in high places, ‘dressed in a little, brief authority,’ have always this consolation, when they contemplate their shortcomings, whether within or without their own control, that the near view is fuller than the distant. If every Territorial soldier in the West Riding had been privy to Lord Harewood’s difficulties, if every unit awaiting a headquarters had been admitted to the heart-breaking negotiations which preceded each grant of an eighth of an acre of ground, if every recruit grumbling at his boots had known how many pairs of boots were included in General Mends’ requisitions, no progress at all would have been made with the raising of the Force or its equipment. But the men who were raised and equipped were spared these disappointments and dubieties. They took their troubles in single spies, not battalions; and the single troubles which they encountered—too much rain, too few blankets, insufficient transport, and so forth—were counted as part of a day’s work, not as items in a quarterly return. They did not multiply their grievances by the calculus familiar to an Association; and it is precisely this restricted point of view which is valuable as a contrast and a corrective to Associational experience. For the final triumph of the Territorial scheme, as proved in the searching test of war, was a triumph achieved by individuals within the limits of their personal capacity. It is well to recapture the spirit in which this triumph was achieved; and, fortunately for that purpose, we can refer to a West Riding unit, whose records go back from its War Diary of 1914 to the date of its original inception in 1859. A happy feature of this possession, unique and valuable in itself, is that the unit in question became in the fulness of time the same 4th Battalion of the West Riding Regiment, whose transport left England for France first of the 49th Division[8]; and, with the added interest of that coincidence, its faded pages may be searched for evidence to the men’s point of view. It was Lord Haldane who wrote (December, 1908), in a passage referred to above[9]: ‘The abstract and dry language of Statutes and Army Orders may command our rational assent, but what Cardinal Newman was fond of speaking of as real assent it will never command unless it is interpreted in the light which the historical method throws on it.’ Such a light is thrown by this record on the history of the previous half-century.