We omit the long figures and many Army Forms with which General Mends and his Staff had to wrestle. The 5,000 blankets and 2,000 sets of saddlery, the 32,887 complete suits of service-dress, the 16,803 water-bottles and 4,242 bandoliers; these requisitions and the rest of them are as tiresome and uninteresting in retrospect as they were absorbing and urgent at the time. There is one feature of their work, however, familiar by the mystic letters S/A, which cannot be passed over without notice, for it imposed a very severe strain on the Association’s capacity for expansion. S/A stands for separation allowance, and the regular issue of this grant to the wives and dependents of serving soldiers had been assigned by the Act of Parliament as part of an Association’s duty. It was by no means an easy task. Allowance has to be made for an inconvenient distribution of functions. A soldier, whether Regular or Territorial, drew his pay from his Commanding Officer out of the monies supplied on vouchers presented to the Regimental Paymaster. In the Regular Army the same Paymaster kept the soldier’s domestic account with his wife and children or other dependents; and, though errors inevitably occurred even when the accounts were thus linked, they could be checked and more readily adjusted, inasmuch as all the information was available in the same office. For the domestic account, it should be observed, was extremely sensitive to variations in the soldier’s rate of pay, and was affected by the soldier’s ‘casualties,’ whether major ones of death or desertion, or minor ones of leave, punishment and so forth. In the Territorial Force, however, the soldier’s domestic account was kept by his County Association, presumably owing to the fact that they were more likely to be in touch with the personnel of the units which they administered. In peace-time this worked very well. When a Territorial soldier went into camp for a week or fortnight in the summer, it was comparatively a simple matter for the local Territorial Force Association to pay the corresponding days’ allowances to those whom he left at home. But the immense expansion of the Force in 1914, and the extraordinarily complicated system of accountancy, added to the distribution of pay-duties between the Regimental Paymaster for the man and the County Association for his dependent, overtook these heavily burdened bodies at a time when they were least well qualified to discharge the work effectively. They did not understand it. It was difficult to engage clerks. The Army Pay Department of the War Office could not spare sufficient trained instructors; and, generally, the urgent problems of the mobilization, equipment and (as we shall see) the duplication of the Force, tended to postpone attention to what seemed less pressing domestic matters. The early war annals of the West Riding Association are full of evidence to these conditions: