The military confusion at home during the period prior to the passing of the first National Service Act, and prolonged to some extent through 1916, though it never affected the keenness and enthusiasm of the 2nd Line troops themselves, has yet to be taken into account in any impression which may be given of the conditions under which training was carried out. Reference to this factor will be found in the Memorandum on the Territorial Force written by General Bethune at the War Office, of which mention has been made before.[41] The then Director-General remarked: ‘Great difficulty was experienced in training, as, with so many new Armies to be formed, the majority of capable instructors went to them, and our 2nd Line Territorial Force had to train themselves as best they could. The result,’ he added, ‘was extraordinarily good and surprised anyone who had anything to do with it.’ We shall reach the element of surprise in due course. Here, for the moment, we are concerned with the ‘great difficulty’ which was encountered, and more particularly with those aspects of the difficulty which lay outside the cognizance of the Territorial Force personnel, or, at any rate, outside their control. Let us go back to first principles. The idea of a voluntary Army, despite the wastage of war and the unequal distribution of patriotic sentiment, or of the capacity to respond to it, was still, late in 1914, a sacred article of British faith. Another accepted article, if not of faith, at least of British practice, was the enlistment of that voluntary Army on a County basis. This procedure, which was laid down in Section IX. (I.) (a) of the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act, followed a similar provision in the Militia Act of 1882, and, tracing it back to that source, we discover that its primary cause was ‘to estimate the extent of the County’s liability in the event of the ballot being enforced.’[42] The tradition survived the ballot, and the rule of County enlistment was incorporated, as we have seen, in the organization of the Territorial Force. This rule worked well enough in peace-time, and might conceivably have continued to work well if it had been the only rule to be applied when war broke out on a scale not dreamed of by the authors of the Act of 1907.[43] But, historically speaking, and without attempting to judge the issue, it was decided very early in the war to vary that rule, and to raise recruits for the new Armies on a system which crossed the method handed down to the Territorial Force by the old Militia and Volunteers. The Counties were reaped of their best men by a Secretary of State who knew not Lord Haldane. The first hundred thousand disappeared into the vast abyss of war from every town and village in the country. Members of Parliament came down to recruit for Kitchener’s Army, and forgot, or were not reminded by the Mayor, of the claims of Haldane’s Force. Bonds of brotherhood in arms, by trades, professions, even by