stationed at home, or on garrison duty abroad, or with an Expeditionary Force. A little later (4) steps were taken to weed out the Home Service personnel still remaining with the 2nd Line units and to distribute them into newly-constituted Home Service units, and finally (5) the National Reservists were formed into Supernumerary Territorial Force Companies, with a fixed establishment of about 120 all Ranks, for the protection of Lines of Communication and Vulnerable Points at home. To complete a brief account of a long process which was not worked out with a very clever perception of its intention from the start, we may add that these Supernumerary Companies were transformed by Royal Warrant, in 1916, into the Royal Defence Corps, when they passed out of the County administration. But all through 1915 the position was extraordinarily complex from an administrative point of view. Territorial Force Associations were responsible for maintaining their 1st Line units overseas, their 2nd Line units at home, their 3rd Line Draft-producing Depots, their Provisional Home Service units and their Supernumerary Territorial Force Companies. In justice to the West Riding Association, which was hard put to it to keep an even keel in this welter of conflicting currents, we may examine the policy which they pursued, in somewhat more detail. From the first they declined to be hustled. As early as October, 1914, the Chairman, Lord Scarbrough, remarked in his Quarterly Report to members of the Association, that ‘In consequence of the great difficulty of obtaining supplies of clothing, boots, necessaries, etc., and the lack of Officers and qualified Instructors, it was considered best not to push recruiting for the Reserve units, but to endeavour to raise them very gradually as Instructors and clothing and equipment could be provided. By so doing,’ he pointed out, ‘the efficiency of these units is not likely to be retarded, and the waste of time and discouragement entailed by collecting large numbers of men without Officers, Instructors, arms, uniform, boots, or any provision for their well-being, has been to a large extent avoided.’ But his policy, however sound at the outset, could not be indefinitely maintained. The time came, and it came more quickly than some even of the shrewdest of observers had foreseen, when the Reserve, or 2nd Line, units had to be allowed to recruit up to full establishment, despite those deficiencies in equipment which so seriously embarrassed their Commanding Officers, in the urgent work of training them for service overseas. So the ‘large numbers’ continued to come forward, and might not be refused. As early as November, 1914, for example, the 2/6th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment had a strength of over 1,400, and this splendid record was not unique in the 2nd Line Division. The real problem faced by General Trotter in the Spring of 1915 was not shortness of numbers, though this, too, became a