“That’s what happens to a chap who doesn’t volunteer,” said Bayley. “Well, after the F.S. corps (we’ve about forty of ’em) come our territorial Volunteer battalions, and a man who can’t suit himself somewhere among ’em must be a shade difficult. We’ve got those ‘League’ corps I was talking about; and those studious corps that just scrape through their ten days’ camp; and we’ve crack corps of highly-paid mechanics who can afford a two months’ ‘heef’ in an interesting Area every other year; and we’ve senior and junior scientific corps of earnest boilermakers and fitters and engineers who read papers on high explosives, and do their ‘heefing’ in a wet picket-boat—mine-droppin’—at the ports. Then we’ve heavy artillery—recruited from the big manufacturing towns and ship-building yards—and ferocious hard-ridin’ Yeomanry (they _can_ ride—now), genteel, semi-genteel, and Hooligan corps, and so on and so forth till you come to the Home Defence Establishment—the young chaps knocked out under medical certificate at the Second Camp, but good enough to sit behind hedges or clean up camp, and the old was-birds who’ve served their time but don’t care to drop out of the fun of the yearly camps and the halls. They call ’emselves veterans and do fancy-shooting at Bisley, but, between you and me, they’re mostly Fresh Air Benefit Clubs. They contribute to the Volunteer journals and tell the Guard that it’s no good. But I like ’em. I shall be one of ’em some day—a copper-nosed was-bird! … So you see we’re mixed to a degree on the Volunteer side.” “It sounds that way,” I ventured. “You’ve overdone it, Bayley,” said Devine. “You’ve missed our one strong point.” He turned to me and continued: “It’s embarkation. The Volunteers may be as mixed as the Colonel says, but they _are_ trained to go down to the sea in ships. You ought to see a big Bank-Holiday roll-out. We suspend most of the usual railway traffic and turn on the military time-table—say on Friday at midnight. By 4 A.M. the trains are running from every big centre in England to the nearest port at two-minute intervals. As a rule, the Armity meets us at the other end with shipping of sorts—fleet reserves or regular men of war or hulks—anything you can stick a gang-plank to. We pile the men on to the troop-decks, stack the rifles in the racks, send down the sea-kit, steam about for a few hours, and land ’em somewhere. It’s a good notion, because our army to be any use _must_ be an army of embarkation. Why, last Whit Monday we had—how many were down at the dock-edge in the first eight hours? Kyd, you’re the Volunteer enthusiast last from school.” “In the first ten hours over a hundred and eighteen thousand,” said Kyd across the table, “with thirty-six thousand actually put in and taken out of ship. In the whole thirty-six hours we had close on ninety thousand men on the water and a hundred and thirty-three thousand on the quays fallen in with their sea-kit.” “That must have been a sight,” I said.