“The conduct and bearing of these units under fire, and the efficient manner in which they carried out the various duties assigned to them, have imbued me with the highest hope as to the value and help of Territorial troops generally.”--FIELD-MARSHAL SIR JOHN FRENCH. The first Territorial troops that I saw in the field was the North Midland Division. Neither they nor I will probably ever forget that meeting, not because either of us made an unforgettable impression on the other, but by reason of the circumstances in which it occurred. It was a wet and cheerless March afternoon, the hour when the greyness of weeping spring is succumbing to the shades of evening. The Division, fresh out from England, had just arrived at its first billets in the field in and about the little village of Merris, which lies a little off the beaten track between Hazebrouck and Bailleul. A battalion--from the Midlands--was halted in the village, a dirty little jumble of white houses straggling along a single main street with a few feet of sidewalk, a cobbled roadway, a totally undistinguished church, a weather-stained and sordid-looking _Mairie_. The rain blew hither and thither in cold, soaking gusts, and pavements and roadways were slippery with sticky, yellow mud. The men of the battalion had been allowed to break the ranks. They overflowed in that squalid village street. They had evidently come a long way, for most of them were soaked to the skin, and their boots and puttees were all smeared with clay. They stood about in groups in the desultory fashion of the Briton in a strange place, or pressed together outside the village shops and stared through the tiny windows at the heterogeneous jumble of articles within--loaves of bread, tins of sardines, bootlaces, pats of butter, picture-postcards, and, as a reminder that British troops had passed that way before, boxes and packets of English cigarettes. It did not need the bronze “T” on collars and shoulder-straps to tell me that these were not Regular troops. These men were prone to silence, rather shy, a trifle helpless, as they stood about the rain-swept street, waiting for their officers to show them their billets, to tell them what to do. They seemed to be drinking in their impressions of this, their first experience of life in the field, and I doubt that they will ever fade from the minds of those men, so cheerless was their welcome at Merris. Regulars would have made themselves at home on the instant. They would have found a fire at which they might have dried their sodden overcoats and brewed themselves a drink of hot tea in their capacious pannikins. If fire or warm drinks were not forthcoming, they would have ferreted out for themselves a dry corner under a roof somewhere, and gone to sleep with that infinite capacity for sleeping at odd moments and in queer places that is peculiar to the British soldier.