When the Territorials first came to France, a Regular might yet safely ruffle his nose at them and get a laugh. “T.F.” stood for Saturday afternoon soldiering and tubby Colonels and bespectacled privates. But the Territorials were used to being made fun of. In peace-time kicks and no ha’pence were their lot, and in war they did not care very much whether they got either as long as they might “have a smack at the Germans.” So they grinned and bore the chaff, and settled down in uncomfortable billets in dreary towns and dirty villages to learn what they had not learnt about war--and at first it was a good deal--in their camps at home, chafing desperately at the waiting, but doing all manner of useful jobs behind the line against the time that their services might be required for the work they had volunteered to do. Their chance came at last, as it comes to every man in the field. At a critical stage in the first battle of Ypres (if you can speak of a critical stage in a battle that was one long crisis), the Territorials I have already mentioned, horse and foot, went into action and bore themselves well. The London Scottish, particularly, fought like veterans at Messines, though I fear that the injudicious “booming” of their spirited charge in the newspapers called down on their heads a good deal of unmerited ill-will on the part of other battalions out here. Winter came and went. In March the first Territorial Division arrived in France. Others followed, and Territorial Divisions began to be employed, with due circumspection, as homogeneous units to do their share of holding our lengthening line. Even as the Territorial Divisions began to arrive, individual battalions were undergoing their baptism of fire on the bloody field of Neuve Chapelle. There were many Territorials in that hard-fought fight, and none did better than the 6th Gordons and the 3rd London Regiment, the latter executing a splendid charge that so electrified the Regulars who witnessed it, that they stood up on the parapet of their trenches and cheered as the “Terriers” swung past. The second battle of Ypres saw the début of a Territorial Division, fighting as a homogeneous unit, in the shape of the Northumberland Division, which, as I have described elsewhere in this book, though only a few days out from England, went straight into action and played its part unflinchingly. Indeed, the fight for the Ypres Salient was a Territorials’ as it was a Regulars’ battle from the inferno of Hill 60, where the Queen Victoria Rifles--“the Q. Vics,” as they are affectionately called in the Brigade--and the 6th King’s Liverpool Regiment earned the unstinted admiration of their fellow-Regulars, to the horror of the closing stages of the battle on May 13, when the North Somerset, the Leicestershire and the Essex Yeomanry showed the Lifeguards and the Blues and the Bays, the flower of our cavalry, that Yeomanry also know how to die.