Right round the arc of the salient, throughout those weeks of bloody fighting, Territorials fought side by side with the Regulars. After the battle General Prowse, commanding the Brigade to which the London Rifle Brigade, that fine London Territorial Regiment, was attached, said to me: “_If you see the L.R.B.’s, tell them from me we want them back. We all look on them as Regulars now._” The old Territorial joke died at Ypres. It lies buried in the salient in the graves where Territorials from nearly every shire in the United Kingdom are sleeping their last sleep. Our fathers who laughed at _Punch’s_ gibes at the old Volunteers, with their “sham-fights” and “field-days” on Wimbledon Common, little thought that those rotund Colonels and bewhiskered Majors and slow-moving privates were creating the tradition that was to bear our gallant Territorials with heads uplifted unflinchingly through the inferno of the Flanders plain. Do you remember Saturday afternoons in London before the war? and the processions of young fellows in odd-looking uniforms of grey and blue and bottle-green, rifles slung across their shoulders, hastening to the railway-stations for their afternoon drills? Some of us scoffed, maybe, at the “earnest” young men whose pleasure it was to “play at soldiers” ... but the shame of it came back to me in a hot flush as I stood by their graves in the salient of Ypres. The attack on the Fromelles ridge on May 9, the fighting at Festubert in May and June, the capture, loss, and recapture of the trenches at Hooge in June, July, and August, found the Territorials in action every time. Their behaviour under fire only confirmed the good impression which their début at Ypres in November had produced on the army. Its verdict was, “The ‘Terriers’ are all right.” Thus, the Regular came to admire--nay, to love the Territorial. He admitted him into the inner circle of his esteem and affection, where hitherto only the navy and the Royal Flying Corps, of our combatants in this war, have had a place. If the New Army prove themselves hardy fighters, imbued with those soldierly qualities which are the sole criterion by which the army in the field judges men, then they, too, shall find ingress into that jealously guarded preserve, the heart of the Regular. When he gives you his friendship, the British soldier is a good friend. Between some Regular and Territorial battalions bonds of the closest affection have been formed in the field. Thus, the gallant Hertfordshire Territorials, who wear the Hart badge of the Bedfordshire Regiment, are sworn brothers to the Guards, by reason of their being brigaded with the Guards in the famous Guards Brigade--the only non-Guards battalion in the Brigade--for many months. The army calls them “The Herts Guards,” and right proud the Hertfordshires are of the title.