Territorial battalions have supplied the army with chemists and doctors and fly experts, with map-drawers and photographers and electricians, and with an extraordinary variety of dramatic and musical talent for concerts at the front. At the fortnightly “smokers” of the Machine Gun School, which are by far the best in the field, territorial battalions supply a good proportion of the contributors to the programme. The Artists’ Rifles are particularly prolific in platform talent. They possess three much sought after performers, in the person of a lance-corporal (in private life a broker in the rubber market, I believe), who is a most amusing “drawing-room entertainer” after the style of the late George Grossmith; a transport sergeant (he forsook the law for the war), who has an extensive repertory of Kipling recitations; and a sergeant-instructor of machine-guns, who is the perfect accompanist and a really first-class musician to boot. These Territorial battalions are full of experts. The beautifully finished sign-posts in Plug Street Wood are the work of Territorials, and a familiar landmark in this historic part of the line is the exquisite little cemetery laid out by a famous Southern Territorial battalion in a pretty little wooded glade, where the gallant Lieutenant Poulton Palmer, the international Rugby footballer, lies. The Adjutant of a certain Territorial battalion of the Leicesters is a quarry manager in civil life. When last I saw him, at tea in a Flemish farm-house, he was proposing to utilize his expert knowledge of pumps for the benefit of his battalion’s section of trenches. In the field I have seen Territorials from England, Scotland and Wales--raw troops fresh from home and hardened veterans of half a dozen fights, bank clerks from Cornhill, miners from Cardiff, gillies from Inverness shire, ploughboys from the Mendips. I have seen them in rain and shine, in the fire-trenches and behind the lines. And seeing them I have marvelled at the equalizing influence of war that has moulded all these men, torn from their civilian callings--as widely differing as the poles are asunder--to the same stamp of cool, courageous fighters who will endure to the end.