However, the long-service man is by no means wholly extinct in the army in the field, and in many battalions his influence lingers strong. In battalions of the New Army it is maintained by old soldiers who have re-enlisted for the duration of the war, and upon whom, with their tales of service in Malta, Gibraltar, Aden, Egypt, and India, their comrades, fresh from civil life, seek to mould themselves. But for all that, the soldier of Kipling’s stories is disappearing from the army as the fighting unit, mainly because his numbers are gradually becoming extinct through wastage of war, but also because the character of the army is changing. Under the influence of the introduction of so much new blood, the army has ceased to be the close corporation it was, the kind of exclusive association that, by its terms of service and its small numbers, was able to select its material and shape it to its own form. It has become more universal in character, more identified with the nation at large. I believe that the change is only temporary, and that, as far as one may look into the future at the present juncture, our military traditions are strong enough to mould any amount of new material into the old form: moreover, the men of the Expeditionary Force, now prisoners in Germany, will alone suffice to furnish the backbone of a new army on the old lines after the war. The introduction of conscription would, of course, sound the knell of the army as we knew it in the past. The regimental officer of the type that Sandhurst and Woolwich turned out is gradually being replaced by the subaltern from civil life. In the new conditions, it will be impossible, I imagine, to maintain to the full the old atmosphere of our officers’ corps, in which patriotism and pride of regiment were rivals in the affections. The subaltern of the New Army no longer talks of his regiment by its old army number, nor does he recognize in the men around him those little symbols that express our great military past, the red beckle of the Black Watch, the Sussex plume, the eagle of the Scots Greys, nor could he tell you why the officers of the Royal West Kents drink the King’s health sitting, and the Grenadier Guards not at all. We are here confronted with the introduction of an entirely new type into the army. In the boys fresh from a Public School and in the ’Varsity graduates the army draws on a class that has always supplied a large proportion of officers, but in addition to these there is found in the New Army the vague young man--_le petit jeune homme_ that Tristan Bernard writes of so delightfully--who has never done anything particular until his response to the call of duty pitched him into a period of intensive training among men to whom the army and its great traditions meant as little as to himself.