The Army of India was little understood in Great Britain. At the commencement of the war I read, not with any surprise but with considerable amusement, accounts of the composition of the Army Corps. A great part of the public appeared to think that Indian brigades and divisions were composed of Sikhs and Gurkhas alone, and did not trouble about any of the many other races of India; nor were they aware that in each brigade was a British battalion. As for cavalry, of course the “Bengal Lancers” were the only specimens known to them; a Sikh squadron being described by one correspondent as “fierce turbaned Moslems on fiery Arab steeds.” The artillery, which was composed of the finest British batteries in the Army, superbly horsed, was reported by one paper as consisting of “mountain guns borne on Abyssinian mules”; and a foreign paper, writing of the arrival of the Corps at Marseilles, solemnly announced that “this Corps has been raised and equipped entirely at the expense of three great Indian Princes, who are now occupying the finest hotels in Marseilles. Their names are Prince Sikya (evidently a corruption of Sikh); Prince Gorok (Gurkhas); and Prince Balukin (meant for Baluchis).” The Germans at any rate were to be rudely awakened. The shell-torn trenches and blood-stained fields of Neuve Chapelle were to prove to them that, given a fair chance and a sufficient artillery support, the men from the banks of the Ganges and Indus, from the plains lying to the south, and the Highlanders of Nepal and North-West Frontiers, could take as fierce a toll on the day of battle as their white comrades. The Army of India in 1914 was trained for a Frontier war or minor oversea expeditions, and for these purposes was to a certain extent sufficiently well armed and equipped, but by no means fully so. The training had been improved out of all recognition since Lord Kitchener formed a General Staff and instituted his “Test”; at the time a much debated innovation, but one which, in my opinion and that of many of those best qualified to judge, was a turning point in the field training of the Army. It had at least set up emulation and given a chance to all classes of which that Army is composed, so that even Corps in outlying unknown stations were brought into the competition, and the spurt thus given to military training had far-reaching effects.