There were thirteen Yeomanry regiments in the Command, all of which I saw yearly. They varied in efficiency, but all Commanding officers had loyally accepted the new idea that the Yeomanry should use their horses as a means of locomotion, dismounting to fight.
As a general rule, if an imaginary north and south line is drawn on a map through Bath, the men of the Regiments to the west of it were generally farmers or their sons, riding their own horses. The amount allowed, £3, for the hire of a horse in the west gave ample margin, while in the east of my District there was considerable difficulty in obtaining the horses, which mostly came from Livery stable-keepers in London, or on the south coast of England.
I always inspected Yeomanry in practical work, and in the first two years I looked at every man individually, finding there was much room for improvement in the saddlery, and the way in which it was fitted. Some of my readers will think this is scarcely the duty of a General, but I did it with an object, for my inspection induced closer attention by the Squadron commanders, who had evidently in some cases inspected in a perfunctory manner in previous years.
The Regiments nearly all trained about the same time, and as the Commanding officers naturally wished to have a week or ten days’ work before the inspection, I had to use two sets of horses and servants, and to travel day and night to get from Welshpool or Tenby, to say Lewes, and Shorncliffe. In my second year of Command I induced two or more Regiments to train together, and encamped with them a battery of Artillery.
I received many offers of hospitality, but was too much hurried to avail myself of them as a rule, but I spent a delightful twenty-four hours at Badminton, where there is a stately avenue, three miles long, which runs up to the house through the park, nearly ten miles in circumference.
The men of the Glamorganshire raised during the War were mainly clerks and mechanics. The Colonel, Wyndham Quinn, a good officer with a progressive mind, had taught his town-bred recruits a great deal in a limited time. The County had behaved liberally in equipping the Corps, and I found the men encamped in Margam Park, which was generously placed at their disposal by the owner, Miss Talbot. Immediately opposite to her dining-room windows there is a steep hill, for the oaks on which it is said the Admiralty, shortly before the invention of iron hulls for ships, offered her father £100,000, which he declined.
The most remarkable of the Yeomanry Regiments in the 2nd Army Corps was the North Devon. It was commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Viscount Ebrington, who if he had not been a Peer of the Realm might have been a successful man of business, for all his arrangements indicated a mastery of finance. I stayed with him one or two days on Exmoor, twelve miles north of South Molton, where he had converted a disused public-house into a fairly comfortable abode. The table arrangements were remarkable in that the whole of our dinner came off the estate on the moor. The soup made from mutton bred on the estate; the fish—trout—from a stream immediately above the house; while the joint, poultry, and indeed everything except the sweet, was produced within a few hundred yards of where we were sitting.
Next morning, when we left my entertainer, he guided me for a dozen miles over the moor to a cross track, where we were met by the huntsman of the Devon and Somerset Stag Hounds, who piloted us another ten miles, until he put us on to a bridle path leading into Minehead, where the West Somerset were awaiting my inspection. The North Devon is the only Regiment I know in which, among the officers, were to be found eleven Masters, or ex-Masters of hounds.
The Montgomeryshire Yeomanry were quite different in appearance from any others in the Command. Many understood little, and spoke no English. They performed tactical operations, however, with intuitive skill. The officers were unusually efficient, and nearly all the men were small farmers. It was remarkable that while some of the Eastern Regiments paid 4s. 6d. for their messing, the Welsh were content to expend only 1s. 6d. or 2s. per diem for their food. Colonel Sir Watkin Wynne would be a remarkable man anywhere. Possessed of great determination, he generally had his way, and being a believer in the theory that horses did not catch cold in the open, he brought into camp in 1902 eleven of his hunters, which stood in a sea of mud at the picket post without injury.
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