During the winter months classes of instruction are held in all the training centres, the instructors being the non-commissioned officers of the permanent Militia. The amount of good done depends largely on the ability and personal effort of the commanders of the local corps. During these months such officers as can spare the time or have not already done so become, by various long and tedious processes, involving much correspondence, attached to the various barracks for instruction.
This arrangement is a very popular one for all concerned, providing as it does—
1. Frequent leave for junior officers of the permanent force;
2. An opportunity to drill men who know, by years of experience, what movements one wishes to perform, and who will (D.V.) perform them with machinelike precision despite wrong commands;
3. A pleasant change in the ordinary drill for the above-mentioned men owing to the aforesaid wrong commands.
In the evenings lectures are given by senior officers who are not young, married, or talented in other ways. These lectures comprise the hundred and one things an officer is expected to know, from "Military Law" to "Protection when at Rest." This last subject will require revision after the present campaign, it being the writer's opinion that soldiers never rest—not when there is a foot of Allied soil unturned by a shovel, at any rate.
Eventually one passes an examination of sorts and becomes a qualified officer of Militia. The questions set are not hard—they would doubtless raise a smile if handed to a first year Sandhurst man—but they present real difficulties to officers whose opportunities are limited and whose spare time is largely taken up in the hard and thankless task of recruiting.
Officers of the permanent force are, in the main, graduates of the Royal Military College, Kingston, an institution second to none in the Empire. Field officers of Militia can also take a training course at the college, but the numbers who can avail themselves of this opportunity are limited.
Our staffs are assisted by very able officers loaned from the Imperial Army in exchange for officers of the same rank attached to Imperial battalions.
But the bulk of the instructional work is done, and exceedingly well done too, by the staff-sergeant—the Sergeant What's-'is-Name of Kipling's song.