Very robust health is not necessary as long as the above conditions are fulfilled, and pistol shooting in the open air may be of benefit to a man who is in too delicate health to be able to play even a gentle game.
The old, evil days when a sportsman was not considered acting as a man unless he drank several bottles of port each evening and had to be carried home in a wheelbarrow are now, happily, gone for ever. Putting drink before all else used to be a constant annoyance. A drunkard was not content till he had reduced every man near him to the same disgusting mental and physical condition.
If others would not drink with him, he had the utmost contempt for them. Called them “milksops,” “drinkers of slops,” “unsociable,” and “too proud.”
I always refused to go out shooting with such people. Besides being very dangerous, they never would do anything but drink. Sport was a mere excuse for going out “on the drink.” Every occasion was made the excuse for a drink. With such people drink was the great event of the day, and if a stag was shot, there was a ceremony to be gone through of everyone drinking whiskey neat to “more blood.”
At lunch, after an interminable time spent in drinking—they eat little—the forester who had been fidgeting to get off, would come up at last and timidly say, “I’m thinking the sooner we go the best, I am seeing a verra heavy beast in yon corrie, with the glass.”
The “sportsman” would answer, “Is there? open the other bottle of champagne and help yourself, it won’t hurt you, there is not a headache in a dozen bottles.”
Drink used to pose as the twin brother and boon companion of sport.
In these days drink is known as the sportsman’s deadliest enemy.
I consider even minute medicinal doses of alcohol are deleterious to shooting, entirely apart from drunkenness. Admiral Jellicoe, speaking at Gibraltar in 1911, quoted with approval a statement of Captain Ogilvy, the noted gunnery instructor, to the effect that carefully compiled statistics revealed the fact that the shooting efficiency of the men was thirty per cent. better before than after the issue of the grog ration ... one eighth of a pint of rum liberally diluted with water.
In Bavaria the Minister of War carried out tests as to the effect of alcohol on marksmanship during twenty days on twenty marksmen (shortly before the war), 80,000 shots were fired, and the trial showed according to the report of Professor D. R. Kraeplin, that the consumption of forty grammes of alcohol, corresponding to the amount contained in one and three quarters pints of beer, made an average reduction in marksmanship of three per cent. The effect was most perceptible twenty-five to thirty minutes after absorbing the alcohol.