hour or two of drill while enthusiasm is at its maximum.

Then on the required date you marshal your little force at the railway station, shepherd them into the cars, and detrain them a few hours later, under even more trying circumstances, a few miles from camp. Then, with a mixture of patience, perspiration, and profanity, you finally march into your line of tents. Here you are met with great glee by the colonel and the adjutant, who inquire blithely as to how many men you have; this may seem useless, but as the men are strung out for at least half a mile along the route it is reassuring to learn how many there should be in the little procession.

We will take it that the colonel is pleased with your reply, in which case he will tell you that his white horse has arrived, so if you will drop around ... prohibition rules in our training camps, but a good O.C. has always something under the mat.

What follows in the remaining days of the fortnight must be endured to be appreciated. At the end of that time the shepherding begins again, and for the next month the company commander scours his district, this time locating uniforms which in defiance of his last orders, and prayers, have not been turned in. Very often the man has gone West and the uniform as well. So remote are the chances of seeing either again that the expression "Gone West" has almost the same meaning as the modern soldier's "Nah pooh!"

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.

He is very carefully selected and trained, and becomes in time a walking encyclopædia of military affairs. He must be a marvel of tact and diplomacy as well, for not only will he meet the officer who knows nothing and appreciates that fact, but also that other type—not uncommon in civil life as well—the man who knows nothing yet thinks he knows all.

CHAPTER II

PETEWAWA

Petewawa is the training ground of the Canadian Field Artillery and the Permanent Force. Until very recently it was strictly reserved for them, and was regarded, by those who had not been there, as a sort of seventh heaven for soldiers. Later, when the city corps were taken there for five days one June—or was it July?—we changed our minds and decided that, geographically speaking, it was part of one of Dante's seven circles. At present it is the internment camp for enemy aliens, and if they endure it for the duration of the war the Kaiser should present them, one and all, with iron crosses.

Fifty square miles of sandy hills, covered here and there with second growth scrub, it is an ideal ground for the purpose. The temperature rises to 98° Fahrenheit most of the days in summer. What it is like in winter the writer does not know—probably 40° below zero, as our climate does nothing by halves.

The name, curiously enough, means "a sound (or music) as of water falling in the distance." Anyone who has toiled through its sands in a July sun can appreciate the subtle humour of the red man who named it. Other attractions are sand fleas, mosquitoes, and black flies, so that after passing through a fortnight in Petewawa one is versed in all modern methods of warfare, including the subterranean and the aerial.

Here the artillery do all their training—heavy and fortress artillery excepted. The latter, however, send quotas each year, though performing their actual drill in their armouries. There are other artillery camps, but none of the importance of Petewawa, for it is essentially an active service camp. Jackets are strapped to the limbers, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows, and straw hats, locally known as "cow-breakfasts," take the place of the more military cap. The gunner reverts to his original state and becomes a farmer again. And he is none the less a good gunner for so doing. Men who can understand the mechanism of a modern combined reaper and binder have no trouble learning the recoil apparatus of an eighteen-pounder gun, and for drivers one cannot find a better man than the farmer, for the man enlisting as such brings his own team with him and naturally will not neglect them.

So one sees the batteries drawn up behind cover, firing slowly and deliberately as they do now on a "quiet" day along the Western front.

A sharp report, a glint of flame and of the gun recoiling between the two men sitting on either side of the trail, and another shell is whirring on its way to the target. Almost before the recoil is finished the breech is opened and another round thrust in, and the breech closes with a clitch-clatch of its own. A few seconds later corrections come over the telephone and another shell goes speeding overhead.

With the infantry, however, Petewawa is a different matter. To them it means manœuvres; and every soldier knows what manœuvres mean. There is a popular idea that these tactical exercises are enjoyed by the officers. Perhaps they are, if perchance one is on the staff, a dizzy height the writer has not yet attained.

Let us follow the fortunes of a typical Militia battalion during the several days covered by this mysterious term "manœuvres."

The General Idea has been received the night before and duly discussed at the "pow-wow" or conference that always follows the reception of this document. Much time and whisky has been consumed, and the sum of the evening's discussion is that the General Idea is exactly the same as last year's, with the exception that the Blue Force is fighting the Grey Force this year. "Last year we had the Red Army to contend with, and the fact that they no longer oppose us is due to the annihilation they suffered"—so says the colonel. "The invasion is coming from the north—presumably the Esquimaux