ments.
Walking through the Rue Colmar, Suez, one day I met my old company
officer, then in the Royal Flying Corps. At Sidi Bishr, on the banks
of the Mediterranean, I met another. A fellow-sergeant in the
Battalion came up in the Rue Rosetta, Alexandria, and claimed me.

Out beyond the Bitter Lakes, east of the Suez Canal, I met an old
Sportsman who had been a fellow-corporal with me. Back of the Somme, a
prominent West Country Sportsman shouted a greeting to me from the
Artillery. He still remembered rousing the camp at Hornchurch one
night by sounding a hunting horn.

In an Artillery Captain in the Hebuterne sector I recognized another
member--a Machine-Gun officer rolled up smilingly on the way up the
line, and, finest time of all, I had nearly a whole day with what was
left of the old crowd when they were resting after Delville Wood.

Friendships made in the First Sportsman's Battalion were not easily
broken. We are out of it now, but--once a Sportsman, always a
Sportsman. That, at least, has been my experience.

And it must not be forgotten that to Mrs. Cunliffe-Owen is due the
credit of conceiving the idea of a battalion formed of men over the
then enlistment age, who, by reason of their life as sportsmen, were
fit and hard. Approaching the War Office, she obtained permission to
raise a special battalion of men up to the age of forty-five. This was
how the Sportsman's Battalion was actually brought into being.

+-----------------------------------------------------+
| TRAINING AT HOME--HOW THE FINISHED SOLDIER EMERGED |
| FROM THE ROUGH MATERIAL |
+-----------------------------------------------------+

TRAINING AT HOME--HOW THE FINISHED SOLDIER EMERGED
FROM THE ROUGH MATERIAL

Formed almost as soon as the war broke out in 1914, the First
Sportsman's Battalion may have provoked some criticism. It was
uncertain at first as to what branch of the service it was to
represent. Personally I thought it was to be mounted, and I was not
alone in this idea either. More than a few of us got busy at once in
settling how, if possible, we could provide our own mounts. That was
in the days when we were new to war, long before we began to know what
something approaching the real thing was.

Recruiting went on briskly at the Hotel Cecil, London, where Mrs.
Cunliffe-Owen and her staff worked hard and late. Lieutenant-Colonel
Winter, then Second-Lieutenant Winter, with his ledger-