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The drill yard would be converted into a source of innocent delight to thousands. “Officer and gentleman” would become a phrase of meaning. I present the idea, for what it may be worth, with my compliments, to Pall Mall.

The fault of the military man is that he studies too much, reads too much history, is over reflective. If, instead, he would look about him more he would notice that things are changing. Someone has told the British military man that Waterloo was won upon the playing fields of Eton. So he goes to Eton and plays. One of these days he will be called upon to fight another Waterloo: and afterwards–when it is too late–they will explain to him that it was won not upon the play field but in the class room.

From the mound on the old Waterloo plain one can form a notion of what battles, under former conditions, must have been. The other battlefields of Europe are rapidly disappearing: useful Dutch cabbages, as Carlyle would have pointed out with justifiable satisfaction, hiding the theatre of man’s childish folly. You find, generally speaking, cobblers happily employed in cobbling shoes, women gossipping cheerfully over the washtub on the spot where a hundred years ago, according to the guide-book, a thousand men dressed in blue and a thousand men dressed in red rushed together like quarrelsome fox-terriers, and worried each other to death.

But the field of Waterloo is little changed. The guide, whose grandfather was present at the battle–quite an extraordinary number of grandfathers must have fought at Waterloo: there must have been whole regiments composed of grandfathers–can point out to you the ground across which every charge was delivered, can show you every ridge, still existing, behind which the infantry crouched. The whole business was began and finished within a space little larger than a square mile. One can understand the advantage then to be derived from the perfect moving of the military machine; the uses of the echelon, the purposes of the linked battalion, the manipulation of centre, left wing and right wing. Then it may have been worth while- -if war be ever worth the while–which grown men of sense are beginning to doubt–to waste two years of a soldier’s training, teaching him the goose-step. In the twentieth century, teaching soldiers the evolutions of the Thirty Years’ War is about as sensible as it would be loading our iron-clads with canvas.

I followed once a company of Volunteers across Blackfriars Bridge on their way from Southwark to the Temple. At the bottom of Ludgate Hill the commanding officer, a young but conscientious gentleman, ordered “Left wheel!” At once the vanguard turned down a narrow alley–I forget its name–which would have led the troop into the purlieus of Whitefriars, where, in all probability, they would have been lost for ever. The whole company had to be halted, right-about- faced, and retired a hundred yards. Then the order “Quick march!” was given. The vanguard shot across Ludgate Circus, and were making for the Meat Market.

At this point that young commanding officer gave up being a military man and talked sense.

“Not that way,” he shouted: “up Fleet Street and through Middle Temple Lane.”

Then without further trouble the army of the future went upon its way.