430 
COMMENDED ESSAY, 1899. 
Trained men. Again when a man is trained and dismissed he should 
not be sent to standing gun drill, simply in order to do it. If he is 
slack or does not know it let him have drill ad nauseam till he does. 
Bu* if he does know his drill, he should be put to do something else. 
It would be infinitely better to have a. man cultivating his garden of 
a morning than to have him standing behind a \o u gun wondering 
when his drill will be over and he can get away to his canteen. When 
a man is a trained gunner, he should be taken once or twice a week 
to a big parade to show him that he is part of the machine; and on 
the other days, let him be practised in has speciality, whatever it may 
be, signalling, laying or range finding, and in the time which is left he 
should be taught a trade, or to till the soil, so as to make himself a 
good labourer, one who can, when he leaves the service, earn his living 
with his spade, or in some other way. A trained gunner who attends 
two parades a week, who has his hands hard, and who is not afraid of 
a day’s work, is a far better soldier than a man who has been marked 
up in the drill record as “ present ” every day at standing gun drill. 
Thursday. With trained men five working days are ample in the 
week, and Thursday may well be set aside as a day of leisure. 
Officers and men should be encouraged to develop their individualities 
and tastes, and one day in the week given up to fishing, shooting, boat¬ 
ing, football or cricket, is not by any means a day lost, 
objections. It will be well to refer to what appear to be objections 
to the system which is proposed. First, a major at home would not 
care to have a subaltern coming to him for two years, and would not 
take pains with him, knowing he was to lose him as soon as he became 
valuable. 
At present there is undoubtedly as already stated, a great desire on 
the part of senior officers to serve at home, and if a man has the good 
fortune to serve at home, he must put up with the counter-balancing 
hardships. If a major was ordered abroad he would at least have the 
satisfaction of knowing that he had reliable officers and a trained com¬ 
pany to work with. 
Second, that the young officers crowding into the home companies 
would reduce their effiiciency. The young officers must be somewhere 
and at present in companies abroad by reason of sickness, leave and 
transfers, it often happens that the command of a company is thrown 
on the shoulders of an officer of less than three years’ service, and this 
state of things cannot be rectified in less than two months. At home, 
should it occur, a few days at most, will set it right. 
Third, that a man cannot do two things at once, i.e. be a specialist 
and a company officer at the same time. This objection would never 
be put forward by a company officer and could not be upheld by any¬ 
one. If the specialist were taken for two or three hours in the morning 
for his company work, he would have all the rest of the day for his 
special work and classes; and he would have to learn to apportion 
his time so as to make things fit in. 
An objection might be put forward to the systematic training of 
companies, that if the enemy attacked at the beginning of the syste¬ 
matic course, the company would not be in a state to meet him. The 
