English Emma Blooms

I did, however, pass into the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, an institution which turned out officers for the Royal Engineers, Royal Artillery and Royal Signals. Nearly all the instruction was aimed at making the cadet a horseman because the horse, although it had proved useless in France, still ruled supreme in army circles - and a skillful gunner. We did not indeed drill with 8-pounder guns - that exercise had been recently stopped - but we learnt which fuses to put into our shells for firing shrapnel or High Explosive, knowledge that served me in no way later in life. We rode horses, which I detested, and talked horses, a stultifying topic, and when we moved off with our bicycles from the shop (RMA)grounds to the Riding Schools at the Gunner Depot at Woolwich we did so in half-sections. That archaic drill has been dead for forty years and more. Whereas the infantry and my own Corps, the Signals moved in fours (also a dead system, which gave way to threes) the gunners moved

After my Wolf Cub disappointment, I had no martial experience until I joined the Officers’ Training Corps at Wellington College. This military circus was commanded in 1923, when I first had the honour to wind on my puttees, by one of the masters, but soon a retired regular Lieutenant-Colonel assumed command. I realize now that the badges we wore in the OTC must have been the badges of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, or was that too logical? We were a ramshackle crew, a sartorial disgrace to any fine regiment, and so perhaps we borrowed some other plumage. In summer time, the OTC had a Field Day with the OTCs of the other public schools. Marlborough was one, Bradfield another. In the Michaelmas term, our Field Days took place near Aldershot on Laffan's Plain and we had a meal at one of the Aldershot Barracks. The Haversack lunch, which always included a pork pie and an apple, was usually eaten long before the battle began. The march back to a railway station behind the Corps Bugl