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