VOLUNTEERS AND VETERANS.
Sir,- I say, Punch, my boy, I wish you’d just pitch into the old pipeclay chaps a bit for the way in which they talk and write about us Riflemen. They seem to fancy all we mean is just to play at being soldiers, and that when the work comes we intend to cut it. Their minds are so jogtrotty, they can’t keep place with the Times, and the rifle movement clearly is something quite ahead of them. I believe they think the thing a sort of amateur theatricals, and imagine that we drill for the mere sake of the dress. They’ve a notion that we like to come out spiffy in our uniforms, and think that our ball practice is just for fancy-ball work. And then they drop out hints that even if it’s proved that we’ve the mind to fight, it will certainly turn out that we have not the muscles for it. How can your young fellows who never have camped out, or had anything to harden them, be fit to go a-field, and rough it like your ‘regulars?’ By Jove, Sir! Why they’d catch their deaths of cold in the first drizzle, and be sent home invalided if they marched a mile, by Jove, Sir! Without their umbrellas!
“Now I say, Punch, it isn’t fair to talk of us this way. Even were it true, I don’t quite see the fun of saying it; for the movement is well meant, if it be nothing else, and it’s not the time just now to try and throw cold water on it. But my belief is really, that there’s not a word of truth in what these old chaps say of us. I don’t believe the ‘regulars’ are tougher men than we are, or more able to fight against exposure or fatigue. I believe our constitutions are just as good as theirs: if anything, indeed, I’d rather back them to be better. As for being trained to hear hunger and privation, to my mind that’s all gammon, and against all human nature. You could no more train a soldier to put up with half rations than you could train a horse to work without your feeding him, and to live on miser’s diet of a straw and half per diem. If you wan’t a long day’s hunting, it won’t quite pay to give short commons in your stable; and the more you practise men or horses to bear hunger, the more you will reduce their power to put up with it.
“But when old fogies say that we know nothing of exposure, and that half-an-hour’s rain would be enough to make us mizzle, they seem quite to forget that we have, most of us, a pretty fair acquaintance with field sports, which, in the way of standing weather, give us pretty fair field practice. We volunteers of England, who sit at home at case, and (they say) daren’t venture out if it should rain, or blow, or freeze, get with tolerable frequency wet jackets in our sports, and yet no amount of drenching one atom damps our ardour for them. Who can say that we can’t rough it, and are untrained to bear foul weather, when he sees in black and white a sporting bit like this. I cut it from the Illustrated News the other day, and it just serves to show people that raining cats and dogs won’t save the life of foxes:-
“The sport with the Quorn has been remarkably good. A correspondent writes us as follows:- Thursday, Dec.29. The first day’s hunting after the frost; raining in torrents: we had a capital day’s sport. The meet, Switheland Stone Pits; fifty-four minutes and scarcely a cheek with our first fox, killing him in the open: twenty minutes to ground in a drain without a cheek with the second: and forty minutes as hard as hounds could race with our third fox. . . Friday, Dec.30. Found a good fox at Thorpe Trussells in the afternoon, and had a capital thirty-five minutes, running him to ground close to Prestwold House, in one of the most tremendous hurricanes and thunderstorms ever known at this time of year in the country. The lightning was most vivid. . . Tuesday, Jan.3. Staunton Harold. Had one of the fastest eighteen minutes ever known in the country, with the first fox: the hounds coursing him for tho last quarter of a mile, and killing him. A very good hunting tun of forty-five minutes with a second fox: when, the afternoon becoming so stormy, and the rain so heavy, the hounds were taken home.”
“Well-if we are not experienced as yet in standing fire, we have had some training anyhow of late in standing water. And, mind you, all these duckings were incurred for sport’s sake merely. There was no compulsion or need to have the nuisance of them. It was in pursuit of pleasure that the risk of them was run, and they who ran it, I dare wager, were not a whit the worse for it. Rheumatism is less rife with us than with the ‘regulars;’ yet who shall say we haven’t just as good a chance of catching it?
“Besides, haven’t we in some way been in training from our boyhood, and exposed to roughish usage as well as roughish weather. Life is not all smoothness at the best of public schools; there are sure to be some thorns mixed among the roses. Fagging out at cricket is tough work for young muscles, and a ’shinning’ bout at football is really no bad practice for the sharper give and take of a regular pitched battle. At all events such exercise fits for active service, and strengthens those who take to it, in lung as well as limb. Thanks to boating, bathing, and to hunting in the holidays, an Eton boy grows up as hard in sinew as a clodhopper, and is just as much accustomed to exposure to the weather.
“Why he should not therefore make just as good a Rifleman, is a problem which I leave for the old pipeclay chaps to work at, and they’ll astonish my weak mind if they can bring it to a negative. Meanwhile, thanking you for all you’ve been and done to help us,
“Believe me, me bo-o-o-o-oy,
“Yours everlastingly,
“Young Nimrod.”
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