The Army Council have announced the formation of a Training
Reserve for providing drafts. The regimental reserves will be maintained, so far as possible, at their full establishment, but behind them there will be the Training Reserve, which will serve as a general reservoir for sending drafts to regiments whose reserves have failed. Recently it has been the practice to transfer trained men from one regiment to another when a particular regiment had suffered such losses that it was impossible to make them good from that regiment's own reserves. This method has been unpopular, for esprit de corps, though a quick, is a very fiery growth, and no man likes being forced to leave a unit of which he has become proud. The new system will overcome this difficulty, as a trained man in the reservoir will not belong to any particular regiment till he emerges from the reservoir. It is the necessary culmination of the logic of immense armies, among which regimental losses are bound to be of very uncertain incidence.
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