Rumour says that the military age will be raised to
forty-eight or fifty, and possibly even to fifty-five. Men who have hitherto regarded themselves as of over military age must make up their minds that for the rest of the war Great Britain must support something like a Landsturm. The Frenchman up to the age of forty-eight was liable to military service at the beginning of the war. That is to say, men who were called up at the age of forty- eight then, still find themselves soldiers though they are over fifty. Military and medical opinion agrees that few men are of much use in the front line over the age of forty. They cannot stand the wear and tear, and soon find themselves in hospital and become an expense and an encumbrance. In the French Army nearly all the men over forty-six years of age have been recalled om the front and placed on lines of communication and at the bases. The duty of the older men here will probably be in the main to form a Home Defence Army and to release the younger men. To an appreciable extent we know that it will be necessary to judge the older men not so much by the dates of their birth as by their degrees of physical fitness, which vary very much between the ages of forty and fifty-five. But after making the necessary allowances for this discrimination, we hope that the fittest of the older men will not necessarily be taken out of the country. We do not want the Landsturm at home to be merely battalions of crocks.
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