THE "SPECTATOR" EXPERIMENTAL COMPANY.
To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTAT0101 SIR,—I venture to think that Mr Bray cannot have read my letter in your issue of January 20th, or else that he must have failed to appreciate the facts related in it. No attempt has ever been made before or since the Spectator experiment to teach soldiers in six months what the men of our company learned in that time. Not only so, but in order the more clearly to prove that young Englishmen enjoy a stiff course of military training—far stiffer, though at the same time more interesting because more varied, than that given to recruits of the Regular Army—I purposely limited my powers of punish- ment for minor offences to a fine of half a crown, and beyond this could do nothing except resort to dismissal. In short, I relied from the first on the discipline of good will and upon getting hard work out of the men by making that work as attractive as possible. The results fully justified the expecta- tions indulged in respect to them. Will Mr. Bray mention any other case in which after four and a half months' training as a private soldier any recruit has made 91 per cent. of marks in a written examination in tactics, answering ques- tions more than half of which were taken from papers that had been set to candidates for commissions or to officers passing for promotion P One of those questions, by the way an outpost scheme, was taken from a paper that had been set to captains I This is merely one point of difference between the Spectator training and the normal. Others equally striking will be found in my letter already mentioned.
Yet there is nothing really remarkable in respect to the Spectator Company except the fact that similar training is not general. Give any officer who is worth his salt the same opportunities that I enjoyed—that is to say, liberty to do his work without interference with himself or with his men—and similar, and in many cases far better, results could easily be achieved. I was fifty-three years of age when I trained the Company, and bad I been twenty years younger could have done much better than I actually did. Certainly I myself never met with a Regular recruit of six months' service whose efficiency could be compared at all with the average man of the Spectator Experimental Company ; the difference indeed is as wide as between a costermonger's donkey and a Derby horse. During twenty-three years as a company officer I never had a fair chance to train men, and in training the Spectator Company I enjoyed an opportunity such as no other living officer of the British Army has ever had. Why P Ask the authorities by whom proper training of soldiers is rendered impossible. Had not my men in the Spectator Experimental Company been civilians, whom generals and regulations could not touch, I should have been powerless to train them any better than I bad trained (to the extent possible) many hundreds of Regulars.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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