He passed the examinations necessary to reduce his military service to
a minimum, and his want of any special scientific or technical
qualification and a certain precocious corpulence that handicapped his
aviation indicated the infantry of the line as his sphere of training.
That was the most generalised form of soldiering. The development of
the theory of war had been for some decades but little assisted by any
practical experience. What fighting had occurred in recent years, had
been fighting in minor or uncivilised states, with peasant or barbaric
soldiers and with but a small equipment of modern contrivances, and the
great powers of the world were content for the most part to maintain
armies that sustained in their broader organisation the traditions
of the European wars of thirty and forty years before. There was the
infantry arm to which Barnet belonged and which was supposed to fight
on foot with a rifle and be the main portion of the army. There were
cavalry forces (horse soldiers), having a ratio to the infantry that
had been determined by the experiences of the Franco-German war in 1871.
There was also artillery, and for some unexplained reason much of this
was still drawn by horses; though there were also in all the European
armies a small number of motor-guns with wheels so constructed that they
could go over broken ground. In addition there were large developments
of the engineering arm, concerned with motor transport, motor-bicycle
scouting, aviation, and the like.

No first-class intelligence had been sought to specialise in and work
out the problem of warfare with the new appliances and under modern
conditions, but a succession of able jurists, Lord Haldane, Chief
Justice Briggs, and that very able King's Counsel, Philbrick, had
reconstructed the army frequently and thoroughly and placed it at last,
with the adoption of national service, upon a footing that would have