A note from Hongkong mentions the very interesting fact that His Majesty has appointed Major-General Sir John Fowler: to be Colonel-Commandant of the Royal Corps of Signals, and upon this honour we feel sure that a great many people in Shanghai would wish us to offer. congratulations to the recipient. Major-General Fowler is very well-known here, for not only has he twice inspected the Shanghai Volunteer Corps but through numerous. visits, either when passing through on his way to the north or with Shanghai as his objective, he has come in contact with a great many of our residents. These visits have made him as popular here as he is in Hongkong, or prior to that in Singapore when stationed there, and moreover our Volunteers are not likely to: forget either the words of en-"couragement he hag given them or equally the conception of responsibility with which he has imbued them.
Our interest in the honour which has come to Sir John Fowler, however, is not so much because of any question of local popularity, but particularly because of the record he made during the war. It is believed that he is the only officer of senior rank who held the same position from start to finish of the campaign. When war broke out he was in command of the British Army Signals and as such went to France with the original Expeditionary Force. This to start with consisted of roughly eighty thousand men, and in comparison with the other branches, the Signals would naturally be small in numerical strength. In the succeeding years the great test was to come. Month by month-the army grew larger, and a very highly technical service such as Signals had to grow with it. It is possible in three months to teach a man to use a tifle, to stand to attention and to put on his uniform so that he does not look like a, scavenger, but to suggest that he is a soldier -by the end of that time is 4
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.