With a number of conditions including pay, length of service and facilities for re-employment after discharge straightened out, British youth started enrolling on Saturday for service under the new Military Training Act. Conscription has a detestable ring in British ears and therefore the new militia, as they will now be called, are in process of formation and the men will begin to join their training units on June 15. The response to the call has been eminently satisfactory in spite of the ingrained British objection to any form of compulsory service which conflicts with the Treedom of choice, but the urgency of the conditions which inspired legislative action to increase the defence forces did not fall on deaf ears. More than 220,000 men registered on Saturday—a fact which induced Mr. Ernest Brown, Minister of Labour, who handied registrations through the Labour Exehanges, to describe it as the most brilliant and successful administrative achievement in the history of the Government. On the first day, practically the entire class affected by the new act attended the registration depots and only medical examinations and other details are necessary to bring Britain's new army into being. Britain's war-time army—which sang its way in route marches and into action—composed new songs, some of them extremely vigorous in language, parodied old songs, and contributed a large number of items to that vast fund of rhythmic verse which cheers, inspires, eases tired feet and annihilates the "blues." Britain's new army will doubtless be nonetheless versatile, and will probably dig up, with many modern variations, the old music hall song which went something like this:
My name is Jimmy Fisher f One of the old militia.
The sentiment is exquisite, appropriate and capable of innumerable variants. Dyeti-in-the wool majors and other "brass hats" still think that battles are won, or armies trained, on the playing fields of Eton, or maybe the Guards parade at Whitehall, will find "the material is young and probably possessing strangely unmilitary ideas in comparison with the old tet books, but the enthusiasm with which Britain's new militia have responded shows that the spirit is not lacking.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.