down the Channel on the evening of the 10th September 1914 in
a convoy of fourteen transports and one ammunition ship, with H.M.S.
_Minerva_ as escort--the first Territorial Division that ever left
England on active service. We sailed in a ship with a few East
Lancashire details and the Headquarters Staff of the Brigade. General
Noel Lee, the Brigadier, was an old Manchester Territorial officer, who
understood the Territorial spirit to a nicety, and his death from wounds
received in the battle of the 4th June 1915 was our irreparable loss.
The Brigade Major was a tower of strength when on Gallipoli.

Of our Battalion, who enjoyed during those shining autumn days their
first vision of Gibraltar "grand and grey," with its covey of German
prizes in harbour, and of the Mediterranean, then free of the submarine,
and who half feared that the War would be over while they were still
buried in the African desert, only a small number survive unscathed.
Many sleep amid the cliffs and nullahs of Gallipoli.

The virtues and capacities of these my comrades will always haunt my
imagination. Their psychology was extraordinarily interesting. They were
unlike the Regulars, who preceded them in the field, and to some extent
unlike the New Army, which gathered in their wake.

They had very little of the professional soldier. Only 45 among them had
ever served in the Regular Army. Their homes and callings and the light
amusements of a great city filled their minds in the same way as the
Regimental tradition and routine filled those of the old British Regular
Army. With a few exceptions, the feeling of duty was a far stronger
motive to their soldiering than any love of adventure. These Manchester
men had little of the Crusader or Elizabethan but his valour. They were,
in fact, almost arrogantly civilian, coming from a country which had
dared ineptly to look down on its defenders. The Northerner is not an
enthusiast by nature. His politics are usually limited to concrete
questions of work and wages, prices and tariffs, and he knows no
history. The Germans in August, 1914, were still "Lancashire's best
customers"--not a warlike race bent on winning world-empire by blood and
iron. The social traditions of the middle-class urban population, from
which the Territorials were drawn, had never fostered the military
spirit, nor the power to recognise and understand that spirit in others.
In such circumstances the sober zeal with which middle-aged s