The unit was thus made up, even
then, of elderly men and of "crocks." (This was before the start of the
Derby Scheme and, of course, considerably before the introduction of
Universal Service.) Perhaps it is allowable to point the moral against
the "shirker"-discovering armchair patriots aforesaid: that no small
proportion of our unit was composed of over-age recruits who, instead
of informing the world at large that they wished they were younger,
"And, by Gad, I envy the lads their chance to do _anything_ in the
country's cause," did not rest until they had found an opening. In my
own hut there were two recruits over sixty years of age. Elsewhere in
the unit there were several over fifty. Our mess-room at meal times was,
and still is, dotted with grey-haired heads, not of retired army men
rejoined, but of men who, previous to the war, had lived comfortable
civilian lives. At a later date, when the few fit men that our
combings-out revealed had gone elsewhere, the unit was kept up to
strength by the drafting-in either of C3 recruits or of soldiers who,
having been at the front and been wounded, or invalided back, were
marked for home duty only.
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