Company Of Spears

This, then, is the army in which Matthew Hervey is making his way – a slow, sometimes disheartening progress, but with the advantage of knowing that he serves among friends who face the same odds, and with NCOs with whom he has, so to speak, grown up. The strength of the army was this regimental system, because the regiment was largely self-supporting and self-healing. It remains so today. It is threatened more than ever before, however. For who that has not served in a regiment, directly or indirectly, can truly appreciate its strength? Certainly not the Treasury, and, I begin to doubt, even ‘the War Office’.