The members not in uniform wore a red brassard with "G.R." in black.

The facetious all over the country called them "Gorgeous Wrecks." I must confess that on their first few parades they did not look very military.

Their composite paunchiness, beardedness, scragginess, spectacledness, impressed me unfavourably when, from my Hosea-carriage, I first beheld them.

Marigold, who was one of the first to join and to leap into the grey uniform, tried to swagger about as an instructor.

But as the little infantry drill he had ever learned had all been changed since the Boer War, I gathered an unholy joy from seeing him hang like a little child on the lips of the official Sergeant Instructor of the corps.