Without sufficiently reflecting on what such a step involved, he had joined the militia, which was embodied in the year 1760; and for the next two and a half years led, as he says, a wandering life of military servitude.

At first, indeed, he was so pleased with his new mode of life that he had serious thoughts of becoming a professional soldier.

But this enthusiasm speedily wore off, and our "mimic Bellona soon revealed to his eyes her naked deformity." It was indeed no mere playing at soldiering that he had undertaken.

He was the practical working commander of "an independent corps of 476 officers and men." "In the absence, or even in the presence of the two field officers" (one of whom was his father, the major) "I was intrusted with the effective labour of dictating the orders and exercising the battalion." And his duty did not consist in occasional drilling and reviews, but in serious marches, sometimes of thirty miles in a day, and camping under canvas.
One encampment, on Winchester Downs, lasted four months.

Gibbon does not hesitate to say that the superiority of his grenadiers to the detachments of the regular army, with which they were often mingled, was so striking that the most prejudiced regular could not have hesitated a moment to admit it.