The Latest in Bottlenecks About nine months ago the War
Office initiated a splendid economy measure in the shape of an order, applying to the Territorial as well as the Regular Army, and decreeing that nobody in a unit was to make a trunk call except the com- manding officer or the adjutant. A reminder that this order is in force has just been issued. It is not easy to think of any single measure which would do more to aggravate the difficulties of the average Territorial unit. Take the fairly representative case of an infantry battalion, with a strength of about 650 all ranks and six outlying drill-halls situated at an average distance of fifteen miles from battalion head- quarters, where there is a small, underpaid clerical staff to cope with a heavy and increasing volume of paper work. There is no clerical staff at the company drill-halls, each of which is manned, more or less permanently, by one regular N.C.O. and visited on two or three evenings a week by the company commander. When a skeleton staff scattered over a wide area has to arrange the training and look after the equipment, documentation and pay of 650 part-time soldiers, a wide variety of problems automatically arises. Whether they are big problems or small problems, in about eight cases out of ten the quickest and surest way to solve them is to sort them out over the telephone. An extravagant alternative is to get into a vehicle and motor thirty miles; or of course you can in theory write a letter and wait for the answer. So funda- mental is the need for day-to-day intercommunication by tele- phone in most T.A. units that • a serious attempt to enforce this restriction or its use would merely lead to an arrangement whereby the adjutant rang everybody up at a fixed time every day in case they wanted to speak to anyone at battalion head- quarters. This would be unlikely to effect an economy.
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