The sergeant had finished his job for that day. "Platoon," be said, then changed his mind.
The name of his force had recent I y been changed; that evening he was no longer giving
orders to the L.D.V.the Local Defence Volunteers. He gave, instead, to his 15 men, their new
name: Home Guard-dismiss !
So I heard, for the first time, words that many of us have beard this-month with the feeling: it may be for the last time. The Home Guard is dismissed,stands down. The "old soldiers who never die have simply faded away .
In the summer of 1940, when I first beard the order, "Home Guard-dismiss !those 15 Sussex men and their 1,500,000 colleagues throughout Britain had a higher proportion of old soldiers among them than would later have been the case. I am not forgetting the value of the reinforcement of youngsters who came in later, nor the va1ue of new and "young" ideas in the development of the Home Guard, when I pay tribute first and mainly to the old soldiers of1 914-18 within its ranks. They, when Britain stood a1one, were the revetments of our hasty fortifications, the solid strength round which a force was built.
The Sussex sergeant and one of his men wore the ribbon that means 1914. I tried to remember Housman's epitaph on the "army of mercenaries" that fought at Mons, the Marne, and at the first Ypres: Their shoulders held the sky suspended. I marvelled that shoulders of any group of men should be so strong that twice, with a generation's length of years between, they could carry part of that weight. Do you remember the smiling perfection of 1940'S
summer ? The best invasion weather, since the year 1066 we joked,. To which the answer was, of course : In my company of the Home Guard, we've got fellows who, can remember farther back than that.
Old soldiers from a past war, badly uniformed and very badly armed, salting a lot of civilians with no military training at all, could have been not much more than a very bad joke. And we had time in that disastrous and glorious year, between the fall of France and the opening of the attack on Russia for good jokes en bad jokes ones, but not for the very bad joke of a useless Home Guard. They could have been a pathetic pretence, a hopeless collection of cripples gathered to act as cannon fodder a Volksturn.

Home Guards :types of service in which men of all walks of life took equal part.

Capt.Lord Camoys .Sixty-one-year old peer of the realm is the administrative officer of E Coy	Major E.L.Elliot The battalion Medical,adged 69,a doctor working in the district.	Lieut.W.Elliot. Forty-eight-old factory forman. Served for over four years in the last war.
Sgt. Major T.W.Anstead. The permanent staff instructor,aged45 :a regular soldier,officialy attached to the H.G.	Pte.L.R.Wise.Youngest member of the company: joined in 1941 when only 15 years old.	The C.O. Reads the King's Message Major N. P. Gold delivers His Majesty's order Listening is the Battalion C.O., Col.L.W. Kentish, D.S.O.

They were not. Almost from the beginning they were a serious reinforcement for our scarcely better armed Regular divisions. Within a few months, they were a force capable holding thousands of Mafekings or Tobruks across the path of any Nazi invasion-and capable of doing more than that.
I had gone to Sussex, that day in 1940, to see and to hear for myself what an average old soldier made of the instruction we were giving at Osterley, the private and unofficial school for the Home Guard,started trough the generosity of Edward Hulton and lord Jersey. I had been well satisfied. After describing minutely and patiently to his 15 men the
measures for the defence of their village that were in hand ,the sergeant paused. He had gone through the list a road-block; meadows to be made difficult for planes to land on :an outlying position by the hill and a covered way by which the riflemen holding it could slip back to their street-fighting positions in the village; his own "reserves" (two men) ; reports, supplies, contact with Regulars-all the rest. Then he spoke again :
"You I 5 men, if two German army corps come up the road from Brighton-we may get pushed
around a bit. Then when we've pulled ourselves together, either hereabouts or out at Wilson's farm, we've got to counter-attack.
That was when I decided that the training we were starting at Osterley had certainly begun to soak right in all right.
The story of these 15 men, most oft hem were aged nearer 70 than 17, preparing to "counterattack" against two German army corps, came pretty into my lectures to Home Guard and Regulars after that. I hope it was clear enough to those who heard it that it was, in a way, the most serious story that could be told: it summed up much of Britain of 1940 and 1941. And with the careful, serious practical instructions that my sergeant gave on ways
in which any men who remained alive could fight on, though the enemy had overwhelmed their village, it summed up the new knowledge, the new idea of war, that the Home Guard can claim with pride was first developed, in Britain, in its ranks.
That idea of war is not new to us now. We have read, since then, the Russian report that their
"partisans" put out of action 30 German divisions during the three years in which German armies stood on their soi1. We know that the French a Maquis played an immense part in the liberation of their country, and Tito's men an even large part in Jugoslavia. Wbat in 1940, were to some, dangerous and heretical novelties in training for warfare, are commonplace now. A1l the more honour to the old and bold" who were bold enough, four years or more ago, to learn eagerly, and to develop with ingenuity, these methods of "guerrilla" or "irregular" warfare-methods which have now become to so great an extent basic tactics of Commando units of Regular armies.

The king takes the Home Guards Farwell salute The March Past at the Hyde Park Saluting Base a Growd of a million Londoners watched the final parade of the Home Guard. Seven thousand men, sent from every command in , marched through London as representatives of that million and a half of ordinary men who have given their time and energy so freely- to be ready.

The Tactics Taught At Osterley

I have had the luck to read General Wingate's reports from Abyssinia, and to talk with him between his Chindit expeditions. And the luck to be able to cross-question General Velebit, of Marshal Tito's army. From these, and from Russian and French reports, I am certain that the principles developed in the Home Guard's training were sound, modern, and imaginative yet practical, and (when, applied elsewhere) successfu1. And I cannot recall methods or basic tactics of this sort of war, from the first battle for Odessa, in 1941, to the rising of Paris
this autumn, that were not outlined at Osterley. It is almost with irony that I watched recently a film of the freeing of Paris. Perhaps at last, I thought, it will be accepted as a fundamental axiom about tanks that wherever air goes in ,flame can go in.
Old soldiers, then, but with an unmatched spirit and a heartening eagerness for new ways of war.
And yet, to those of us who knew what our own people had done and could do, how little
was really new! Baden Powell taught us field craft and the defence of towns and villages :Lawrence of Arabia was our tutor in what the Chinese call the short attack. We were only applying, in new terms, tradition that goes back in our history beyond the wars of Napoleon ,the volunteers raised by William Pitt and trained by Sir John Moore.

I am not sure how clearly or consciously that was at any time the aim : to combine the traditional levy of the English shires, the rising of the Scots clans or of the "trained bands" of our cities centuries ago ; to combine the ways of fighting taught by Robert Bruce, or even Hereward the Wake, with the new knowledge of weapons and tactics gained in Spain and Poland and before Dunkirk. Hut that was what was done. And from its doing, the British Army gained more than a reinforcement.
Of course, the immense and necessary changes in our Regulars' training and ideas of warfare, between Dunkirk and D-Day, are mainly the Regulars' own achievement. Hut in some of these changes, the Home Guard were partners in the pioneering that had to be done, and useful rivals in testing out the results.
"War," said a realist, "is mainly a matter of waiting and making lists." The Home Guard waited. The officers of the Home Guard made lists millions of them, far too many. Parades became, to some, an intolerable boredom; the curt order to stand down was welcomed with a sigh of relief .
What had been waited for so long had never come. It seemed and anti-climax, an inglorious ending.
But I look back to the very first article I wrote in Picture Post for the Home Guard. At the beginning of it is a snatch of the song that volunteers sang a hundred and fort y years ago, waiting for the invasion of Napoleon's Grand Army :
We be the King's men, hale and hearty.

Marching to meet old Bonaparty,
If he be seasick, says No, No,
We shall have marched for nothing-oh
For nothing-oh!