From ‘How to Use Our Home Guard Volunteers’, The Spectator, 19 June 1915:
There is a technical objection which for the moment seems to raise an insuperable barrier against the military authorities getting what, in many cases, they so eagerly desire, and against the Volunteers rendering the aid which they are equally anxious to render. Clause 6 of the War Office letter of November 19th, 1914, to Lord Desborough, the letter which regularized the position of the Volunteer Training Corps and contains the War Office recognition of all those affiliated to the Central Association of Volunteer Training Corps, and is also the charter of the Volunteers, makes the following stipulation: “No form of attestation involving an oath is permitted.” In other words, the Volunteers, however willing, are not allowed to give, either temporarily or permanently, the kind of obligation without which the military officers under whose command they would pass declare, and, as we have shown, very reasonably declare, that they cannot employ them.
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