liable for reserve service. The new reserve system had been tested in the 1882 Anglo-Egyptian War (when reservists fought overseas for the first time) and during the Pendjeh Crisis, when the reserves of one cavalry regiment and fifteen infantry regiments, totalling 4,681 men, were mobilised. The administrative structure of the Army had been further reinforced by the creation of regimental districts, where regular infantry regiments were paired together to share a depot and linked to the local militia and volunteer units. In the early 1880s, the next step was taken by the Childers Reforms, which formally amalgamated the regiments into a single two-battalion unit along with the militia and volunteers. This meant that, in general, one battalion of each infantry regiment was based at home with its depot and one was based overseas, which meant that roughly half the Regular Army was available in the United Kingdom for responding to any new overseas commitments. It was estimated, by the "Stanhope Memorandum" of 1891, that a mobilisation of the whole Army would provide two full Army Corps of regular troops—with units reinforced individually by reservists—and a third composed partly of Regulars and partly of Militia, with the remaining auxiliary forces used for garrisons in fixed defences at the ports and around London. Status of the auxiliary forces in 1899 The regular units were supported by their own reserves, discussed above, and three "auxiliary forces"—the Militia, the Yeomanry, and the Volunteers. In the Militia, which was administered by the Regular Army, recruits drilled for six weeks on joining, and for one month a year thereafter, a period of time which was suited well to casual labourers or agricultural workers but was impractical for urban workers or skilled tradesmen. Thirty to forty percent of recruits were young men who passed into the Regular Army, and only twenty percent served their full six-year service. All militiamen over 19 could join the Militia Reserve, accepting the liability to serve overseas with the regular army in case of war if called on to do so: in 1898, this reserve exceeded its establishment of 30,000 by 1,049 men. The force came to 123 battalions of infantry, 32 brigades of coastal artillery, and little else; there was a small group of fortress engineers and a medical staff of about 600 men, but no service arms. If the members of a battalion volunteered for overseas service it could be