II.
On ordinary parades, the captain of an infantry company is seldom able to get together more than a fraction of his men. The calls on the company for men for duties and odd jobs, leave and furlough, and, in the Territorial Force, the private occupations of the men, allow of only a few being assembled on any one parade. This being so, there is a temptation—sometimes yielded to by officers who have not much experience, to say to themselves: “This is rot; what can I do without any men?” Such a question is the result of confusing the individual instruction of the men with the tactical practice of the leader in handling his company as a whole. The answer too often takes the form of an hour’s close order drill or something similar, which may do some good, but not nearly as much as if the officer stoutly made up his mind to make the best of a bad job and took out those few men and did some practical training in field operations. The fewer men there are on parade, the more individual attention will the company commander be able to give them. He will be able to look at each man’s work more carefully, talk to the men and get to know their characters as soldiers, spot who are likely to make good non-commissioned officers, and coach them far more than if the whole company were on hand at once. So do not turn up your nose at a company only twenty strong, but make up a scheme of exercises to be gone through, and, since the men who are not on parade to-day will be so to-morrow, arrange to do the same exercise on two, or, if needed, three, consecutive days, so as to catch all, or, at least, most of the men, and your non-commissioned officers, who are not usually so drawn on for off-parade duties, will become well acquainted with each exercise, learn what to do and how to run things, and so become both a help to you as instructors, and themselves gain authority and power of command from the knowledge of their own competency.
It is quite likely that these exercises and the explanations given, may seem to some readers to be absurdly simple and needlessly long-winded, while there is also a good deal of repetition. To this I will make early reply that they are written for officers who are not too proud to accept other people’s advice in training a company of young soldiers of the stamp which would be forthcoming if some cause[1] or other tempted or constrained into military service that great proportion of our male population who are at present quite ignorant of a soldier’s work, and who, from apathy, or a hundred other causes, do not join the Territorial Force. Such men probably have never in their lives given a thought to soldiering. The majority of them are town born and bred, and have passed most of their lives among bricks and mortar. If they have ever looked carefully at the large or small features of a bit of country, it has been from an industrial, sporting, or, perhaps, sentimental, but never from a tactical, point of view. They have everything to learn in making use of ground for fighting. Their ideas of using modern arms are equally crude; the primitive fighting instinct will be uppermost in their minds, and would express itself in an incontinent desire to get to close quarters with their enemy, when bayonet, butt or hand grips would seem the proper way to settle the matter. A very laudable desire it is—this of wanting to close in—and one to be encouraged by every means, but however brave troops may be, they cannot in general indulge their desire to attain close quarters and the resulting facilities of fighting by the light of their natural instincts unless they have first been successful in the fire fight—the strife of the arms of artifice—which is waged by bullet and shell at distances which Nature never contemplated.
It is the artificiality of the fire fight which makes the task of turning town-bred men into skilful soldiers such a difficult and lengthy process. They must be led to look at ground in relation to its capabilities of increasing the effectiveness of their own fire and also of diminishing the result of that of the enemy, i.e., they must learn to select good fire positions and good cover. The problem of finding the latter for himself against a civilized foe begins, for the individual soldier, as soon as the enemy’s rifle fire becomes effective and compels the use by his side of extended order; this is held to be on open ground about fourteen hundred yards from the enemy’s infantry (I.T., 118 (4)). Prior to this the responsibility for cover rests with his leaders, as he will then be in some close formation. Fire positions he must choose for himself as soon as his section commander ceases to be able to indicate his wishes, or to secure combined action by the whole unit. This will probably happen at about six hundred yards from the enemy, when individual fire is expected to replace controlled fire by sections. These two aspects of fighting—the use of ground, and the use of the rifle as a far-reaching weapon of almost absolute precision, if truly sighted and aimed—are foreign to our instincts, and the average man has to be trained till he is able to override his instinct and fight an artificial war, so as to work his way to charging distance. Some men need less training than others; a stalker in a deer forest is an adept in the use of cover, and in general, country-bred men should be easier to train than town-bred, but the majority of our men being the latter, we must lay ourselves out to teach them from the beginning this business of the fire fight, since success in this is usually necessary before the assault can succeed (I.T., 121 (7)). This can only be done by training them in extended order and putting them through various exercises chosen for the purpose. Any exercise which does not in some way tend to fit men for battle is mere waste of time; aimless perambulations of an extended line fall under this category, but are quite often to be seen on parade grounds. No amount of smartness in close order drill will compensate for a deficiency of field training.