VIII.
Training is the preparation of officers and men for the duties which they will carry out in war. These duties consist in the application of the principles contained in the training manuals, and it is your business to provide concrete examples. But in these days of long range arms combats take a very long time, and you cannot expect in a parade of perhaps one or at most two hours, and with a limited extent of ground, to carry out all the varied phases of an operation which, in warfare, would take anything from six to eighteen hours to complete, and would extend over perhaps five or six miles of country, even if we limit ourselves to the extreme ranges of heavy artillery, and take no account of movements not within the range of possible fire. Therefore, in your training, you must be analytical, choosing for one parade such phase or phases as you have time and ground for, and doing the others later on. When your company knows all it can be taught thus piecemeal, it will be early enough to try to get time and ground to perform continuous operations.
For instance, infantry in the attack will usually have to go through three phases: first, the advance to fire positions; second, the fire fight (I.T., 121 (6)); and, third, the assault, which latter must be divided into the charge and the steps which follow it according as it is successful or not. You will have to train for these three phases. The first, against an enemy armed with guns and rifles, would consist in opening out from column of route into little columns—sections or platoons—and moving forward in this formation, the main object being to escape being smashed to pieces by his artillery fire before being able to do him any damage (I.T., 118 (3)). Later, you would come under his rifle fire, and your little columns must scatter out into lines of men in extended order (I.T., 118 (5)). These movements seem, and are, very easy, but still they must be practised in peace if they are to be done coolly and without confusion in time of war when the first intimation of the necessity for opening out may be the shriek and crash of what will be to most of the men the first shrapnel they have ever seen, and withal aimed at themselves. This phase requires the presence of all four platoons of the company, and so may be kept over till the men have been trained in the phase which it precedes, namely, that of the fire fight.
The fire fight begins when the attacking infantry have got as far forward as they can without having to reply to the enemy’s fire, and it is quite distinct from the preceding phase of passive endurance. Success in the fire fight is an absolute necessity for a successful assault. Possibly your enemy has prepared your success before war broke out by abstaining from training his men in musketry, but even if his shooting is inferior, the fire fight will call into play all the qualities and skill of which your men are possessed, both individually and collectively. Accordingly you should practise them in the fire fight from the opening of their fire up to the assault, first individually and then collectively.
The assault can be dissected into the fixing of bayonets with as little cessation of fire as possible, the charge itself, followed, according as it is held to have been successful or not, by the rallying of the troops, pursuit of the enemy by fire and strengthening of the captured position, or the withdrawal or such mitigation of the results of failure as may fairly be attempted. Thus, by considering the attack as made up of phases as above, it is, I think, possible and instructive to practise each one of them separately, on a short parade, and on limited ground, by placing the men in the order in which they would be at beginning of any one phase, and carrying on from there.
Before beginning any exercise, call your non-commissioned officers out to the front, and explain to them and to the men, in very full detail, what the exercise is intended to be, what points particularly require attention, how you want it done, and the sequence of events, if it involves combined action between the different units; whether the company is supposed to be acting by itself or as part of the battalion, and, if the latter, whether your side are having the support of artillery fire or not, where the enemy is, and what he is, i.e., is he infantry only, or has he also cavalry and guns, what he is supposed to be doing, attacking, defending, retiring, marching, or what. Deal with all such points before you start, otherwise you will find your non-commissioned officers and men filling in the blanks each according to his own bent of imagination, and everyone in consequence playing at a different game. To be thus able to define the scope and arrangements of the exercise, you must have it clearly planned out in all detail in your head. This you should do if possible the day before the parade, so that you will have the thing well thought out, and events marshalled in logical sequence.
At all exercises, if possible, have the enemy represented by a skeleton force, as directed by T. & M.R., 48, a few actual men with blank cartridge, and a red range flag or two to roughly define the enemy’s position. Use for this purpose old soldiers, if you have them, or, at least, men who have already performed the exercise you mean to do, and it is better to take one or two men from each platoon than to send off a whole section, and so break up the company organisation. Six or eight men are quite enough to form any skeleton enemy that is needed for a company to manœuvre against. You must give the skeleton enemy definite orders as to what they are to represent, where they are to go, and what to do and not to do. If they are given at all a free hand, especially if under the enterprising British subaltern, they are very apt to indulge in far-reaching manœuvres, and subject you to sudden raids and onslaughts which upset your scheme for the parade, and leave you no enemy at the very point you wished to have him. If you cannot arrange for a skeleton enemy, at least never fail to indicate some position as supposed to be held by an enemy. If your exercise ground is limited in extent, fix the enemy’s position outside it, regardless of whether you have, or have not, licence to traverse the intervening space, so as to avoid carrying out your exercise within impossibly close range of the enemy. In default of a skeleton enemy to provide you with a target, tell your men to aim at any members of the public who are about the enemy’s position. This is better than snapping at inanimate objects, as it gives more interest and so keeps up careful aiming. As regards the general method of training, follow commonsense and the manuals, and work from individual up to collective, bearing in mind always that collective work is built up of the work of the individuals who throughout have to be kept up to the collar by the various arts which I have touched on. The less of the iron hand that is shown the better.