Having educated yourself to choose the points of a defensive position that must be occupied if the position is to be effectively held, you have still to train your men to the work of defending them, and they must learn to be able to do without the help of a supervising officer, as will often be the case on service.
Daylight defence is almost entirely a matter of fire, the immediate object being to make it impossible for the enemy to come to close quarters. Platoon and section commanders then must be able to dispose their men with this in view to the best advantage within the limits of the ground allotted to their units, and the men must be able to site their trenches or whatever form of cover has to be constructed so as to use their rifles to the best effect. It is no good to teach men to dig trenches and make loop-holes unless they know the proper places for them. (M.F.E., 18 (7)).
At the same time, practice in digging and the use of tools is very necessary for men who are not accustomed to such work. The hands of the untrained man blister and his muscles tire under the unusual effort, while he expends much energy with results small in comparison with what he can accomplish once he has learnt to use his strength well. Moreover, a certain amount of technical skill is required in making any but the most simple cover.
To practise the execution of work, you must have ground which you are at liberty to turn up, as well as some materials for loop-holes and obstacles. These may not be obtainable at any and every parade, but you can give practice in the selection and siting of trenches on any bit of country without causing damage, the men merely spitlocking or marking with stones or anything else the position of the trenches on the surface of the ground, and describing what they propose doing.
I would, therefore, advise that you make your training consist of two parts, firstly the siting of trenches and the planning by unit commanders and men of defensive work, the choice and occupation of alternative positions, and the assumption of the offensive from the defensive, all this without actually breaking ground, and, secondly, ground and tools being then available, the performance of a course of making real cover and obstacles.
But the first part cannot be carried out unless the men have a knowledge of what trenches, loop-holes and so on are like, and the objects with which they are made. In a company of raw recruits taken from the populace at large, there will be plenty who have no ideas on the subject at all. You must then precede your exercises either by a short lecture, materials for which you will find in plenty in the “Defence of Duffer’s Drift,” and the manuals of training, or, better than a lecture, by showing them specimens of entrenchments made by regular troops. The main points to insist on are the securing of a field of fire, the necessity of concealment of the defences, the importance of head cover as a help to the delivery of an accurate fire by letting men keep the enemy in view without showing up themselves, the avoidance of enfilade fire by making traverses, or by taking advantage of intervening high ground, the provision of cover from downward shell fire by making the trenches deep and steep enough to let men stand close up to the edges, and, in the case of isolated posts and points held as pivots of a position, the necessity of preparing an all-round defence so that these pivots will be able to continue fighting whatever happens on the intervening ground. The course of work actually performed for the second part should include digging all kinds of trenches, by which the men will learn to use their tools to the best advantage, and their hands and muscles will become hardened, the use of the excavated earth to form parapets and parados (cover from fire from the rear of the trench; forty inches of earth are needed to keep out a bullet), the drainage of trenches, the making of traverses against enfilade fire, the making of loop-holes and head-cover with the aid of all sorts of materials, sand bags, brushwood and heather, straw and twigs, stones and bricks (which must be covered with earth to deaden the effects of splinters), packing boards, and so on, the concealment of trenches and loop-holes so as to be invisible to the enemy (this is of great importance), the masking of loop-holes when not in use to prevent light showing through, the making of dummy trenches and loop-holes to draw the enemy’s fire away, the improvement of existing cover, such as loop-holing walls and the use of hedges with or without ditches, making sangars, if stones are available, the making of obstacles of barbed and plain wire, and measuring and marking of ranges round a position, which should be done by some means not obvious to the enemy, and clearing the field of fire. It will seldom be practicable to obtain subjects for practical demonstration of some of the latter in peace time; people will object to their walls being experimented on or their shrubberies laid low, and so even here a description of the method will have to be substituted for actual performance. For night defence the construction of night rests for rifles is needed. The best I know is a packing case, filled with earth, with the front and rear edges notched to hold the rifle stock. The magazine is laid hard up against the outside of the rear edge and the notches, front or rear, slowly deepened with a penknife till the sights bear on the target; afterwards earth is banked up outside the box and head-cover made above. The foregoing may seem a formidable list, but they are things that will undoubtedly be required as soon as you get on shooting terms with an enemy; while if you exhaust this list and feel the want of further occupation, the Engineering Manual will supply you with further subjects for your activities.
Pending your getting facilities of ground, tools, and materials to execute work, you can proceed with the first part of training outlined above. If your non-commissioned officers have not had experience, take them out as an instructional section in the same way as when teaching outpost work, and put them through the exercises which follow. But if they are already fairly competent, take the men on parade, forming them, if possible, into not less than two sections.
Instruction in Siting Trenches.
Choose any position on undulating ground, form the men in extended order in one line in rear of it, and order them to move up, and mark where each would place his trench in order to fire on an enemy advancing from the front. In doing this it should be an invariable rule that men must lie down, bring the rifle into the firing position, look along the sights, and move forward or back till they see that they have got the best position to sweep the ground in their immediate front (see M.F.E., 31 (3)). Dead ground close to the trench gives the enemy a place in which to collect and organise an assault. Take the men in the same way on to other positions and repeat the lesson till they all understand that the first thing to be done is this aiming with the rifle to secure a good field of fire. At first halt them close to what you see is the best line, and afterwards halt them thirty or forty yards from it, and then give the order to choose sites. For instance, halt them on the top of a convex slope and let them find out that the best place to bring fire on to flat ground at its base is somewhere on the enemy’s side of the convexity, for if the trench were made on the top of the slope the ground immediately in front would be hidden by the convexity. The section commanders must help the men in choosing sites.
After the men have fixed and marked the proposed sites, let them lay down their rifles three paces in rear and kneel or lie down at the rear edge of the site as if waiting to commence work while you and section and platoon commanders go round and examine the line. Ask details from the men—how high they would make the parapet, how thick it should be, how they would make head-cover, how they would conceal the work, and so on.