When you have put non-commissioned officers and men through the preceding course, plan some scheme on the lines of the defence of Duffer’s Drift, to deal with a company isolated and beyond reach of immediate reinforcement. Any bridge over a railway line, a group of buildings supposed to contain stores, or a ford or bridge over a river, will provide you with an object to defend. Choose a line of defence round it and determine what are the essential pivots to be held. To do this, so as to furnish an instructive lesson, it will usually be necessary for you to pay a visit to the place by yourself and formulate your proposed defence before bringing the company on to the ground. Pay great attention to crossing and supporting fire from the pivots, and look at the surrounding country with a view to meeting attack from any direction, for in this case the company, as well as the pivots in its line of defence, must be self-contained. Also have regard to the certainty that you will have artillery fire against you, to which you will not be able to reply, and in consequence your proposed defences must include deep trenches or recesses to shelter the men from shell. Your defences will take the form of a chain of isolated groups about the point to be defended and separated from each other by possibly several hundred yards. It is no use simply to go and sit inside a group of buildings which the guns would knock about your ears and against which the enemy can concentrate. The better plan is to break up his attack and hide your weakness by occupying well-strengthened pivots, behind whose protection you may have some freedom of movement, and so be able, if the weakness or rashness of the enemy gives opportunity, to inaugurate local counter-attacks. These, if successful in inflicting a sharp and sudden loss, will make him hesitate to deliver a decisive attack till he has found out all about you. With one company you cannot expect to achieve decisive results against any considerable body of the enemy, but must be content with keeping him in play for as long a time as possible, and an attitude of active bluff is the best means of doing so.
When you have got your plans completed, take out the company as strong as possible and complete in its proper platoons and sections—if there are too few men let one man count for two or three. Send off platoons to occupy and plan the defence of the pivots as done when practising it before. Do the same scheme on two separate occasions. The first time do not send out a skeleton enemy, so that the men may have time to look round, but for the second time send out some scouts under a subaltern, and let the platoons fall out on their positions with patrols out in front. Fix a certain hour by which you expect the arrangements to be all ready, and arrange for the enemy to advance at that time, and open fire on the patrols if they are met. When the patrols have fallen back the enemy closes in and starts sniping at the position. Then bring off a counter-attack, withdrawing some men for the purpose from pivots that are not threatened, and coming in on the flank of the attackers. In theory, of course, you should have a support or reserve available for this, but it does no harm to move men out of their trenches with the object of assuming the offensive, while the men learn the essential part of their work by all being employed on the perimeter.
Have out the company yet a third time on the same or a similar scheme, pivots and skeleton enemy as before. On this occasion, if the scheme is the same, change round the platoons to different pivots from what they occupied before, and when the arrangements for defence have been settled, leave only sentries and their groups on the pivots as look-outs, but have patrols in front. Form the remainder of the men into a support in some central position, and tell them off to occupy as alarm posts the pivots from which they were withdrawn. When the skeleton enemy attacks, reinforce the threatened part of the line by the men of the units told off for its defence, and with part, or even the whole of the rest, make a counter-attack.
It is very desirable, though unfortunately not often possible, to perform these last three practices on ground where you are at liberty to dig, and with an enemy of three or four companies instead of a few snipers.
Night Defence.
A night attack may be delivered as a sequence to fighting by daylight, in the course of which the enemy has established himself sufficiently close to the defences held by his opponent to see clearly the way to reach the point against which he intends to lead his force. Or he may deliver an attack without previous fighting, hoping to get the better of the defenders by surprise, and basing his plans solely on the results of reconnaissance. In the latter case the attack must be preceded by a night advance, long or short, according as the defenders’ outposts and their patrols have succeeded in keeping the hostile troops at a distance or not, unless, indeed, the troops or their scouts or spies have not been in touch at all during the day in which case an attack would not be a wise proceeding, because the needful information about the ground and your forces is lacking. Such attacks as require a night advance as a preliminary are likely to be made either over open ground or along roads, for the difficulties and delays occasioned by moving troops over broken ground which is not thoroughly known are very great. But in the first case, when fighting has been going on by day, and the two forces are in close contact at nightfall, separated perhaps by only a few hundred yards, the presence of broken ground in front of the defences is no guarantee that the enemy may not consider an attack by night to have a reasonable chance of succeeding against any of the points which he has been trying to carry by daylight. It follows then that in preparing a position for defence the pivots must be ready to withstand attack by night as well as by day, and also that roads or paths leading into the position from the surrounding country should be held and defended by night, in spite of their being innocuous by daylight owing to being swept effectively by fire from the adjacent pivots. It will be admitted, I think, that fire by night is ineffectual unless at very short ranges, or when delivered by men of extraordinary skill such as the up-country Boer and the American backwoods-men were pictured to be. A European enemy will seek to bring off his attack with the bayonet. The defenders will try to foil this attack, firstly, by the use of fire at the close range, which allows it to be effective, and, secondly, by the use of the bayonet. This plainly translates itself into obstacles to keep the enemy under fire, obstacles to hamper him when at bayonet distance, and night rests to help the accuracy of the fire in certain desired directions. I have told you one good form of night rest, and there are several others, but all require some material if they are to be even approximately accurate. Failing material of any sort, tie white rags round the muzzles of the men’s rifles if you can get them. After a week in the field your men will have nothing that is not very dirty, but in a civilised country some member of the population may perhaps be found ready to oblige a soldier.
Working still on your daylight scheme show your non-commissioned officers and men how to make night obstacles in addition to those meant for daylight defence, which latter may be any distance up to one hundred yards in front of the trenches. The night obstacles, on the other hand, should be quite close, the fire obstacles as close as ten yards, the bayonet obstacles, say a narrow ditch and a wire, close under the trenches so as to make a man stumble when trying to reach the defender with his bayonet. Make or plan these arrangements round the pivots, and then practise blocking and defending paths or roads by the same methods as for pivots, but with this variation, that a parapet which can only be used for defence at night may be as high as you consider needful without paying regard to its invisibility, while those to be used by day are kept as low as possible. In a practical exercise the men to hold these night posts would have to be furnished either from your support or by thinning some of the pivots.
Yet the most carefully arranged trenches and obstacles will be of no value unless the men occupy them in time to avail themselves of their advantages. Time sufficient to allow of this, must be got by patrolling in front as for outposts, by making automatic alarms in front of the obstacles (M.F.E., 55 (12)), by having alert sentries on the defence line, and by having a good and well understood arrangement of alarm posts by which each man shall be ready to occupy at once, in silence, and without confusion, the place which has been assigned to him. Patrolling has been dealt with under “Outposts,” the alertness of your sentries will depend largely on the state of discipline to which you have brought your company, and on the commonsenseness, to coin a word, of their training. Alarm posts are practised in the same way as on outpost. In many corps it is a standing order that when in camp or bivouac, on manœuvre as well as on service, men are to fall in on their alarm posts once a day, the usual times being at retreat or on arrival in camp (F.S.R., 48 (2)), and this is done whether in Brigade (F.S.R., 47 (2)) or not. If such is the order in your battalion, adhere to it within your company when detached, if not, do it off your own bat. It does not fatigue the men and ensures attention being paid on all occasions to this important duty.
EXERCISE XVI.
Hasty Expedients.
I.T., 93 (iii.), directs the training of the section to include rough and ready expedients so as to form a fighting front in any direction. This training is of great value, both from a disciplinary point of view, as it makes men quick to move on an order, and also from the point of view of moral, as men accustomed to get sudden and unexpected orders given under imaginary circumstances will be more likely to keep cool, when such orders are necessitated by the stress of actual battle, than men who have always been trained in a deliberate fashion.