CHAPTER IV
INFANTRY
The old-time term, light infantry, has little meaning at present as far as difference in the stamp of man and the weight of equipment carried is concerned; one infantry battalion is equal to another in respect of “lightness,” except that some Highland battalions, recruiting from districts which provide exceptionally brawny specimens of humanity, obtain a taller and weightier average of men. Varieties of equipment in the old days made infantry “heavy” and “light,” but the modern infantryman is kept as light as possible in the matter of equipment in all units.
Certain battalions possess and are very proud of distinctions awarded them for feats on the field of battle. Thus it is permitted to one infantry regiment, including all its battalions, to wear the regimental badge both on the front and the back of the helmet in review order, also on their field-service caps, to commemorate an action in which the men were surrounded and fought back to back until they had extricated themselves from their perilous position—or rather, until the survivors had extricated themselves. In another regiment, the sergeants are permitted to wear the sash over the same shoulder as the officers, in view of the fact that on one occasion all the officers were killed, and the non-commissioned officers took command, with noteworthy results. Yet another distinction, but of a different kind, is the concession made to Irish regiments in allowing them to wear sprigs of shamrock on St. Patrick’s days.
In the “review order” or full dress of modern infantrymen—and in fact of all British soldiers—there are certain buttons and fittings which serve no useful purpose, and soldiers themselves, even, sometimes wonder why these things are worn. The reason is that, in old time, all these fittings had a use; the buttons on the back of the tunic supported belts which are no longer worn, or covered pockets which no longer exist. There is a reason also in the officer wearing his sash on one shoulder and the sergeant his on another, and in the same way there is a reason for every seemingly useless fitting in a soldier’s review uniform—it perpetuates a tradition of the particular battalion or regiment concerned, or it keeps alive a tradition of the service as a whole. To the outsider, these may appear useless formalities, but they are not so in reality; the soldier is intensely proud of these things, which make for esprit de corps and maintain the spirit of the Army quite as much as material advantages.
The actual spirit in which the infantryman views his work is a difficult thing to assess. One noteworthy example of that spirit is the case of Piper Findlater, who, wounded beyond the power of movement at Dargai, sat up and piped—an amazing piece of courage and coolness under fire. Yet that same Piper Findlater, invalided home and out of the service, could display himself on a music-hall stage, an action which was incomprehensible to the civilian mind. But, to the average infantryman, there was nothing incongruous in the two actions—one was as much the right of the man as the other was to his credit, and Findlater was typical of the British infantryman.
Under the present system, each infantry regiment is divided into two or more battalions. Under the old system, each battalion was distinguished by a number, but the numbers have been abolished in favour of names of counties or districts, and two or more battalions form the regiment of a county or division of a county. It is very seldom that these two or more portions of the same regiment meet each other, for, in the case of a two-battalion regiment, one battalion is usually on foreign service while the other is domiciled in England, and the home battalion feeds the one on foreign service with recruits as needed to keep the latter up to strength. A notable exception to this rule occurred in the case of the Norfolk Regiment a few years ago, when the first and second battalions met at Bloemfontein, one outward bound at the beginning of its term of foreign service, and the other about to start for home.
The infantryman is fitted for what constitutes the greater part of his work, when the season’s “training” is over, by what is known as “route marching.” In this, a battalion is started out at the beginning of the route-marching season on a march of a few miles, in light order—carrying rifles and bayonets only, perhaps. The distance covered is gradually increased, and the weight of equipment carried by the men is also increased, until the men concerned are carrying their full packs and marching twelve or fourteen miles a day. Service conditions are maintained as far as possible, so as to make the men fit for long marches at any time; by this means the men’s feet are hardened and the men themselves brought thoroughly into condition, while weaklings are picked out and marked down for future reference. “Falling out” on a route march without good and sufficient reason means days to barracks for the offender, at the least, and “cells” is a possibility.
The work of the infantryman is less complex than that of any other branch of the service: he has to be trained to march well and to know how to use his rifle and bayonet. Principally, given the physical endurance for the marching part of the business, he has to learn to shoot, and the simplicity of his duties is compensated for by the thoroughness with which he is taught. Then, again, discipline is of necessity stricter in infantry units than in other branches of the service; the cavalryman, with a horse to care for as well as himself and his arms and equipment, and the driver or gunner of artillery, with “two horses and two sets” (of saddlery) or his gun or limber to mind, is kept busy most of the time without an excess of discipline, but the infantryman in time of peace is concerned only with himself, his arms and equipment, and his barrack-room—a small total when compared with the cares of the man in the cavalry or artillery. By way of compensation, the infantryman is made to give more attention to his barrack-room; he is restricted, in a way that would not be possible in the cavalry or artillery, in the way in which he employs his leisure hours, and parades are made to keep his hands out of mischief, as well as to train him to thorough efficiency.
A brigade of infantry, consisting of four battalions, looks a perfectly uniform mass of men on, say, a service, dress parade, but intimate knowledge of the characteristics of the men in each battalion reveals a world of difference; each regiment has its own traditions, and each battalion differs widely from the rest in its methods of working, its way of issuing commands, and its internal arrangements. There is a standard of bugle calls for the whole Army, but practically every infantry battalion infuses a certain amount of individuality into the method of sounding the call. The buglers of the Rifle Brigade, for instance, would scorn to sound their calls in the way that the East Surreys or the York and Lancaster battalions sound theirs, and conversely a York and Lancaster or an East Surrey man would smile at the bugle call of the Rifle Brigade battalion. The districts from which men are recruited, too, account for many little peculiarities in the ways of different battalions. There is obviously a world of difference between the way in which a man of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry will view a given situation, and the view adopted by a man of the East Surreys, for one is “reet Yorkshire,” while the other is Cockney all through. Dialects and regimental slang combined make the language of the one almost unintelligible to the other, and, while each arrives at precisely the same end by slightly varying means, each claims superiority over the other.