8. A judicious Employment of Supports and Reserves.
Very deficient in any of these qualifications, skirmishers cannot be of the first order. Possessing them all in reasonable proficiency, skirmishers must be very good, let the character of their other attainments and systems of drill be whatever it may.
I.
The life and especial mark of the good skirmisher is Active Intelligence.
In the ranks, the closer men attain to a state of unreflecting mechanism, with nothing of mind but attention, the nearer they are to true soldier-like perfection. Not a thought should arise, an eye-ball turn, or a finger tremble, but in obedience, and that obedience should be accurate and instantaneous as the word. Not so the skirmisher; within certain limits he is his own general, and must think for himself. From the moment that he “shakes out” from the elbows of his right and left comrades, reflection must awake, and, in due dependence on a broad established system, be energetically directed to gain every advantage on the opposing foe.
The French as skirmishers excel in active intelligence. Every man manœuvres as if the fate of the day depended upon his conceptions. Their ability, in this particular, may spring in a great degree from the looseness of their instruction practice of all field exercise. This, while it is ill calculated to make steady soldiers at close order, is well adapted to give free scope to the natural intelligence of skirmishers.
The mechanical stiffness, formerly much seen in British light infantry, arose, there can scarcely be a question, from the formality of our old ordinary mode of applying the system of light infantry drill. The automatonism, proper to the ranks, was extended to skirmishers, and they also were taught to move only as they were wound up. The indignation of the drill instructor was poured out, not upon men who failed in the first-rate essentials of good skirmishing, but upon those who erred a foot in dressing or in distance—who did not step off, halt, or fire, precisely at the sound of the whistle or elevation of the signal fire-lock—whose unmusical ears refused to distinguish amid the endless variety of bugled orders—who could not run like racers, or who ran bewildered in some of the intricate evolutions, which were supposed to crown the very pinnacle of skirmishing perfection. Some corps did not drill according to this erroneous method, others did not carry it to its full extent; but, taking the army as a whole, unreflecting precision in the details of skirmishing was its system, and to this day that system has its votaries.
It is no small proof of the strength of natural intelligence in British soldiers, that, when brought into actual service, they broke through the fettered stiffness of their instruction drill, let go what was indifferent in it, clung to that which was important, and soon rivalled their intelligent and experienced opponents.
The true summit of perfection in skirmishing is, the preservation of order in disorder and of system in confusion; for the circumstances which accompany skirmishes of necessity produce, almost always, more or less mixture, inversion, and general irregularity. In hot contests over large extents of intricate ground, men of different companies regiments, brigades, and even divisions, mingle with each other. Soldiers should therefore be drilled, not indeed to fall into such irregularities on principle, but to be ready for them in practice. They should be made at times to skirmish in inverted companies, mixed companies, and mixed regiments—to form good skirmishing lines out of confused masses—to concentrate from similar mixed bodies into squares to resist cavalry, or into lines or columns for the purposes of charging or defending streets of villages, or other defiles—to extend again rapidly, and to perform every necessary evolution as if no mixture or irregularity had occurred.
Such movements, when inculcated as necessary exceptions to good order, do not unfit soldiers for more regular manœuvres; but, by the contrast, increase order and intelligence in them.