National guard inspection
The same general principles apply to the inspection of national guard organizations. If anything is found wrong with them the inspector should not keep silent at the time and content himself with rendering later an adverse written report; he should tell the officer being inspected what is wrong and take pains to show him how to correct the error. A helping hand, offered in the right spirit, will always be appreciated.
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TRAINING A NEW REGIMENT
Need for quick training
In this country we are liable to have the necessity forced upon us of turning out troops in the shortest possible time. We shall have to use troops not fully trained; we shall have to employ them as soon as they can be used at all. Of course this system will be frightfully costly in blood and money. In war imperfectly trained troops must pay with their lives for all mistakes. The better trained they are, the fewer mistakes, the more skill they possess the more cheaply can any desired result be obtained.
It is the duty of all officers who may be charged with the responsibility of preparing this mass of untrained men for war service to give the subject careful thought, to study the question carefully and to be prepared on short notice to take charge of such work and produce the best results possible in the shortest time.
Success in this hurried training can only be secured if the man in charge thoroughly appreciates his task and follows out a well prepared and systematic course.
There are three phases of the problem: Our regular regiments must be raised from a strength of about 65 men per company to nearly 150. The national guard regiments, less well prepared, will have, as a rule, to stand a still greater increase of new men, and there will be hundreds of entirely new regiments to be raised.
The commander
In outlining or suggesting a possible course to be pursued in such cases let us take the new regiment. The regiment must first be enlisted, organized and equipped. This first step will not be considered further than to say that in its organization it is absolutely necessary that its commander be an active, competent officer, one who can train it and prepare it for its work. In no other way can the regiment be prepared to do anything within a reasonable time.