Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/379

TACTICS.] WAR 355 Practical work. Control drill. Now the danger which faces any British army under present conditions in preparing for modern battle lies in the fact that a long peace following upon the great wars of the end of the last and the beginning of the present century has tended to stereotype forms which were origin ally based upon the battle-experience of the past. There is a dread of change where change is required, because officers and men have come to look upon the great tradi tions of the past as sacred. In England men wish to follow in the footsteps of the soldiers who acquired an experience under Wellington such as no men since then have had. It is in its essence a sound and healthy feeling. But there is the greatest danger lest names should be put for facts, lest in the very act of servilely copying forms we should ignore altogether the principle which determined the action of our forefathers. They started from the ex periences and necessities of the battle-field as these existed in their own day. They based their forms upon those necessities. If we would really imitate them we must in this do as they did. We cannot take their forms based on the battles of their own time, and then work forward from these forms to what we shall do on the battle-field now. We must frankly face the fact that, the character of battles having changed, we must work back from the con ditions of our present battle-fields to the peace-forms which will prepare our soldiers for them. Terms under such circumstances become confused. Men talk about the practice of forms in which their life is spent as "practical work." They look upon all experience gathered from the fields where shells actually burst and where infantry firearms are used to kill as "theoretical." The truth is exactly the opposite. Such merit as the older drill at present has is due to certain theoretical con siderations which were at one time soundly deduced from practice in the past. The only practical work is that which tends to prepare men, not for the inspection of some general on a parade ground, but for actual war. An army is doing " practical " work in the preparation for its real duty, that of winning battles. It is employed on mis chievous theoretical work, on false theory, whenever it is doing anything else. Now this one thing is certain, that, whereas the great fighting formation of the past for British infantry was the line, that formation can be used no longer in actual fighting against troops armed with modern weapons, unless excep tionally in purely defensive positions, where its trained cohesion is of little importance, because cohesion is in any case easy. All rigid drill is at present based on the assumption that wheels of parts of this line are necessary in order to enable the troops to keep together shoulder to shoulder. What is required is not this, but that we shall obtain by complete organization down to the lowest units a command of fire and a command of groups. Of all the incidents of a modern fight that of which it is the hardest to give any conception to a man who has not seen infantry possessed of the enormous facilities for firing which are supplied by modern arms is the intense absorption in the mere fact of firing, which almost like a catalepsy takes possession of the man who is using his weapon against an enemy, or, as may often happen in close country, against nothing at all. Many of the rifles that were picked up on Majuba Hill were found, at the last moment when the Boers were closing, sighted to 800 yards. It is noted as a quite remarkable instance of presence of mind on the part of a Prussian sergeant during the attack on St Privat, that he personally took care that the men reduced their sights to the proper range as they advanced. Now this illustrates perfectly the kind of trained habit which we need by our modern drill to induce in men in action. We want to educate men so that they do not fire under the conditions of a catalepsy. Now experience has shown that this can only be done by having men who are not themselves firing trained to look after those who are firing, so that the fire may be regulated, effective, and deliberate. The men themselves must be trained to fire only under orders, and not under the influence of a tendency to fire merely to relieve their feelings. We cannot put better what is in volved in these necessities than in the following words of Colonel J. H. A. Macdonald of the Queen s Edinburgli Rifle Volunteer Brigade : " How is this to be done ? How but by so regularly, consistently, and persistently putting the soldier through the action of firing ~by orders that it shall be a second nature to fire his rifle only under control of his superior, and not otherwise. What is wanted is the conviction in the mind of every instructor, from the highest to the lowest, that his men should never leave a parade without having gained something in fire discipline, that is, that fire control drill be one of the main points in view as a necessary part of the work to be performed on every occasion when men are being drilled, exercised, or inspected, from the moment that they know the rifle exercises until the day when they leave the service. Let some of the time which formerly was spent in a perpetual form drill to produce a military machine that had a steadiness in formation which nothing could shake be now spent in producing by a per petual control drill a firing organism which shall have a steadiness in the use of fire which nothing can shake. The troops that shall be found most in the hands of the commander in the matter of fire will, castcris paribus, be invincible." 1 But in order that we may secure this end it is essential that the organization be carried down to the smallest groups within a company, and our drill must be adapted to deliver such groups as methodically and regularly as possible within the zone of fighting. It does not appear that any adequate experiments have as yet been made to determine the means by which this can best be done. Experiments during peace time are in no sense wholly satisfactory. In order that they may be worked out properly they require to be watched at every stage by men who have closely studied the experiences of modern war, and know what has been done by other armies, who have learned from those experiences not slavishly to copy what was done by men who were them selves experimenting under the dread conditions of actual warfare, but to extract from them sound lessons for future guidance. To quote again from Colonel Macdonald. " Would it not be wise to do what is done in other departments of military science, and give some facility for practical and exhaus tive experiment ? In all other departments practical experiment goes merrily and expensively on. Thousands of pounds are spent on a gun which penetrates another inch or two of armour. Kevr and thicker plates are rolled. A new Big Will is built, and again crashes through the armour with its first shot, and perhaps blows off its own muzzle with the second. Treasure-devouring sea monsters are built superseding one another at short intervals. Torpedoes, torpedo boats, and machine guns are subjected to crucial experiments. But from the nature of the material with which experiment has to be conducted in the case of the most important land fighting machine the infantry the circumstances are exactly reversed. Experiment would cost nothing ; but, while inventors can experiment in armour me-tal, gun building, and rifling and explosives, before offering appliances to the Government, there can be no practical experiment with the only material out of which the infantry machine of war is made without order from authority. It is only by leave of the state, through its officers, that any proposals to improve the working can be tested, and as is the case in all inventions not only tested, but developed and improved by experiment. Almost all successful invention is the result of alternate thought and experiment. There is also the further difficulty that the proposers of tactical improvements are not independent men, but servants of the owners of the material. They cannot consistently with discipline proceed as other inventors are able to do. They cannot canvass higher officials, or exert extraneous influence. They may not use the soldiers who happen to be under their control as material for experiment. " Further, even if it be permitted to them to exhibit these ideas xperimentally, the material with which they must do so is not dead material, plastic and absolutely passive. They have to test 1 Common Sense on Parade, or Drill without Stays (p. 118), by

Colonel the Right Hon. J. II. A. Macdonald, C.B., M.P., 1886.