TRAINING IN FRANCE
Of course all our troops are trained before they go to France, whether the individual soldier goes out with his battalion or in a draft sent from its reserve battalion at home to reinforce it. But when reinforcements are landed in France they are put through a further course of instruction, before they go up to join their regiments at the Front.
This final period of instruction is very short; it is tightly packed with work; it assumes that the men already know their work and only need to do it with greater finish; and it is given by the best experts the British Army possesses in trench warfare as it is carried on to-day. That is, really to-day, and not as it was carried on six or even three months ago.
Training Schools.
For these infantry training schools at the base are in constant living contact with the Front. The instructors come fresh from the trenches, and if the latest experience gained by the Army on the Somme or before Cambrai leads to a change in the recognised technique of bomb-throwing or the cutting out of an unnecessary movement in the bayonet exercise, the officers and non-commissioned officers who instruct can show the young soldier, from their own experience, just how the improvement will help him at the crisis of a scrimmage.
Thus the course may be compared with the short final period of very exacting coaching in which “racing polish” is put on a boat’s crew which has already undergone a long training. Or it may be compared with the “post-graduate courses” in a university, at which the latest results of special research are imparted by original researchers to students whose previous ordinary training enables them to profit by this higher teaching.
Trench Warfare.
The men under instruction have to learn—or else show that they know already—everything that a soldier in trenches must know in order to protect himself and endanger the enemy. They are “put through it” in the ordinary parade movements in close order, in open order work, in bayonet fighting, musketry and bombing. There is not much time for each subject, but none is wasted; the men are intensely keen to get up to their regiments, and they know that they cannot go till they are passed as qualified; the instructors teach with the zest of veterans relating their own experiences to recruits.
No Idle Moments.
There is not a vacant moment in which to be bored. Work is knocked off for an hour towards mid-day to let the men eat the rations which the drafts have brought in their haversacks from their quarters at the base depôt camp of the division to which their battalion belongs. But a band begins to play from the moment of dismissing, and it also gives priceless help in keeping up march discipline and smartness on the few route marches for which there is room in the course.
Defence against Gas.
A detail, which needs care and gets it, is instruction in self-defence against gas. Lachrymatory gas is comparatively a trifle. The men are practised in walking through an open trench full of the heliotrope smell of the gas, and come out shedding tears and laughing at the far end. The more serious poison gas is let loose in a tunnel-like chamber through which every officer and man bound for the Front must pass. The foul stuff in the chamber is some hundred times as dense as any gas to be met in actual warfare. But if the man’s gas mask is in order, and he uses it as he has been told, he suffers no inconvenience while passing through or afterwards, and thenceforward no German gas has any terrors for him.
Varied Lessons.
The photographs bring out many interesting details in the training course. One of them shows, in a night scene, how skilfully the general atmosphere of the Front, as well as the details of trenches and craters, is reproduced for purposes of instruction. Another shows non-commissioned officers receiving instruction by the help of “picture targets” in the indispensable art of describing any point in a landscape exactly and tersely. In a photograph of the bayonet fighting course the Indian soldiers’ firm balance of the body and excellent carriage of the head are noticeable.
Sandbag-Filling.
Speed in sandbag-filling, for trench fortification purposes, is extremely important; in some battalions it is encouraged by systematic competitions, the competitors working in pairs. Note, in the photograph of men aiming or loading, in a lying position, the uniformity with which their heels are kept down. In a badly trained draft several heels would be sticking up, inviting enemy bullets.
Swedish Drill.
The photographs of Swedish drill or “physical exercise”—as one out of a soldier’s many forms of physical exercise is formally called—do less than justice to that admirable part of our present military training. Its object is not to produce a rigid protrusion of the chest or a poker-like straightness of figure, but to give every separate muscle in the body its share of work and development, and also to give a free, easy balance and elasticity to the whole. There is still, in the New Army, so much of the tradition, or instinct, of the old one that the men will insist on “throwing a chest” when confronted with a camera on a parade ground. The value of Swedish drill is realised later when sterner conditions demand the “negotiation” of trenches, fences and breastworks.
En Route.
The photograph of troops disembarking in France, prior to boarding the train for “Somewhere in France,” needs no explanation. Railway accommodation is not luxurious, but a good soldier is generally a great boy, and it is an unfailing source of boyish pleasure to our troops in France to be restrained by no railway bye-laws and to be allowed to travel, in adventurous discomfort, in or on every sort of closed or open truck except an ordinary passenger carriage.
In the few cases where men who are not sick or wounded travel by passenger train, there is a noticeable tendency among the gayer spirits to travel on the footboard or on the roof. A genial array of smiling faces, indicative of high spirits, may generally be observed among the troops en route for the Front.