Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/380

Rh 356 WAR [TACTICS. their invention with materials which have been turned into a machine already on a different system, and have therefore a way of working which unconsciously at first militates against the dis play to the best advantage of the new idea. &quot; These conclusions appear unanswerable. Though, for the reasons which are implied in the very sentences we have quoted, we are not as yet prepared absolutely to advocate any specific system, it appears to us that the method of working which has been suggested by Col. Macdonald promises such valuable results that it ought at least to be fairly tried on a large scale. It has received the warmest possible support from the best infantry sol diers of the English army from Lord Wolseley, from Sir Donald Stewart, and many more. It has been approved in principle by many others, who have not had the oppor tunity of examining its practice. It has been successfully tried and experimented upon so far as peace-trials go, both at home and in the colonies, and has been greatly appreci ated by those who have tried it. It consists in a method of permanently arranging a company in four ranks, so that from these the successive bodies of firing line supports and reserves may be successively sent forward. It has several important recommendations. It limits the front of a captain s command. By forming groups of eight men of those who stand side by side in the fours it carries organi zation down to the lowest point, while it tends to bind together, by the principle of comradeship, the supports who successively arrive to the men who are in front. By making this comradeship apply to those who form the two adjacent groups of four of the company when in line, it ought certainly to facilitate the re-formation of the com pany. At present if one man is lost in the front rank of a company, the whole have to be numbered again in order to enable it to form in a column of fours at all. On Col. Macdonald s system each group of eight being fixed, the company can be fitted together by the gathering of these groups in any order, so long as all are in their proper places within their own group of eight. In any case, going back once more to the experience of the past, we are now at a time in these matters very like that which preceded the Peninsular War. The drill which was employed in the Peninsula was in all essentials worked out by Sir John Moore in a series of experiments con ducted at the camp of Shorncliffe. No more important results were ever obtained by peace-training for war than those which were deduced from these experimental exercises. If we really reverence the great soldiers of the Peninsula, this is the way in which we shall honour them. We shall not do what they did not. We shall not accept from the traditions of the past forms which are not adapted to actual warfare. We shall not write drill books in the study or the bureau, and force field movements into conformity with them. We shall employ for the Avork of our great camps of exercise generals who have made an exhaustive study of the present conditions of warfare, and staff-officers who can assist them in their work. We shall experimentally try &quot; those suggestions which have upon them any reasonably good stamp of approval by military men of skill.&quot; We shall really and crucially investigate them, &quot; with oppor tunity afforded to proposers to meet difficulties that may be suggested.&quot; &quot; Those proposals which can be defended from serious theoretical objections should be submitted to a few months experiment in selected regiments, and reported oil as to their practical working in the essential points of simplicity and uniformity of manoeuvre, adaptability to circumstances arising, maintenance of order, retention of unity of commands, rapid recovery of exact tactical form, and fire control. Then let authority take what is best, it may be adopting here one detail and there another.&quot; 1 1 Colonel Macdonald, as above, p. 127. The Russians at one time adopted and abandoned a system of working by groups of four. So far as we are able to perceive, Colonel Macdonald s system is not open to the objection which led the Russians to abandon their method of fours. They found that, when they had formed their groups under a &quot; father &quot; who became the leader, the men were so much attached to one another that as soon as one was wounded all remained with him, so that every time the enemy wounded one man four were put hors de combat. It is clear, on the one hand, that this is an objection that would not present itself in mere peace practice at all, so that the necessity for criticism applied at the time from actual experience of fighting shows itself forcibly. On the other hand, it by no means follows that the difficulty would not be overcome by such a closer association of groups as Colonel Macdonald s system ap pears to promise, and by a trained habit of trusting that the wounded will be properly cared for by the men assigned for that purpose, and a knowledge that the business of all those who are able to continue the fight is to ensure the safety of the wounded by securing victory. It will be obvious from what we have already said that we do not believe that any army in Europe has as yet solved the question of the most effective mode of deliver ing infantry within the area of modern fight, and that nevertheless we believe that data now exist from which, with proper experiments, a method might be adopted which would at least give to that army which adopted it incal culable advantages in the earlier battles of a modern war. The one point that must be thoroughly realized is that the firearm of the present day has become the determining. weapon, for the development of the efficiency of which all tactics must prepare the way. That brings us to another matter of vital importance. As long as the shock tactics of the past were possible, the neat drills of the parade ground were the essence of sol diering, and therefore, when a few rifle regiments at first, and afterwards the army generally, had liberty to prac tise shooting, that was looked upon as an accidental and exceptional thing unconnected with the real business of the soldier, and therefore with his everyday life. This unfortunate divorce between the work at the butts and on the manoeuvre-ground, once established in the habits of an army, cannot for many years be cured. It exists still. Yet every manoeuvre in which careless aiming, careless expenditure of ammunition, and wrongly adjusted sights are permitted is a direct injury to the fighting efficiency of the force which manoeuvres. Nothing else can compensate for the evil so done. Good shooting, and movements tending to give to good shooting and good weapons the greatest possible advantage, are next to a healthy morale the essence of modern fight. Nevertheless, it is the training of the spirit of an army, the bringing home to all ranks of the objects now to be aimed at, that is the difficulty in all these matters. The very strength and power of discipline in its formation and engraining of habits is that which makes an army so hard to deal with when habits have to be changed. In the present condition of the tactical question it has seemed to us essential to devote so much space and pains to the enforcing of these points that we can only lightly touch on several questions that have been most eagerly discussed in relation to infantry tactics. The question of long-range fire against reserved fire is Long-ran; mainly a question between material and moral effect. It a seems no doubt a strange thing, when we have enormously fe increased the range of modern weapons, that we should throw away that advantage, and allow an enemy without firing a shot at him to pass over a large area of ground where we could inflict loss on him. Undoubtedly, in so f.