OFFICERS AND RIFLES
As I have said, I have learned among other things to obey my officers
and depend upon my rifle. At first the junior officers appeared to me
only as immaculate young men in tailor-made tunics and well-creased
trousers, wearing swords and wrist-watches, and full of a healthy
belief in their own importance. My mates are apt to consider them
as being somewhat vain, and no Tommy dares fail to salute the young
commissioned officers when he meets them out with their young ladies
on the public streets. For myself, I have a great respect for them and
their work; day and night they are at their toil; when parade comes to
an end, and the battalion is dismissed for the day, the officers, who
have done ten or twelve hours' of field exercise, turn to their desks
and company accounts, and time and again the Last Post sees them busy
over ledgers, pamphlets, and plans.
Accurate and precise in every detail, they know the outs and ins of
platoon and company drill, and can handle scores and hundreds of men
with the ease and despatch of artists born to their work. Where
have these officers, fresh youngsters with budding moustaches and
white, delicate hands, learned all about frontage, file, flank,
and formation, alignment, echelon, incline, and interval? Words of
direction and command come so readily from their lips that I was
almost tempted to believe that they had learned as easily as they
taught, that their skill in giving orders could only be equalled by
the ease with which I supposed they had mastered the details of their
work. Later I came to know of the difficulty that confronts the young
men, raw from the Officers' Training Corps, when they take up their
preliminary duties as commanders of trained soldiers. No "rooky" fresh
to the ranks is the butt of so many jokes and such biting sarcasm as
the young officer is subjected to when he takes his place as a leader
of men.
Soon after my arrival in our town a score of young lieutenants came
to our parade ground, accompanied by two commanders, a keen-eyed
adjutant, brisk as a bell, and a white-haired colonel with very thin
legs, and putties which seemed to have been glued on to his shins. The
young gentlemen were destined for various regiments, and most of them
were fresh and spotless in their new uniforms. Some wore Glengarry
bonnets, kilts, and sporrans, some the black ribbons of Wales; one,
whose hat-badge proclaimed the Dublin Fusilier, was conspicuous by the
eyeglass he wore, and others were still arrayed in civilian garb, the
uniform of city and office life. Several units of my battalion were
taken off to drill in company with the strange officers. I was one of
the chosen.
The young men took us in hand, acting in turn as corporals, platoon
sergeants, and company commanders. The gentleman with the eyeglass had
charge of my platoon, and from the start he cast surreptitious glances
at a little red brochure which he held in his hand, and mumbled words
as if trying to commit something to memory.
"Get to your places," the adjutant yelled to the officers. "Hurry up!
Don't stand there gaping as if you're going to snap at flies. We've
got to do some work. There's no hay for those who don't work. Come on,
Weary, and drill your men; you with the eyeglass, I mean! I want you
to put the company through some close column movements."
The man with the eyeglass took up his position, and issued some order,
but his voice was so low that the men nearest him could not hear the
command.
"Shout!" yelled the adjutant. "Don't mumble like a flapper who has
just got her first kiss. It's not allowed on parade."
The order was repeated, and the voice raised a little.
"Louder, louder!" yelled the adjutant. Then with fine irony: "These
men are very interested in what you've got to tell them.... I don't
think."
Eyeglass essayed another attempt, but stopped in the midst of his
words, frozen into mute helplessness by the look of the adjutant.
"For heaven's sake, try and speak up," the adjutant said. "If you
don't talk like a man, these fellows won't salute you when they meet
you in the street with your young lady. On second thoughts, you had
better go back and take up the job of platoon sergeant. Come on,
Glengarry, and try and trumpet an order."
Glengarry, so-called from his bonnet, a sturdy youth with sloping
shoulders, took up his post nervously.
"A close column forming column of fours," he cried in a shrill treble,
quoting the cautionary part of his command. "Advance in fours from the
right; form fours--right!"
"Form fours--where?" roared the adjutant.
"Left," came the answer.
"Left, your grandmother! You were right at first. Did you not know
that you were right?... Where's Eyeglass, the platoon sergeant, now?
Who's pinched him?"
This unfortunate officer had dropped his eyeglass, and was now groping
for it on the muddy ground, one of my mates helping him in the search.
Other officers took up the job of company commander in turn, and all
suffered. One, who was a dapper little fellow, speedily earned the
nickname of "Tailor's Dummy;" another, when giving a platoon the
wrong direction in dressing, was told to be careful, and not shove the
regiment over. A third, a Welshman, with the black ribbons, got angry
with a section for some slight mistake made by two of its number, and
was told to be careful and not annoy the men. He had only got them on
appro'.
Spick and span in their new uniforms, they came to drill daily on our
parade ground. Slowly the change took place. They were "rookies" no
longer, and the adjutant's sarcasm was a thing of the past. Commands
were pronounced distinctly and firmly; the officers were trained men,
ready to lead a company of soldiers anywhere and to do anything.
No man who has trained with the new armies can be lacking in respect
for the indefatigable N.C.O., upon whom the brunt of the work has
fallen. With picturesque scorn and sarcasm he has formed huge armies
out of the rawest of raw material, and all in a space of less than
half a year. His methods are sometimes strange and his temper short;
yet he achieves his end in the shortest time possible. He is for ever
correcting the same mistakes and rebuking the same stupidity, and the
wonder is, not that he loses his temper, but that he should ever be
able to preserve it. He understands men, and approaches them in an
idiom that is likely to produce the best results.
"Every man of you has friends of some sort," said the musketry
instructor, as we formed up in front of him on the parade ground,
gripping with nervous eagerness the rifles which had just been served
out from the quartermaster's stores. We were recruits, raw "rookies,"
green to the grind, and chafing under discipline. "And some sort of
friends it would be as well as if you never met them," the instructor
continued. "They'd play you false the minute they'd get your back
turned. But you've a friend now that will always stand by you and play
you fair. Just give him a chance, and he'll maybe see you out of many
a tight corner. Now, who is this friend I'm talking about?" he asked,
turning to a youth who was leaning on his rifle. "Come, Weary, and
tell me."
"The rifle," was the answer.
"The crutch?"
"No, the rifle."
"I see that, boy, I see that! But, damn it, don't make a crutch of it.
You're a soldier now, my man, and not a crippled one yet."
Thus was the rifle introduced to us. We had long waited for its
coming, and dreamt of cross-guns, the insignia of a crack shot's
proficiency, while we waited. And with the rifle came romance, and the
element of responsibility. We were henceforward fighting men,
numbered units, it was true, with numbered weapons, but for all that,
fighters--men trained to the trade and licensed to the profession.
Our new friend was rather a troublesome individual to begin with. In
rising to the slope he had the trick of breaking free and falling on
the muddy barrack square. A muddy rifle gets rusty, and brings its
owner into trouble, and a severe penalty is considered meet for the
man who comes on parade with a rusty rifle. Bringing the friend from
the slope to the order was a difficult process for us recruits at the
start the back-sight tore at the fingers, and bleeding hands often
testified to the unnatural instinct of the rebellious weapon. But the
unkindest kick of all was given when the slack novice fired the first
shot, and the heel of the butt slipped upwards and struck the jaw.
Then was learnt the first real lesson. The rifle kicks with the heel
and aims for the jaw. Control your friend, humour him; keep him well
in hand and beware his fling.
I was unlucky in my first rifle practice on the miniature range,
and out of my first five shots I did not hit the target once. The
instructor lay by my side on the waterproof ground-sheet (the day was
a wet one, and the range was muddy) and lectured me between misses on
the peculiarities of my weapon and the cultivation of a steady eye.
"Keep the beggar under control," he said. "You've got to coax him, and
not use force. Pull the trigger easily, as though you loved it, and
hold the butt affectionate-like against the shoulder. It's an easy
matter to shoot as you're shooting now. There's shooting and shooting,
and you've got to shoot straight. If you don't you're no dashed good!
Give me the rifle, you're not aiming at the bull, man, you're aiming
at the locality where the bull is grazing."
He took my rifle, slid a cartridge into the breech, and coaxed the
trigger lovingly towards him. Three times he fired, then we went
together to look at the target. Not a bullet fired by him had struck
it. The instructor glared down the barrel of the gun, made some
nasty remarks about deflection, and went back to yell at an orderly
corporal.
"What the dickens did you take this here for?" he cried. "It's a
blooming wash-out,[1] and was never any good. Old as an unpaid bill
and worn bell-mouth it is, and nobody can fire with it."
[Footnote 1: "Wash-out" is a term used by the men when their firing is
so wide of the mark that it fails to hit any spot on the card. The men
apply it indiscriminately to anything in the nature of a failure.]
On a new rifle being obtained I passed the preliminary test, and a
rather repentant instructor remarked that it might be possible to make
a soldier of me some day.
Since then my fellow-soldiers and I have had almost unlimited rifle
practice, on miniature and open ranges, at bull and disappearing
targets, in field firing at distances from 100 to 600 yards. On a
field exceeding 600 yards it is almost impossible to hit a point
the size of an ordinary bull; fire then must be directed towards a
position. Field or volley firing is very interesting. Once my company
took train to Dunstable and advanced on an imaginary enemy that
occupied the wastes of the Chiltern Hills. Practice commenced by
firing at little squares of iron standing upright in a row about 200
yards off in front of our line. These represented heads and shoulders
of men rising over the trenches to take aim at us as we advanced. In
extended order we came to our position, 200 yards distant from the
front trenches. At the sound of the officer's whistle, we sank to
the ground, facing our front, fixed our sights, and loaded. A second
whistle was blown; we fired "three rounds rapid" at the foe. The
aiming was very accurate; little spurts of earth danced up and around
the targets, and every iron disc fell. The "searching ground," the
locality struck by bullets, scarcely measured a dozen paces from front
to rear, thus showing that there was very little erratic firing.
"That's some shooting!" my Jersey friend remarked. "If the discs were
Germans!"
"They might shoot back," someone said, "and then we mightn't take as
cool an aim."
We are trained to the rifle; it is always with us, on parade,
on march, on bivouac, and recently, when going through a dental
examination, we carried our weapons of war into the medical officer's
room. As befits units of a rifle regiment, we have got accustomed
to our gun, and now, as fully trained men, we have established the
necessary unity between hand and eye, and can load and unload our
weapon with butt-plate stiff to shoulder and eye steady on target
while the operation is in progress. In fact, our rifle comes to hand
as easy as a walking-stick. We shall be sorry to lose it when the war
is over, and no doubt we shall feel lonely without it.