By Friedrich Engels

Written mid-April 1861.

From the English.

[The Volunteer Journal, for Lancashire and Cheshire, No. 33, 20 April 1861]

In our
penultimate number
we directed the special attention of the volunteers to Colonel McMurdo’s remarks on company drill. We now return to this subject, as we consider it high time that its importance be fully recognised by every rifleman in the country.

The other day we had an opportunity of attending the battalion drill of a volunteer corps, which, taken as a whole, in proportion to its effective strength, in the good attendance at drill, in the sense of duty of the officers, and accordingly in its general efficiency, is decidedly above the average of the troops of this district. To our great surprise we found only slight progress compared with the performance of this corps which we had seen about six months ago. The battalion movements were a little better than at the close of the last season, but the manual exercise and the formation of platoons were carried out in a rather slovenly manner. Even at [the command] ‘Shoulder arms!’ it looked as if each soldier acted without knowing that he had to exercise in concert with some 400 men on his right, left, and rear. At the ‘Ready’ and the ‘Present’ every rifle seemed to pride itself on arriving at the correct position independently of its neighbours; and a silent disregard of the ‘one-two’ or ‘one-two-three’ by which the execution of each word of command is marked, appeared to be the general order of the day.

In a corner of the barrack square on which the volunteers were drilling we saw a squad of a line regiment fall in for drill under a sergeant. We take it to be a battalion squad ordered for extra drill on account of awkwardness at drill. What a difference! The men stood like statues; not a limb moved before the command was given, and then only those limbs moved which had to execute the order. The rest of the body remained perfectly still. The instant the command reached their ears, every arm moved simultaneously; each of the motions into which the execution of the command is divided was very distinct and was performed by every man at the same moment. The whole squad moved, in fact, like one man. Those gentlemen who are so fond of boasting that the volunteers understand their business just as well as the line would do well to study the line a little; they would then soon find that between the best volunteers and the worst-drilled line regiment there is still an enormous difference.

But, it will be said, of what use is such perfection in drill to the volunteers? They are not to attain this perfection, and it can neither be expected of them nor will they need it. No doubt this is quite correct. The mere attempt to make the volunteers compete with the exact drill of the line would be the ruin of the movement. But drilled the volunteers must be, drilled to such an extent that the ordinary, simultaneous evolutions become completely mechanical, a matter of course to them, and that their steps and movements can be carried out by all simultaneously and constantly with a certain degree of military bearing. In all these points the line will remain the model to which the volunteers must look up, and company drill will be the means by which alone the requisite efficiency can be attained.

Let us take the manual and platoon exercises. It is not merely a matter of fine appearance that at a given word of command all the rifles of the battalion should be moved simultaneously and according to regulation. We must assume that all volunteer corps have now advanced so far that the men can go through these exercises without injuring each other or striking their rifles against one another. Beyond this, a slovenly performance of the various movements has undoubtedly a great moral effect upon the battalion drilling. Why should each individual soldier listen with particular attention to the command if he knows that mistakes are being made on his right and left and that the rifles are bobbing up and down in an uncertain manner long after he has carried out the command? What confidence can a soldier on the left flank place in his comrades on the right flank before the enemy, if he does not know that they will load, make ready, and present at the given command together with him, and be ready to load again as quickly as he himself? Moreover, every experienced soldier will say that the execution of this simultaneous action—the certainty that the officer’s word of command is answered by these two or three definite, measured sounds which show that every soldier is acting at the very same moment as his comrades—has a very great moral influence upon the battalion. It brings home to the men the consciousness that they are really a single body, that they are completely in the hand of their commander, and that he can at the slightest hint employ their force with the greatest effect.

Take again the movements of large or small bodies of troops. Unless every man is so firmly grounded in drill that every movement that may be required of him is executed almost mechanically at the given word of command, a battalion will never move in a uniform manner. A soldier who has first to rack his memory or his understanding to find out what action the given command requires of him, will do the battalion more harm than good. The same applies to a man who, either from habit or from some other cause, is inclined to assume that certain steps must necessarily follow upon others. He will often receive a totally different command from what he expected, and then he will most probably make a blunder. These defects can only be eliminated by constant company drill. Then the commanding officer can put the small unit under his command through so many different movements and formations in a quarter of an hour, and can vary the sequence from one to the other to such an extent, that the men, never guessing what is coming next, very soon learn to be attentive and to follow the word of command quite mechanically. In a battalion all movements are necessarily much slower and to a certain degree instructive for the officers; for the soldiers, however, less so. It is a recognised fact that soldiers who are perfect in company drill will, under good officers, completely learn battalion movements in a very short time. The more the soldiers are put through their paces in the company by a competent, careful drill-instructor, the more reliable they will afterwards be in the battalion. It need not be specially pointed out how important perfect uniformity in a battalion is; a volley may be fired rather irregularly and yet have its effect. But a battalion that falls into disorder when forming square, deploying into line, wheeling in column, etc., will be hopelessly lost at any time when facing an active and intelligent opponent.

Then there is the important point of distance. It is an undeniable fact that no volunteer officer or soldier has an eye for distances. When marching in open columns or columns of quarter distance, when deploying, every battalion drill shows how difficult it is for the officers to maintain the proper distance. When re-forming column from square, the men of the centre sections almost always lose their distance. They advance too far or too little, and accordingly wheel very irregularly. The officers can only learn to preserve distance in the battalion, although company exercises in sub-divisions and sections will help to improve this; but the men, in order to learn to form column from square (a movement of the greatest importance before the enemy), must drill in companies.

Yet another point must be observed, and that is the military bearing of the soldiers. We do not mean merely the erect, proud, yet unconstrained carriage of each individual man under arms, but also the rapid, simultaneous action in company and battalion movements, which is just as necessary for a body of troops as the handling of rifles at the halt is for a battalion. The volunteers seem to be quite satisfied if, by some means or other, they succeed in getting to the right place in something like the prescribed time, with a delay of a few seconds more or less. No doubt that is the main point, and in the first year of a volunteer corps’s existence everyone would be perfectly satisfied with that. But for the execution of every movement there is a certain fixed form laid down in the regulations, and this is intended to be the form by which the desired object can be attained in the shortest time, with the greatest advantage to all concerned, and consequently with a maximum of order. The consequence is that every deviation from the prescribed form is necessarily accompanied by a slight degree of disorder and want of uniformity, which not only creates an impression of carelessness upon the observer, but also entails a certain loss of time and leads the soldiers to the view that the carrying out of the regulations is sheer nonsense. Only let anyone observe how a body of volunteers advances in double files from the centre into line, how it forms company, or performs any other change of formation, and he will see what careless habits we are falling into. But such faults as may occur in an old line regiment, which has the good foundation of solid drilling and then has to go through the same exercise once more in order to shake off its careless bearing, are much more dangerous in a volunteer force, in which this solid foundation in detail drill is entirely lacking. Their careless behaviour, which must be tolerated at the beginning, since the men have to go through all the elementary exercises quickly, will grow and multiply unless it is regularly and persistently counteracted by strict company drill. It will be impossible to root out such habits completely; but at any rate they can and should be checked so as to prevent them from gaining ground. The individual bearing of the soldiers, we believe, will gradually improve, although we very much doubt whether that peculiar swaying of the line when marking time, which is to be observed at all volunteer drills, will ever disappear. We mean a certain habit of moving the upper part of the body when marking time, which seems to be common among all volunteers, as far as we have seen up to now. The right foot is not raised until the right shoulder goes up and the left is lowered. With the left foot the left shoulder moves upward, and thus the whole line heaves to and fro like a ripe cornfield under a gentle zephyr, but hardly resembling a body of steadfast soldiers, prepared to meet the enemy.

We believe we have said enough to direct attention to this subject. Every volunteer who has the movement at heart will agree with us that regular and careful company drill is necessary, for, to repeat it, the volunteer corps have been thoroughly neglected in their elementary training, and it requires great attention and a good deal of work to remedy this deficiency in any way.