THE CALL TO ARMS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2594, 31 August 1909, Page 6

THE CALL TO ARMS.

THE CURSE OF INCOMPLETENESS

Better a sharp tomahawk than a blunt axe (says a writer in the Melbourne “Argus.”) When a hundred practised marksmen assemble they are not a fighting unit, though their pockets be filled with cartridges and their rifles be in their hands. They want a commander to direct them, with his subordinate officers to see to the carrying out of his instructions. They cannot march, for they have no transport; iior camp, for they have no food or shelter; nor fight, for they have no ammunition for more than the preliminaries of battle, and no entrenching tools to throw up cover. Give them transport, food, ammunition, spades, and they become a real means of offence and defence. Take a score, or a hundred, or a thousand of such effective units, they are not an army. They must be grouped. The groups must be officered.’ Groups "must, in turn, be organised in larger bodies with their commanders, and so on-till we reach the chief commander, who, through his immediate staff, controls the whole. And then we have not an army. For this organised, disciplined, and controlled body is of riflemen only. Armies* require cavalry (or their Australian substitute, light horse) for protection, for information, for special speed of movement. They want artillery to support the infantry. Engineers are needed to maintain communication, to make or break bridges, to mend or ruin roads. Signallers are required for transmission of orders. Ammunition columns are more indispensable than* ever in these days of quickfiring guns, magazine rifles, and weeklong battles, and it is necessary to provide in wheeled vehicles replenishments of shrapnel and of bullet for the firing line. The food for men and horses, and the waggons which carry it, must be properly assembled in supply columns. The sick, and wounded must have their field ambulances. All these must be in the proportions experience has decreed; It needs much more .than shooting; at a- target" to make a soldier, and infinitely more than soldiers to make an army. * Campaigning, despite a prevalent impression to the contrary, does not consist of a series of bloody battles, with the combatants returning, to lunch in the intervals. The battle which counts is but the culminating point of years of peace preparation, and weeks or montns of "marching in war. It is the final test of the army which 1 figbts.it, tut has been preceded by a long, line of tests, which- must have been successfully "passed to enable the last to be tried at all with any prospect of victory. The power to manoeuvre depends on the fitness and completeness of the instrument, they and the,capacity or the general, its wielder. On the. power to manoeuvre depends the possibility of engaging the enemy oh terms which justify engaging him at all.