CORRESPONDENCE.

A NIGHT ATTACK.

[TO TIM EntTOIL Or TOR "SPECTATOR."]

Siu,—There is no subject upon which soldiers are in more complete agreement than that a night attack is the most difficult of military operations. To begin with, it requires the perfection of discipline amongst the men, and by discipline here is meant not merely the willingness of the privates to do what they are told, but discipline in the technical sense,—the instant and co-operative obedience which comes from long training, obedience like that of the bands or the feet to the brain. Orders are understood and executed automatically, and there is no puzzling out first what is ordered, and then how the order is to be carried out. Next, a night attack demands the extreme of vigilance and intelligence in officers of all ranks. Lastly, it requires, if it is to be carried out not by a single com- pany or battalion, but by a body of men consisting of three or four independent battalions, the most complete staff organisation. There must be a well-ordered co-relation of the whole force, interdependence between the units and a complete central control. The reason for all these things is clear. In daylight, defects of discipline and defects of central and local organisation may be corrected by an energetic commander. In a night attack no corrections of error are possible. There can be no rushing about of energetic staff officers, no "galloping majors," no adjutants " perspiring and profane," bringing up scattered men, and keeping connexions between companies on the oue hand

and battalions on the other. The sheep dogs not only cannot see when. the flock goes astray, but even if they could, see they would not be able to give the warning barks which keep the units together and prevent them becoming a mob.

This being so there is a very general feeling in the Army that night attacks are not the sort of things, to be tried with Volunteers. Even those who are most favourable to the Volunteers consider night attacks " above the rise of the Auxiliary spirit." It was with no small interest then that I found myself able to take part in, or rather, as a civilian, I should say, to be a spectator of, a night march under- taken by the West Surrey Volunteer Infantry Brigade on Wednesday the ith. The brigade was encamped: by Fort Darland, at Chatham, under the command of Colonel Burrell,- and the Brigadier, greatly daring, but,.as the sequel proved, not without good reason, determined to attempt a night attack. Let me give a rough idea of the problem before him. The outlying forts which surround Chatham were supposed to be occupied by a Home Army, while we of the West Surrey Volunteer Brigade represented an invading force. The forts from Luton to Bridgewood knew generally that they might be attacked, but were unaware which fort would be chosen for assault. They were also theoretically unaware on which night the attack would take place, though actually no doubt they had good reason to expect that it would be Wednesday night,— when, in fact, it did take place. They therefore were on the look-out for us. We, on the other hand, if our attack , was to succeed, must give no indication as to where the . blow would fall, The Brigadier determined to make his attack upon a line of works which stretch between Fort Bridgewood and its next neighbour,—Fort Bridgewood being the most distant of the forts. If these works were carried, it was recognised that Fort Bridgewood must itself fall, and with it the whole fortress. His problem, then, was not merely to make a night assault upon the particular work. First, without being observed, he must march his men through the country to a point of assembly. Next, from the point of assembly he must steal in the darkness to the place just below the works from which the final rush for the trenches could be made. If we were " spotted " during our march to . the place of assembly or in covering the distance between the place of assembly and the place whence the final assault . would be delivered, we should have lost the game, for . the guns of the defenders would have blown our columns • to atoms. Translated into plain language, this meant that Colonel Burrell, our Brigadier, had by means of reconnaissances and by close observation of maps to find a route through roads and lanes which would keep our battalions concealed from the watchful eyes and telescopes of the besieged. This, again, meant a considerable detour. If we had gone uphill and downhill straight for our objective, we could have reached it in, say, a march of four miles. Instead, we had to make a circuitous march of at least ten miles in order to get un- observed to the place of assault. If we had taken the short cut we should have been visible to the whole world. By taking the long road we moved, as it were, invisible, sunk in hollow lanes or behind hills and woods.

To show the difficulty of such concealment I may mention that when we left our. camp perched upon a high chalk down, we were nearer to our objective, the point of assault, than we were at the point of assembly. Thus we were in greatest danger of observation (because nearest to the line of forts) when we started. Also it happened that the road, soon after it left our camp, was for some forty or fifty yards exposed to the full view of the countryside, as roads running up the side of a chalk down often are. Any man on the fort with a good telescope could have seen these , forty to fifty yards of road on the hillside and have noticed the column pouring down them. In order to turn this difficulty. the Brigadier ordered hurdles to be .prepared and stu,ck with saplings and branches of trees some seven or eight .feet high. With these leaf4ringed hurdles the gap was filled, .If the ,rgader of enquiring mind asks how it was that the watcher§ in the forts did not notice the disappearance of the gap:owing to the Brigadier's umbrageous 'envelope, the answer is supplied by the remark. of :a landscaiie painter who happened to be with the coluMn. "They will not notice: the filling . of the gap: he said " because there is .n high leafy . . Image on the other side of the road, and therefore they are already,- accustomed to look at a background of green leaves." Fortunately, too, there was a hedge of some four feet high on the exposed side of the gap, and therefore the roa-d. did not show white on the hillside even before our art had modified it. It was only our beads and shoulders we had to bide.

Our column began its march at five o'clock in the afternoon. It consisted of four battalions of .Surrey Volunteers. The leading battalion, the 2nd Queen's, commanded by Colonel Perkins, was followed by the battalions *Of Colonel Ramsey, Colonel Bevington, and Colonel Watney. I write from memory, and am not sure of the exact orderin which they marched. It took us about two hours to reach the place of assembly. Here the men rested for a short time and ate some food, and the officers' horses were sent back to camp by the road by which they had come. At about half-past seven tin night march proper began, though, of course, it was not yet dark. The point at which we had to take up our positions for the actual assault was now roughly five miles away. The hour at which we were to reach that point was half-past eleven. The commanders of battalions were given their orders as to the places they were to take up, and each was provided with a local guide who knew the ground—more or less. They were further informed that the actual signal for assault would be communicated by our searchlight,—the searchlight which did not accom- pany us but was posted on a bill opposite the fort— giving a series of .irregular and random dots and dashes. The signal was to be expected shortly after half-past eleven. By the time half the distance between the point of assembly and the point of assault had been covered, we reached the place where we were to leave the high road and plunged into a lane and track, which led us down a steep hill into the valley beneath Fort Bridgewood. Bridgewood is on the top of the down and has a very steep, nay, almost precipitous face. I should mention here that just as it got really dark, we encountered Lord Methuen, the General responsible for the Eastern Command, and General Scott, the General commanding at Chatham, and their staffs. From the point of assembly to the point where we left the high road the column marched almost with- out noise, but from the moment that the high road was left and the march in the dark began the silence was absolute, or if broken at all, it was only by the conversa- tion of the two Generals and their staffs. Possibly this violation of the chief condition of a night march was calculated,—the Generals may have desired to test the discipline of the men and to see if their example would be followed. If so, they must have been greatly pleased, for it did not seem to have occurred to a single man in the ranks that if General Officers might talk, so might he.

Nothing, I think, impressed me more the Whole evening than the short halt at the point where we left the high road. Here darkness had completely. fallen, for it was by this time nine o'clock. I was at the head of the column. Looking hack, I could see dimly the faces of the first half-dozen men. Blackness swallowed the rest. But although my reason told me that there were some fifteen hundred crouching figures packed closely together behind me, not a sound came from the long brown human serpent. Nobody coughed or shook his accoutre- ments, or stamped his feet or fidgeted, or at any rate if anyone did he was what Mr. Kipling calls ",most mousey quiet " about it. When the halt was over, we descended a steep and rugged path bordered by bushes and completely arched over by leaves. Here the darkness was so profound that later I heard one of the men refer to it as "the underground passage." As far as I could gather, he really thought that we had .been proceeding underground,not so ridiculous a supposition as it sounds, for the ground round Chatham just now seemed filled, with under- ground passages dug by the sappers in the course of their mining operations, and these passages often stretch for fifty yards or so.

As the column emerged at the. bottom of the passage, the dramatic interest of the evening began. Almost immediately we came within range of the searchlights. These showed us that at the bottom of " the underground passage" we were in a: narrow valley. On the right was Fort Bridge- wood, and on the hills' to the left. was our seachlight,which played upon the fort, giving it a weird illumination.. At first the enemy's searchlight went over our beads, and merely lit .upthe slyping fields to tour left while filong in the shade. Suddenly, however, the light, with its blinding glare, was upon us. Our first thought was AV obey our 'orders, and throw ourselves upon our faces. This was done with extraordinary promptitude by the men, and also with extra- ordinary silence. There was no bustle, no giving of orders. Every man dropped flat as if he bad been shot, for he knew that if you move while the searchlight envelopes you, you are seen' at once, whereas if you keep quiet you only look like a stone or a tree or a shadow. In spite of this knowledge, however; most of us, I think, believed when we first encountered the searchlights that we had been caught, :and that the game was up.

A little reflection, however, showed that this was not the case. The' first proof that we had been discovered would have been a fusillade of musketry and big guns from the defenders of the " fort. When no firing was heard, we realised that we had not been seen. We had confirmation in the fact that the search- light did not remain playing upon us, but was soon shifted to another part of the field. The instant that the search- 'light moved from off us every man rose to his feet, and hurried on as far as possible,—till the searchlight again gleamed in his eyes. Then the same manoeuvre was repeated. We fell on our faces as if " a mighty rush- ing wind had laid us low." The men, however, seemed instinctively to understand that every moment of darkness 'was precious, and must be utilised to the utmost by move- ment. Thus, our time was occupied by alternate moments of darkness coupled with extreme activity, and of brilliant 'light coupled with extreme quiescence. We flitted like ghosts through the blackness : we lay in a deathlike • stupor in the light. But all the time no word of command was heard to break the silence, and if occasionally an anxious officer or non-commissioned officer passed dumbly down the line it was only to give a touch or a sign, but never a word. "Come like shadows, so depart," was the order of the day. . Our progress of human dots and 'dashes ate up the hours—time gallops on a night march • —and it was not far from half-past eleven when we of the leading battalion were assigned by our guide the 'place from which our assault was to begin. Admir- able' was the way in which without tumult or apparent difficulty the Colonel and his officers formed us up for the attack, for we were to attack with closed ranks, the Brigadier enforcing this order by telling us that the assault must have weight in order to carry it home.

I began by one of the commonplaces of practical soldier- ' 'in. I must end by another,—the commonplace that the

• military interest of peace manoeuvres and peace field-days ' 'ceases at the moment when the guns open fire or the charge begins. Till that happens the conditions may be almost 'exactly assimilated to those of war. With the first round of blank cartridge or with the charge which must be stopped before it goes home, the spell is broken. I feel very much inclined then to end my account of the night attack at the point which I have reached,—at the point where the battalions had got to their positions two or three -hundred yards below the works which were our objective, and were ready to rush them. We had done what we had been ordered to do,—we had got to the point of assault without having been .seen by the enemy, without having betrayed ourselves either by noise or - by moving in the searchlight. As we beard afterwards, we passed absolutely unperceived till the last five or six minutes, when two or three men doubling up in haste had - been observed. Detection then, however, was immaterial. We had already got to the point of assault, and should in any case have made ourselves visible within a very few minutes.

But though a charge in peace may be futile, it is certainly extremely picturesque when it takes place at night. Unfortunately the battalion to which I bad attached myself, that of Colonel Perkins (2nd Volunteer Battalion of the

• Queen's) .was at the moment when its charge should have taken place stopped by one of the chief umpires on the ground -that it was out of bounds. In other words, there was a " bole 'in the rules," for the authorities bad given no instructions as to any part of the ground being out of bounds. Possibly, how- ever, the umpire was justified, because that part of the hill-side where we were, as we found afterwards, was so sown with deep 'trenches that serious injury to the men might have occurred • bad we charged over it. Thee result was that we did not

charge, and while our officers were debating the point with the umpire, we heard the three distinct cheers, which were the agreed sign that the work had been carried. The fort was ours, and the umpire therefore allowed us to go on.

Dramatic in the extreme was the sight of the men as they crowned the fort and stood up visible against the skyline in the rays from the searchlights. Picking our way through the trenches we were soon in the fort itself. Without confusion, the officers of the battalions already inside were getting their men in order, and in what seemed to me an incredibly short time the battalions, in spite of alternate darkness and dazzle, were assembled and prepared for their march home. Men and officers, and most of all the Brigadier, on whom had fallen the strain and responsibility of planning the attack, were naturally very proud of the result. They had done what they had set out to do. They had got to the place of assault without being detected, although the doing involved a march of ten miles, five of them in darkness. A Volunteer infantry brigade of four battalions had success- fully managed a night assault over a very difficult piece of ground. To say that is to say all that is necessary.• At any rate it is not for me, a civilian, to attempt to distribute praise to the nation's officers and soldiers, even though I felt an intense feeling of pride in the citizen soldiers of my own county, and could not but admire the admirable dis- positions of the Brigadier and the skilful work of his Brigade- Major, Major Addison.—I am, Sir, &c.,

WEST SURREY.

P.S.—I see I have forgotten to note that the main night attack was supported by a feint made by a cadet battalion belonging to our brigade. They were ordered by Colonel Burrell to attack Fort Luton at ten o'clock, and thus engage the enemy's attention at the other end of his line of forts. The operation, under the command of Colonel Beresford, was skilfully executed, and did great credit to his battalion.