FIELDCRAFT AND THE TOWNSMAN.
TO the traveller looking down from one of the rolling ridges of a great open tract of country such as Salisbury Plain, when the outlines of the broad woods and hills are blurred in the fading light of sunset, one of the most insistent of reflections is the permanence of the large features of the landscape round him. The roadways ran differently through the valleys, perhaps, two thousand years ago, if indeed there were roadways then; possibly the lower ground, where the hares are chasing each other over dusty ploughs, was marshland, and probably the rings of surrounding bills lay
bare to the sun, unshadowed by hanging beechwoods. But the main alternations of valley and upland, the rise and fall - of the wide miles of plain, have not changed. If one of the Druid chieftains buried with his treasures beneath that high barrow could stride out once more to watch the sun rise beyond the great trilithons of Stonehenge, he could find his way north or south to his tribe as readily and quickly now as before the Romans came. The old landmarks would still be there ; the curves and dents of the skyline would be unaltered; the same stars would ride over the same ridge at midnight. Set down among the fens of Norfolk or the peaty moors of Surrey, he could still travel east or west, by day or night, to the ordered point of meeting. The changes of civilisation, the town spread wide over miles of country which he knew as marsh or thicket, the railway cutting steel levels through the hills, might thwart and puzzle, but would not prevent him moving forward. As a potential traveller, he would contain, for the purpose of making his way from one spot to another, all power and knowledge within himself.
Power and knowledge of that kind being an extremely fascinating possession, it might seem strange that so many millions, living thousands of years later than the builders of Stonehenge, should never feel the desire for it,--except that great desires only arise in the case of great needs, and of all physical necessities, the necessity of being able to orientate himself is one of those which occur least often to the member of a modern civilised community. The business of the stars and the lodestone is already finished, complete and in order, by the railways and the tramlines. The Scots gillie, who knows every stick and stone on the forest, and could walk blindfold over twenty thousand acres from one march to the other, may still need to be able to find his way over fresh country ; but for the ordinary man the necessity is cut away by Bradshaw. It is a necessity which would arise again to any great extent only, probably, in time of war ; but that does' not make it less worth consideration. Indeed, among the manceuvres practised in peace-time hardly any are more interesting than those which depend for their success on the ability of a body or bodies of men to find their way across unknown country to meet in a given time at a given place, under varying conditions of light and weather ; and never are manoeuvres of the kind better worth study than when necessity compels a body of town-bred soldiers to face the open country for the first time. Only officers who have trained large bodies of troops, or those who, as it was the writer's fortune to do lately, have accompanied small detachments of men over fresh country, would believe the astonishing mistakes that can be made by inexperience. Not only by night, when the difficulty of succeeding in any attempt at gaining a rendezvous is trebled by the velvety curtains drawn on every side, but in broad daylight, the most unimaginable blunders somehow do occur, to the confounding of even-tempered Colonels. The officer who has tried it before knows what to expect. He knows that he may point out to an intelligent sergeant a bridge a quarter of a mile away, with a road running a white riband in hot sunlight from the spot on which he stands to the parapet over the railway where the imagined train has broken down, and yet that somehow, by some queer prompting, possibly because nearer vision makes all things look unlike what they were before, it will happen either that the sergeant will never get to the bridge, or, getting to it, will pass to other roads and other bridges beyond,—all in the serene belief that his orders are being carried out with justness and exactitude. He knows, too, that on one particular point, the judging of distances, he cannot rely on the report or the calcu- lations of any but the expert. Few revelations of the kind are more amazing than the inability of the untrained, or town- trained, eye or mind to appreciate distances between point and point. It fell to the writer's lot recently to post a non- commissioned officer and a handful of men to hold the approach to an important point, direct communication with the next body of men to the right being only possible over a rising piece of ground sown with young corn, so that the messenger would have to work round the base of a small hill. Having posted the men, he walked over to the neighbouring picket, distant, perhaps, seven or eight hundred yards away, where the umpire stood, appointing various times and limitations. To the latter, a little later, up rushed a breathless messenger, panting from his run round the base of the corn-sown hill. "The enemy have attacked Sergeant — in force, Sir, and there's, as you might say, a deadlock ; neither of them will give in."—" Indeed, and where is Sergeant — P "—" 'E's over there, Sir "—an arm was waved vaguely towards the horizon—" a long way ; about three and a 'arf miles, I should say."—" H'm ! And how long ago did you leave him P "—" Oh, a long time now, Sir ; quite ten minutes." Long experience gave the city worker a very fair notion of judging time.
Distances are deceptive enough to the trained eye, even when difficulties are not superadded in the shape of intervening water, slanting sunlight, and so on. But it takes a credulous mind to believe without further witness the mistakes which are possible to the recruit asked for the first time to sight his rifle at a distant object. A black cow is pointed out, perhaps four hundred yards away,—a calculation easily made because from the point at which the rifleman stands a line of telegraph-posts, sixty yards apart, runs directly out through the field in which the cow is grazing. The scattered line of sharpshooters estimates the distance from rifle to cow with varying degrees of assurance,—fifty to fifteen hundred yards. Reason is given for believing the true distance to be almost exactly four hundred and twenty, and those who were within moderate limits of error are mildly jubilant. Ten minutes later a similar test with another cow about half the distance away, and also near some telegraph-wires, prompts equally valorous guessing,—except that, with commendably sound memories, several state the distance to be four hundred and twenty yards almost precisely. Does a yard really mean anything at all, you wonder ? Here and there it does not, perhaps the best method of pointing out what it does mean being to work in comparisons of the length of a cricket-pitch. One of the queerest of disabilities, by the way, imposed by prolonged existence among bricks and mortar is the inability to estimate what it is possible for any live person with two legs to jump. It is a curious sight to see a line of thoroughbred Cockney boys skirmishing on open ground for the first time in their exist- ence, and confronted by a four-foot stream. Three or four waver, uncertain how to proceed. In a town of flags and cobbles they have never yet had to cross running water. They jump eventually, imitating the others, and look back, .pleased and surprised at their newly discovered powers.
But it is, of course, moving over unknown ground at night which imposes the highest and hardest test on the unprac- tised. It is, inieed, not without a little difficulty that the less adventurous can be induced, when first moving off the easy road away over grass and heather, to put one foot in front of the other. Even when the point to mare!! upon stands up plain enough on the horizon—even, perhaps, when some kindly star sits nicely balanced over Point 123, the distant cross-roads upon which the various columns are ordered to converge— even then the difficulty is to get the men forward. Soft and thwarting veils of darkness wrap themselves round peering eyes; grass on the grey, straggly footpath through the heather suddenly shows black and dangerous like water; the right foot shuffling over the treacherous surface catches in a tussock, and the left foot follows unwillingly after it. A snipe dashes up from a marshy hollow, making an incredible noise ; in the daytime be would be cutting high zigzags in the sunlight; now he vanishes, a ghostly sound and nothing more,—perhaps one of the enemy's scouts. Suddenly the ground dips, to the consternation of the ill-balanced ; he tumbles clumsily and his armour rattles upon him, like a hero of the Iliad. That tumble, in the " real thing," would have let loose flame and lead, his officer explains hoarsely, under his breath ; and it does not need ninety or a hundred minutes' marching over that broken, un. certain ground to extract d sigh of relief from most of the little party when at last, perhaps a hundred yards west of " 123 " the column actually emerges on dusty macadam, tried and true. Those ninety minutes do not entail much in the way of fieldcraft ? They do not, hilt even that little is possibly a little more than it falls to the opportunity of 'all to test. It would be child's-play to the Scots gillie ; would the Druid have taken a quarter of an hour over it ? Perhaps not ; perhaps, after all, anybody could do it, given the opportunity. If the opportunity is wanted—but there, no doubt, the journalist ought to leave argument to the recruiting officer.
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