This is a thing that I want to state as emphatically as possible.  It is the pith of the lesson I have learnt at the front.  The whole method of war has been so altered in the past five and twenty years as to make it a new and different process altogether.  Much the larger part of this alteration has only become effective in the last two years.  Everyone is a beginner at this new game; everyone is experimenting and learning.

The idea has been put admirably by Punch. That excellent picture of the old-fashioned sergeant who complains to his officer of the new recruit; “’E’s all right in the trenches, Sir; ’e’s all right at a scrap; but ’e won’t never make a soldier,” is the quintessence of everything I am saying here.  And were there not the very gravest doubts about General Smuts in British military circles because he had “had no military training”?  A Canadian expressed the new view very neatly on being asked, in consequence of a deficient salute, whether he wanted to be a soldier, by saying, “Not I!  I want to be a fighter!”

The professional officer of the old dispensation was a man specialised in relation to one of the established “arms.”  He was an infantryman, a cavalryman, a gunner or an engineer.  It will be interesting to trace the changes that have happened to all these arms.

Before this war began speculative writers had argued that infantry drill in close formation had now no fighting value whatever, that it was no doubt extremely necessary for the handling, packing, forwarding and distribution of men, but that the ideal infantry fighter was now a highly individualised and self-reliant man put into a pit with a machine gun, and supported by a string of other men bringing him up supplies and ready to assist him in any forward rush that might be necessary.

The opening phases of the war seemed to contradict this.  It did not at first suit the German game to fight on this most modern theory, and isolated individual action is uncongenial to the ordinary German temperament and opposed to the organised social tendencies of German life.  To this day the Germans attack only in close order; they are unable to produce a real modern infantry for aggressive purposes, and it is a matter of astonishment to military minds on the English side that our hastily trained new armies should turn out to be just as good at the new fighting as the most “seasoned troops.”  But there is no reason whatever why they should not be.  “Leading,” in the sense of going ahead of the men and making them move about mechanically at the word of command, has ceased.  On the British side our magnificent new subalterns and our equally magnificent new non-commissioned officers play the part of captains of football teams; they talk their men individually into an understanding of the job before them; they criticise style and performance.  On the French side things have gone even farther.  Every man in certain attacks has been given a large