Brewster 'A Glimpse of War through a Private's Eyes', a retrospective account of experiences in World War I, 1915-1917 / John James Brewster - Page 49
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[Page 49]
higher branches, it looked uncommonly like mere waste of time to go through exactly the same performances right from the beginning but under conditions much more difficult to bear, time which could have been very much better devoted to making them better fighting men by making each & every one more expert in firing his rifle, in bomb throwing & in the work of handling and firing Machine Guns & Trench Mortars.
If in Egypt almost the whole time had been spent in exercises of this kind and Route marches, & all the useless close order drill & Elementary Rifle Exercises "cut out" altogether, the value of every man when in France would have been considerably enhanced as a fighting man as well as preventing the possibility of a lot of irritating annoyance & dissatisfaction arising.
Without any stretching of veracity it is safe to say that when our Company first went into the firing line in France more than half had never handled a live bomb let alone throw one & had never seen a Machine gun close enough to handle it, had they understood its working but they had performed the simplest elementary close order or "squad drill "by numbers" so often that by the tedious monotony, their execution of all their work was perceptibly worse at the end of their alleged training than in the earlier stages. The evident uselessness of all the unnecessary tiresome repetition of parade ground proceedings seriously affected all that enthusiasm, all that patriotism, all that personal ambition to try to be of the greatest value as a unit, of a force keenly & strenuously fighting for its very existence in the service of a country well worthy of defence
When it is accepted that every officer & man enlisted with the one single object in view, the defeat of the enemy, it is very hard to have to draw attention to & specially dilate on what appears to be plainly mistaken ideas, views, & methods, to obtain