May 2, 19 1 8 
Land & Water 
2 1 
Education of the Soldier : By Centurion 
FROM the moment a civilian attests or is called up 
he is subjected to what experts in the treatment of 
shell-shock call a process of "re-education" — with 
this difference, that in his case the process is not 
restorative but revolutionary. He finds he has 
many things to learn, and still more to unlearn. 
The first thing he learns is that his personal tastes are of 
no importance. He is taken before the company orderly 
sergeant and told with some asperity to get his hair cut ; 
the operation is performed with an incisiveness that leaves 
nothing to be done in the way of uniformity except the 
branding of the scalp with a broad arrow. He goes before 
the quartermaster-sergeant and exchanges the whole of his ■ 
variegated wardrobe for ready-made garments more remark- 
able for uniformity than cut. He is allowed little private 
property; but a large number of articles, all exactly like 
everybody else's, are issued to him, which he is expected to 
keep with as much care as if they were his own, under penalty 
of being put under stoppages of pay if he becomes " deficient." 
He finds that he has to black his boots, brush his clothes, 
polish his buttons, and make his bed, with an eye not to his 
own satisfaction, but to that of some one else. He has to 
rise and retire at inexorable hours, and from reveille to 
tattoo his life is subject to a time-table. He is free to make 
a pal, but his choice is strictly limited to the ranks ; the 
shades of distinction in these things are fine but definite. 
He has probably reflected, on the way to the depot, that the 
tolerant smile of the sergeant conducting the draft, under 
the volatile chaff of the slouching recruits, is indicative of a 
large heart and a sociable disposition ; a few days' experience 
of N.C.O.'s on the square wiU induce him to think that there 
was irony in that srnUe, and his one ambition will be not to 
attract a sergeant's attention, but to avoid it. 
He may feel that he would Hke to know his CO., but he 
soon finds that the opportunities for seeing him are singularly 
restricted and usually avoided unless they come unsolicited 
from the orderly-room, in which case it generally means that 
he is "for it." He finds that to go unremarked is at this 
stage more creditable than to attract attention, and 
originality is out of place. 
Unless he is both modest and humorous, his first days will 
be depressing. He \yill find that the N.C.O.'s, though he 
may be better educated than they, give him credit for pos- 
sessing very littre intelligence — and when he is wiser he will 
recognise that they were probably right. He will find that 
the instructors are quick to discover an element of "personal 
error" in him which he did not know himself. He finds 
that he never "orders" his dinner or anything else, but that 
everything is ordered for him. He is subject to all kinds of 
."inspections," and if, like most civilians, he has been very 
casual about his chattels, knowing that he could always 
walk into a shop and order a substitute for the article he has 
mislaid, he will almost certainly be "deficient" at his first 
kit inspection. He discovers that to be slack, unclean, 
disorderly, haphazard, are not merely faults : they are 
"crimes." He must inwardly digest the lesson that the 
first duty of a recruit is to be "clean and regular" ; if he 
learns it thoroughly he may aspire, when put on- guard duty, 
to "get the stick" and be made orderly-room orderly. H 
he does not, he is "for it." It will console him to discover 
that everybody else, including the N.C.O., has to be "clean 
and regular," too, and that if the regimental institutions 
which minister to his comfort, from cook-house to canteen, 
are not clean and regular, the Orderly officer will know the 
reason why. If the company-sergeant seems hard on him, 
he may reflect that the company-sergeants might, with as 
much or as little justification, think the same of the sergeant- 
major and the sergeant-major of the CO. By the time he 
has got his first stripe — if not before it — he will have realised 
that all this inexorable discipline has a meaning, and- that 
he and his fellows are, in the language of the Apostle, members 
one of another. 
The "re-education" of the recruit is a series of surprises. 
He discovers on the square that he has never learnt how to 
use his legs ; at Observation he finds that he has never known 
how to use his eyes. To translate a command " Right turn ! " 
into an immediate co-ordination of the musc!(?s of the heel 
of the right foot and the toe of the left is at first an act of 
painful deUberation ; it is only later that it becomes a reflex 
movement. Unless he was an athlete, he was probably a 
stranger to his body until he joined the army ; after 
"physical jerks," he discovers by the location of numerous 
Copyright in U.S.A. 
aches and pains that it contains a number of muscles which 
he has long neglected, until they were in danger of becoming 
as obsolete as the vermiform appendix. The first thing is to 
get him "fit" — physical jerks do much, the "gym squad" 
and route-marching do the rest. 
All the time his mind is not being neglected ; indeed, like 
his body, it is treated as singularly unformed. Squad drill 
probably strikes him as a stupid and elementary operation ; 
but he is astonished — with a wholesome humiliation — to find 
that to remember your right from your left and whether 
you are odd or even is not so instantaneous as he had thought 
it was. At section-drill he begins to grasp the great principle 
of the composition of a battalion, namely, that it is founded 
on a standardisation of parts ; when he has done his company- 
drill the lesson is complete. During these stages he feels that 
he is becoming merely automatic, and so he is. He is 
learning to subordinate his personality to the will of others. 
Observation Lessons 
At "observation" he learns how to use his eyes, and 
discovers — especially if he is a townsman — that all his life 
he has been in the habit of looking at things without seeing 
them. A class of recruits, when invited to estimate the 
number, distance, and size of given objects, will exhibit the 
most astonishing differences of judgment, which will have 
nothing in common except that they are all wrong. In 
time, they will learn the chronology of "six o'clock," will be 
able to locate objects in terms of a given "prominent object," 
and sum up a landscape in "Church to the left. Two 
elms in the foreground. Farmhouse in the middle distance. 
Eight hundred." They will learn to read nature like a book 
— to know that she has a thousand tricks of camouflage, 
that in a good light the distance of an object is under-estimated 
and in a bad one exaggerated, that red and yellow colours 
seem near, and purple and violet appear distant. Later 
they will leam» to consider the heavf ns like the husband- 
man and to estimate almost intuitively the effects of wind, 
moisture, and light in producing a marksman's margin of 
error. 
Up to this point a recruit has been learning to train his 
muscles and re-educate his senses. In the old and leisurely 
days before the war all these stages were carefully graduated, 
and the time at which a recruit went "off the square" to do 
his musketry course at the butts was strictly contingent on 
the degree of intelligence he had attained. Also he learnt 
one thing at a time. In these days of intensive training, 
when a man is rushed through a course in fourteen weeks 
which in the old days might take a year and more, he has to 
learn half a dozen things at once. But there is one principle 
that the army instractor has never abandoned — namely, 
that theory can never be a substitute for practice. ' You do 
not teach a recruit the use of a rifle or a Lewis gun from a 
diagram ; you put the weapon into his hands, and educate 
him in the meaning of the parts before you teach him to use 
the whole. The army instructor works on the principles of 
that great educationist, Mr. Squeers, "Spell winder — now 
go and clean it" — except that the pupil has to clean it before 
he "spells" it. He must know how to "strip" a Lewis gun 
before he fires it. Moreover, in the actual use of any weapon, 
he has to learn a dozen things in order to forget them ; they 
begin by being dehberate, they end by being instinctive. 
The ideal of a good musketry-instructor is to teach his men 
to shoot like the cowboy who, on being asked by a naive 
spectator how he managed to shoot so unerringly, retorted : 
"Guess yer a clerk, ain't yer ? Wal, you don't have to aim 
with yer pen every time you write a letter, do you ? " 
When the recruit has learnt how to use a rifle or to throw 
a "powder puff," he can enter on the stage of five rounds 
or live bombs. But training goes far beyond that : the one 
and undivided object of Army schools to-day is to exercise 
the recruit in circumstances which approximate as nearly as 
possible to the conditions which the soldier will have to 
encounter in actual warfare, A good training camp is 
furnished with trenches, strong-posts, and assault-courses — 
which sometimes reproduce with remarkable fidelity all the 
features of a German position with its tricks of concealed 
machine-guns, masked trench-walls, and all the rest of it. 
The soldier is even taught how to use the weapons of the 
enemy and exercised in the use of those lethal toys, the 
" pineapple" trench-mortar. And he has not only got to know 
his own job, but also how to act in conjunction with others ; 
also in tiiis war of platoons a soldier's education is incomplete 
