NOTES from CALAIS BASE AND PICTURES OF ITS MANY ACTIVITIES By C. E. MONTAGUE LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN, Ltd. 1, ADELPHI TERRACE, W.C. 1918 Printed in Great Britain by THE AVENUE PRESS (L. UPCOTT GILL & SON, LTD.), LONDON. TRAINING IN FRANCE Of course all our troops are trained before they go to France, whether the individual soldier goes out with his battalion or in a draft sent from its reserve battalion at home to reinforce it. But when reinforcements are landed in France they are put through a further course of instruction, before they go up to join their regiments at the Front. This final period of instruction is very short; it is tightly packed with work; it assumes that the men already know their work and only need to do it with greater finish; and it is given by the best experts the British Army possesses in trench warfare as it is carried on to-day. That is, really to-day, and not as it was carried on six or even three months ago. Training Schools. For these infantry training schools at the base are in constant living contact with the Front. The instructors come fresh from the trenches, and if the latest experience gained by the Army on the Somme or before Cambrai leads to a change in the recognised technique of bomb-throwing or the cutting out of an unnecessary movement in the bayonet exercise, the officers and non-commissioned officers who instruct can show the young soldier, from their own experience, just how the improvement will help him at the crisis of a scrimmage. Thus the course may be compared with the short final period of very exacting coaching in which “racing polish” is put on a boat’s crew which has already undergone a long training. Or it may be compared with the “post-graduate courses” in a university, at which the latest results of special research are imparted by original researchers to students whose previous ordinary training enables them to profit by this higher teaching. Trench Warfare. The men under instruction have to learn—or else show that they know already—everything that a soldier in trenches must know in order to protect himself and endanger the enemy. They are “put through it” in the ordinary parade movements in close order, in open order work, in bayonet fighting, musketry and bombing. There is not much time for each subject, but none is wasted; the men are intensely keen to get up to their regiments, and they know that they cannot go till they are passed as qualified; the instructors teach with the zest of veterans relating their own experiences to recruits. No Idle Moments.