Before taking the men on to the exercise ground, you should choose a point on it from which you intend to start your advance. Some fourteen hundred or less yards from this choose a position for your skeleton enemy, who will consist of three or four old soldiers with forty rounds of blank each. If men are not available, put up a few red range flags. Whichever are used, put them into some position that an enemy might reasonably occupy; do not simply dump them down on to the ground. The skeleton enemy must be told to show up occasionally, and to open a slow but regular fire as soon as they see your men advancing, but only to keep it up as long as your men show themselves in making their advance. A complete cessation of fire will denote that your men are making such good use of cover as to be invisible to the enemy. Let your men also know that these instructions have been given, and that such an advance is the ideal to be sought for, provided always that it is not absurdly slow. If neither men nor flags are available you must make believe and point out a supposed position at a supposed distance. I have already pointed out the advantages of having a skeleton enemy to work against. In front of your starting point, and about four hundred yards from it, decide on some point at which you will let the men halt after they have made their way across the intervening space. Here I will refer you to the diagram. The line AA´ is your starting point, CC´ the enemy’s position. Your exercise consists in showing individual men how to gain ground from AA´ as far as BB´, distant about four hundred yards from AA´, with the minimum of exposure to the enemy’s aimed fire. Draw up the sections, supposing there are two, on the line AA´, fifty to one hundred yards apart, and let the men sit down facing away from CC´ and, if possible, under cover, so that they may not see how their comrades negotiate the course. Space the available non-commissioned officers of each section along the course from A to B and A´ to B´, with orders to supervise and criticise the advance of each man within the limits of their beats. Allow a belt of twenty to thirty yards broad from A to B and from A´ up to B´, within which men must seek their cover. This belt is made broad here to afford instruction, but when the men work together in their sections, it will be much narrower, as they will then be extended at intervals of five or six paces only. Start off one man at a time from each section to cross from AA´ to BB´, to move as if under fire from the enemy in rushes from one cover to another. As soon as a man reaches BB´ he may fall out and watch the movements of the remainder. Do not send off a fresh man until the preceding one has nearly reached BB´, so that your non-commissioned officers may have good opportunity to look at each man as he goes. As for yourself, be active in supervising both sections, using your horse if you have one. DIAGRAM I. FOR EXERCISES I. & II. [Illustration: