a help to you as instructors, and themselves gain authority and power of command from the knowledge of their own competency. It is quite likely that these exercises and the explanations given, may seem to some readers to be absurdly simple and needlessly long-winded, while there is also a good deal of repetition. To this I will make early reply that they are written for officers who are not too proud to accept other people’s advice in training a company of young soldiers of the stamp which would be forthcoming if some cause[1] or other tempted or constrained into military service that great proportion of our male population who are at present quite ignorant of a soldier’s work, and who, from apathy, or a hundred other causes, do not join the Territorial Force. Such men probably have never in their lives given a thought to soldiering. The majority of them are town born and bred, and have passed most of their lives among bricks and mortar. If they have ever looked carefully at the large or small features of a bit of country, it has been from an industrial, sporting, or, perhaps, sentimental, but never from a tactical, point of view. They have everything to learn in making use of ground for fighting. Their ideas of using modern arms are equally crude; the primitive fighting instinct will be uppermost in their minds, and would express itself in an incontinent desire to get to close quarters with their enemy, when bayonet, butt or hand grips would seem the proper way to settle the matter. A very laudable desire it is—this of wanting to close in—and one to be encouraged by every means, but however brave troops may be, they cannot in general indulge their desire to attain close quarters and the resulting facilities of fighting by the light of their natural instincts unless they have first been successful in the fire fight—the strife of the arms of artifice—which is waged by bullet and shell at distances which Nature never contemplated.