Petworth, Aug. 26.
The Sth and 6th Infantry Brigades, and the supplementary troops which help to constitute the 2nd Division, have been resting this week-end after five days of continuous maneuvring over the hilly Sussex country. The troops are young and the stiffening of old! soldiers, who exerted such a heartening influence in pre-war manoeuvres, is almost non-existent, yet the men of 2nd Division have stood the test of the past 12 days on the road and in the field wonderfully well.
The caterpillar tracters, which have left their trail on the chalky roads of the South Downs, have been used for the guns of the 9th Brigade Royal Field Artillery. They are obviously under-engined, and so far are in the experimental stage; but since leaving Deepeut on August 14 they have averaged 30 miles a day on and off the road, with no more mishaps than fall to the lot of every mechanically-propelled vehicle. No horse teams could have maintained such an average speech over hilly country for ten days.
The new military wireless telegraphy sets, which have not been tried before in real or mimic operations, have been put through searching tests The '"C'" set, which has a range of between 20 and 60 miles and can be carried in a Crossley tender or a four-horsed limber, has been used with complete success for communication between divisional and brigade headquarters. The "A" set, light enough to be carried by four men or in mule panniers, with a range limited approximately to six miles, has linked up brigade headquarters with battalions, and although its success perhaps has not been so absolute as that of the weightier installation, it has given promise of a complete success soon to be achisv-
Wireless telephony. between "contact? aeroplanes and divi-sons, brigades, and battalions has been utilized during the training, although, in the case of the last-named, their part, with a set weighing only 151b., has been limited to receiving messages from the observers overhead. Telephonic communication; too, between tanks on the move has beer n to be possible during the field; operations, so long as they are no more than five or six miles apart.
In the cooperation of all arms, which the operations are intended to demonstrate and to illustrate, the observer-officers of the Royal Air Force have been more heavily handicapped than the officers of any other arm. The thickly-wooded country is part of the handicap, but a far greater drawback has been the skeleton nature of one force and sometimes of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.