WWI was very largely trench warfare in Europe, including on the Eastern Front. Trench lines weren't as deep or as continuous as on the Western Front, but fronts were at a standstill most of the time, and that had to be broken by assaulting into trenches during offensives.
Moreover, I wrote about rifle fire. During WWI the long range fires with bullets were overwhelmingly done with tripod-mounted heavy machineguns, whereas the Boer War lessons emphasized the importance of rifle long range fires. The entire Boer War experience was very misleading. I once saw a book describing it and some lessons from it. It did correctly point out the importance on flanking, but flanking became very hard once continuous trench systems were established.
The siege of Port Arthur was MUCH more educating for most soon-to-be-WWI-officers than the Boer Wars.
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You write about Marines in the vignette part. I stated that the vignette was an old one from the Infantry Magazine. Clarification: That's an Army publication.
http://www.benning.army.mil/infantry/magazine/#
The reply was about U.S. infantry in general, not exclusively Marines.
I brought that vignette up as anecdotal evidence of the mindset at the time. It doesn't matter for this whether such resources were really on hand in a timely fashion. I guarantee you the North Vietnamese did not use such vignettes to prepare their infantry company COs. They had to use entirely different mindsets, and focus on many different skills because of their scarce resources.
