Wimpy Translator Guy types not with standing. Would it not make sense to have people whose sole job it was to resupply the fighters? Would they have carried rifles as well, cutting down their load capacity? Were/are medics required to carry rifles and do they in actual practice? Seems like in a major classic style war you might of had in desperate times many lightly armed men toward the front either supplying the fighters or waiting for a weapon to show up.
I recall reading somewhere that one of the innovations of the Turkish military was to have one expert firing a musket, with 4 or 5 loaders doing nothing but reloading and passing him the guns. It cut down on the number of weapons needed without impacting rate of fire significantly since it took about a minute to reload one of those damn things.
I could see that being overall more effective - assuming everyone was operating from cover. Otherwise you’d have the Redcoat Machinegun mowing down the marksmen since they’d be taking 5x the fire in the first volley.
However, how does that cut down on the number of muskets you’d need? Less trained shooters, sure, but not less guns.
-Joe
From what I was taught, they did have the ammo, but transporting it through the Pripet Marshes was impossible (the same landscape that made the Russians consider a tank on wheels 27 feet in diameter). So during the Brusilov Offensive each Russian infantryman was issued thirty pounds of bullets along with his standard pack. It as too much to demand, and so much of this ammo was dumped by the side of the road that the offensive stalled.
But they never had to carry tents. Every Russian simply got a big wool coat. I recently read where a German officer weighed one of his men’s saturated coats after a short march through the trenches in the mud. It was fifty pounds. Imagine not just a march up to the front trenches but an entire campaign lugging that weight for the coat alone, and you really can’t blame the guys for tossing their extra ammo
You’re right, of course it doesn’t cut down on the number of guns.
I’m not sure if there’s any proof of the movies’ allegations in WW2, but Russian shortages of both rifles and bullets have been well authenticated for WW1. Bruce Lincoln’s Passage Through Armageddon quotes Russian General Mikhail Beliaev that in 1915, up to a third of soldiers in battle had no rifles and were forced to wait for soldiers to fall to get their rifles. I also wonder if the moviemakers confused regular bolt action rifles with automatic rifles. Even in the US army, two soldiers were used as ammunition carriers for a Browning Automatic Rifle. (A regulation US Army infantry squad during WW2 had a four-man section for a single Browning rifle.)
The thing is, Russian military doctrine of the time treated the M91/30 rifle as being more of a pike with the ability to fire bullets than anything else- the bayonet was never removed from the rifle, except when travelling.
Later on in the war, they started issuing Sub-machine guns to everyone. The PPSh-41 had a 72-round drum magazine, so It’s pretty safe to assume they’d sorted out their ammunition supply problems by that stage in the game… 
“The bullet is a fool, the bayonet is a fine chap.”
Alexander Suvorov
One thing smart the Russians did: they took a pounding from modern artillery in the Russo-Japanese War, a few years before anybody else, and issued all their troops shovels. In the first few weeks on the Western Front a lot of soldiers probably wished they had them.
Really? The British Expeditionary Force had shovels as standard in the Pattern 1908 equipment. The French issued them to every man by 1870, and the Germans were apparently using an M1887 pattern throughout WW1, and although my German isn’t good enough to figure out whether they issued it to everyone, I’d be surprised if they didn’t, since entrenching had been a standard tactic since at least the Crimean War.
After all, the reason why WW1 trench warfare developed was that one of the first things the opposing soldiers did when they encountered each other was to reach for their shovels and dig a hole to shelter from enemy fire. Then they stayed there for four years.
This was a light infantry tactic during the American Revolution: One man loads, one man fires. Works when firing from cover, but not so good in the line.
It might have been predated by medieval crossbowmen, who employed a similar tactic.