Have fun... don't die
The first piece of learning to command your forces out on the field is realizing that you are not a part of them. A dead commander gives exactly 0 commands or direction out to the rest of the group. That means that if you choose to command you need to be standing in a place where you are 1) not easily picked off and 2) not directly engaged in combat. If you're close enough to melee with other people then you should be focusing on the fight in front of you. If you fail to do that you'll often get killed while shouting instructions to someone else. I can no longer count the number of times I have seen someone turn and shout at a teammate only to immediately get hit by the person in front of them. The second piece of that is having protection. Once it's clear that you are actually controlling your forces you will become a magnet for arrows. While it's always good to have a shield yourself to knock those aside it's not a bad idea to have a few bodyguards whose job it is to make sure projectiles don't make it to you. After all, you can't be looking in every direction at the same time.
Reading the field
If you've got yourself protected this should allow you to spend your focus looking at the field around you. There's a few things that you're looking for; gaps between lines (yours and theirs), any flankers or shock troops that are looking to make a play, a section of the fight where your team is winning or losing significantly and any support weapons that are making a big impact on the fight. Let's take those one at a time.
Gaps
If you see that there's a gap in your line then you need to redirect some forces to fill it. If you don't that small gap will let people through and once they get through that gap it will curl your lines and lead to their destruction. A flanker who shoots through a gap can also be a bane to your back line, cutting down arches and taking out polearms on your line as they go for backs. If you notice a gap in the opposing teams line then that's your chance to strike and apply pressure. You can do this in one of two ways. You can either take a group of shields and simply run them through the gap, or, you can pull on the gap to make it bigger by apply more pressure on either side of the gap and then let your flankers take advantage of the opening, curling the two sides around that gap.
Shock Troops
Of all the people you'll see out on the field it's commanders, archers and shock troops that are most taking the time to read it. Commanders move their forces so they need their eyes open and archers are searching for shots that they can make often on distracted enemies. One of the hardest jobs though is being a melee fighter and trying to find a way though to the enemy backlines. Unless there's a giant gap between lines you're going to have to force your way through, quickly executing one or more enemies while quickly closing the distance between your side and your enemies side. Even when a gap exists it often doesn't exist for very long, meaning that you have to make the call to go in decisively since you don't know how long any particular opportunity will last. Given these attributes shock troops are a field commanders worst nightmare. In addition to preying on momentary lapses of cohesion they'll also destroy important parts of your force by picking off archers or turning winning sections into losing sections. As a result make sure that you have eyes on an shock troops your enemy has and make sure that wherever they wander to you have a strong force there to oppose them. Shock troops tend not to be high in number; in addition to the experience required to read the field and the skill to close the gaps, being a shock troop also requires a fair degree of cardio that most people aren't up for. So, if you can stack enough people in front of them most shock troops won't directly engage - they're far too smart for that.
Winning and Losing
If you notice that on some section of the field your team is winning or losing significantly this will also be important for making plays. If your team is winning on one side of the field, it's often the case that they are losing elsewhere, so it's not as though each condition is separate. These things can also happen quickly, or can happen slowly and how that plays out will change your response. If you have a side that's winning, and doing so quickly, then you need to start pulling bodies off that section as fast as you can to reinforce other areas of your line. As discussed in the previous paragraph, if that winning section has made a gap then you can pull some of it off and use it to smash into the side of a section of line where the opponents may have briefly had the advantage. If your team is winning slowly on a side then you don't have to do much. Simply let them continue rolling and make sure that they're protected from either side. A winning flank can quickly become a losing flank if a flanker finds their way in.
Assuming that your looking at a part of the field that's losing you have basically two options. The first is to try to buy time. You do this by retreating slowly and trying to work angles on your opponents. If you can convince them to overextend or spread themselves thin you create opportunities for flankers. Assuming that they are using polearms to win, the more time you can buy that side the more likely it is that the polearms deciding the fight get picked off by archers. What I've seen people do time and again is try to hold a straight line in response to an approach rather then start using angles. This always means that the side in question breaks eventually. What I recommend instead is slowly angling, convincing the enemy team to step too far forward by inviting them in. You do have to be a little bit careful with this as anyone not paying attention to this tactic is likely to get speared in the side.
Assuming your team, or section, is losing quickly, then it's time to scatter. There's no sense in trying to stand in front of a force that is mowing you down. Run, scatter and deny the enemy a form to push at. If you aren't standing together the opposing team may often lose focus. You can use that moment to hit however isn't being protected as their formation also loses it's coherency. Back when I ran the blades the battle cry for this was either "scatter" or "leeroy jenkins" because it became every man for themselves. Once your team doesn't have form it becomes a skirmish, or battle of attrition. Take legs, don't stand together, and back whatever you can. Split up your archers by pairing them with shields and stay mobile. If you've got good veteran fighters this is often where they come into play, by convincing the opposing forces not to rush them outright.
Support Weapons
Some support weapons matter more then others, and can single handedly decimate the forces across the line from them given enough support. Out here in the west the person who immediately comes to mind is Batman, though there are plenty of other fighters that when applied to a line with support will simply trash whats in front of them and create pressure. If you've got one of these on your side it's important to make sure that they've got enough cover in the form of shields to make sure they don't eat projectiles. If you're facing down a polearm like this then there's two steps. The first thing is to deny them their swings. This means keep retreating slowly every time they swing so that they can't get any kills. The second piece is to line up archers to shoot at them. If you deny them their opportunity to get kills while simultaneously trying to kill them, eventually one of those arrows is going to connect.
Once more with feeling
Assuming that you've got the basics down as far as 1) staying alive for the engagement and 2) knowing what pieces of your forces to move and when you also have to make sure that everyone can actually hear you. In the middle of a pitched melee it's very very loud and even a person with a booming voice is going to be drowned out amidst the rest of the noise. What this means is that you need to have people who will repeat what you say. Having a bunch of people echo your orders means that your voice can reach down along the line so that everyone on your team can hear you. It also has the unintended side effect of making it so that people are more likely to do what you tell them; if you establish yourself as a voice to be parroted then you've given yourself authority over the group. If you're working with people you already know, then try to get everyone to echo your voice. If you're working with a group you aren't used to, then grab 3 people and send one to the left, middle and right side of your line. If the lines too big, recruit more individuals to parrot your voice. While it's better to have everyone involved having specific people will mean that you know that your voice will be heard. The only downside to this is because those people are shouting commands they may be perceived as leadership and catch arrows.
The other piece of making your voice heard is having the respect of the people around you. In a big field with lots of noise, any direction at all is better then no direction and it means that if you say anything at all people may still listen, but the smaller the group gets, the more important it is that they aren't just SOME commands but YOUR commands. In this case the respect of the people around you is pivotal because even if you make perfect calls, sometimes bad things happen and the battle won't go according to plan. If you can, establish a leader before the fight starts and have everyone buy in. That way even if there are mistakes you at least cohesively moved together. To steal a bit of strategy from league, if you make a good call but it's only followed half-heartedly it may become a bad call because it didn't have the follow through. Similarly, things that are bad calls may become less bad, if the whole team acts decisively even if it ends poorly. Knowing what calls to make and when to make those calls comes with time and experience. But the only way to get there is to actually do it, and that means knowing you'll make mistakes ahead of time and getting everyone onboard anyways.
Marshalling your forces
Once you're alive, focused and being listened to it's important to make sure you have the resources you need on hand to execute on whatever plans you may make once the fighting commences. While it's ideal to have everyone able to operate independently and simply win without oversight, it's been my experience that reserving a little bit of your forces to be deployed later can have dramatic impacts on the fight. To be clear, I'm not talking about having a percentage of your force in reserve like shock troops, I'm talking about selecting specific individuals who you know will do work to have listen to your voice. Typically, I'll grab one or two polearms that I know can apply pressure on a line (mobile siege), I'll grab two archers (snipers) that I can use to assassinate problems at range, and about 4 shieldsman (honor guard) who act as both my personal honor guard and also who can be used to fill gaps in the line, run gaps I see the enemy leave or fill in a losing line and start shouting orders at them to maintain group coherency.
Having a set of self-organized groups is also valuable as you can move them independently. In most cases you'll have a group of people who respond to right flank, left flank and middle simply based on their location. Shouting commands at these groups can get them to move and act as a group even without having organized them before hand. In most cases you'll also have groups based on either weapon type or job and call for archers, polearms, line or flankers and expect that some people will respond to your call. You can also combine the two sets and say something like "polearms, right side, push". If you have people designated by other groups beforehand, either organized by unit or designation (shock troops, reserves, etc) then you can also call on those groups. I've found that generally speaking keeping it as simple as possible so that 80% of the troops are the line, 10% are backline and 10% are flankers or people waiting for an opportunity works best.
More then just words
In the ruckus of a battlefield it's important to be able to communicate efficiently. Whenever possible use single word, single syllable commands. The longer you make your commands the more likely they are to be misinterpreted, the more likely they are to not make it across the line as a command, also, screaming lone sentences at the top of your lungs is super tiring, and if you've committed to being leadership you're going to be doing it all day long, so save your vocal chords. Yelling out, "right side could you please apply a bit more pressure" is super time consuming and as a result super ineffective. Yelling out "Right side, PUSH" is going to get you much further. If that seems too direct you can always go with "Right side, apply pressure / pressure them / press". Again, the important part is not so much what you say, so much as making sure you say it quickly so that it can't be misinterpreted. Also, generally speaking, the psychological impact of single word statement is far greater then short sentences. While I wouldn't employ this strategy in the rest of your life out on the field when the battle is going it's fine to be a bit more intense, it just means that being friendly to people before and after the battle has started becomes more important. You don't want to be seen as overly aggressive or mean.
Prefixes your commands with who and where first is also very important. You want the first thing that happens when you start barking orders is to get the attention of someone. If you've gotten everyone onboard to listen and you have folks repeating what you're saying down the line then you should be able to ensure that each part of the line can hear you. Once you start shouting you want your voice to make it to the relevant people and THEN you want to give the command. If you start with the command and then the group of people, often they'll only hear you calling out their names, which is of no help to anyone.
Intel
Having your own voice heard is great, but leadership is actually a two way thing. In addition to being able to send out orders along the line and have it respond decisively when called on, it's important to have each piece of the line communicate back whatever information they have. That can be anything from "we're losing over here" to "we've got this, put people somewhere else". As the fight goes on have each section of line constantly talking back, and use your repeaters to shout this information back to you as leadership. This way you know in advance if someone has gotten around the side and is about to wreak havoc, giving you more time to respond to that situation by using your snipers or honor guard to zone them. If you know that a side is losing before it starts to break then you can either call for reinforcements from other parts of the line or use the mobile siege that you've pulled off to reinforce while calling on your snipers to try and execute the polearms on that lane. If you're informed there's a gap you can use your honor guard to fill it while you get your forces to form a cleaner line. Whatever the issue is, if you know what the problem is ahead of time it's going to make dealing with it much easier.
Keywords
If you're in the context of a unit, or other group that you can organize beforehand, having a bunch of pre-baked command words can be very effective. As it turns out, even if you use obvious words that everyone understands having your team prepared to respond to them effectively will mean that things still end well even when your opponent knows exactly what you're about to do. My favorite example of this was the blades 2-1 call in which one person yelled out "two" and then when they called "one" everyone swung at the same time. The fact that you could see it coming made no difference whatsoever as you still had to deal with a set of strikes coming at you from multiple angles all at the same time. In my experience the most useful set of command words are used to set the pace of your forces like, forward, easy forward, double time, push, crush as well as maintain coherency of your forces like, reform, form up, together, etc. I've got a complete list of the stuff that I've used in the book of rift if that's something that you're interested in, but by and large it's best to use words that make sense to you and the people you work with, rather then someone else's set of things.
Fin -
As you can see... there's a lot that goes into commanding a group of people you fight with. Some of it's learned over time, some of it is sort of inborn. If you've got a good voice most people will listen instinctively and that helps. If you don't have the kind of voice that everyone listens to instinctively then you can find someone to shout for you, or you can practice doing voice work and lower the tone of your voice so it starts to sound deep and commanding. In any case, hopefully this vague sketch from a commanders eyes will help you on your path. Good hunting friends.
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