exophoric
The "they" can be said to form a cataphoric link with the references to "the soldiers" and "the officer" later in the narrative.
They had no problems in explaining away any unusual cataphoric references as the "it" in the sentence is simply a dummy subject.
I will first elaborate on the anaphoric and cataphoric contexts and the dependent pronoun variants in the next section.
In the sentence "If you want some, here's the cheese," the "some" is cataphoric.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Linguistic terms & linguistic style
accentual
affricate
allophone
allophony
anaphor
contextualize
emphatic
entailment
etymological
etymologically
etymologist
idiomatic
inflected language
philological
philologically
polysemy
portmanteau word
prescriptivism
stylistics
tautology