10 JANUARY 1852, Page 12

NATIONAL DEFENCE.

THE Caffre war, which Sir Harry Smith was to finish off by his mere appearance, continues, at a cost, says Sir Charles Shaw,* of 38001. a day. Such is the cost, we presume to this country, for military expenses ; there is also the cost of an indefinite but large sum daily to the colonists, their lands being traversed by maraud- ers whom Sir Henry has stirred up but cannot put down. There is, however, one use which, as the Times suggests, the Caffre war has furnished to us—it has exposed the inefficient state of our in- fantry, and of our fire-arms, both in construction and practice.

Fiat experimentum " : it is luckily dotes chiefly at the expense of the Cape. We have, however, had ugly experiences before. The abandonment of Cabul was not quite creditable to our military history ; the troops at Canton were furnished with arms so ineffect- ive that they might have been exposed to destruction, had the enemy but conjectured the true state of the case ; but it is in Caf- fraria that the worst becomes known : the British soldier cannot compete with a Caffre in ball-practice ! The Caffres despise our men—they venture so freely even into the British camps, that they have taken the oxen out of General Somerset's own baggage-wag- gon. Our men have not the same contempt for the Caffres ; they protest against being sent to be "targets for savages," and being " butchered like cattle." The savages treat our men with contemptu- ous disregard, and come within distances humiliating to our military renown. A battalion of the Rifle Brigade has been sent over to strike terror into the black breast, by shooting a few of our harassing foes ; and perhaps we may at last get . the better of them. Meanwhile, we have ascertained a momentous fact : it may almost be said that, taken in the lump, with his bad equip- ments and stinted in his practice, the Britatih soldier is not equal to a Caffre !

Nov a Caffre, we take it, is not equal to a ICabyle; a Kabyle is

not equal to a Frenchman ; and thus it follows by the rule of pro- portion that an Englishman is not equal, by at least three degrees, to a Frenchman. An Englishman, who was " equal to three Frenchmen " ! The Frenchman, we know, " cannot stand cold steel "—at least so it is said, though he proves tolerably willing to stand it pretty often in the Bois de Boulogne; for the Frenchman adheres, in duelling, to the use of the sword, which the English- man has discontinued. It would scarcely do to rely upon the cold steel presumption.

When we come to the reasons for the unpleasant- disparity be- tween the Englishman and the Caffre, the case looks even more ugly. " An Old Officer of Light Division," writing to the Times, ascribes it to the bad construction of the. musket;. which is with- out even the improvement of the " double-pipe swivel" lock, that is now generally used by sportsmen in this country, and is as much behind the improved muskets and rifles of France and Prus- sia as the old flint lock or even matchlock is behind a modern weapon. The musket is a heavy piece of artillery, with ball that does not fit it, and does not strike a broad quiet target once in ten ; the ammunition is heavy, adding to the burdens of the sol- dier, which amount, with knapsack and clothing, to sixty pounds weight. It was long before official men would trust the percus- sion-lock as a substitute for the flint; they will perhaps introduce the double-pipe swivel, now that the Minis rifle is generally adopt- ed elsewhere ; and by the time that some still further improvement on that arm has been effected abroad, the English will have grown used to experiments with the Minis. An Old Officer of Light Division ascribes the inefficiency partly to want of practice—thirty rounds of ammunition being allowed to each soldier for the prac- tice of a year ! It is not without more practice that the Tirailleurs de 'Vincennes have attained such skill, that their unerring aim, at the siege of Rome, raised a suspicion of treachery among the de- fenders themselves,—so certain was the death of an artilleryman who showed his head above the walls; so impossible to account for it, when not a foe could be seen in the ground before him. Sir Charles Shaw relates some striking facts respecting practice.

" The present French musket 'fusil de munition, model 1840, is fully as good as the musket now used in the British army ; and I hero give the re- sult of 300 shots of model rifle 1846, (witti balls before they were made hol- low,) and of 300 shots of the musket, (as good as the British,) these 600 shots being fired by the same men at a distance of 656 yards. The targets fired at were five panels, made of boards of poplar-wood, each about an inch thick. The four were placed directly in rear of the first at a distance of a yard from each other. Each panel was 13 feet long and six feet high, thus representing a column of sections composed of six men in front (a man in the ranks occupies 22 inches). The model rifle, 1846, put in the target out of the 300 shots 127 balls, of which 33 went through the whole of the five panels; and out of the 300 shots fired from the French musket (equal to the British) only 33 balls struck the target, eight of which only penetrated the first panel and two balls the second. Thus, the 14,000 French with their present rifles, can hit a section of six men in front 40 times in 100 shots, while the British muskets, with similar distance and number of shots, can hit only 11 times. But since the late invention of the hollow cylindro-conique balls by Captain Minis, and now used at Vincennes, as precise firing can be done at 1150 yards as I have above stated at 656 yards, and Captain Minie himself will undertake to hit a man at a distance of 1420 yards three times out of five shots. This ball always enters with the point, and if fired at a distance of 1600 yards, will penetrate two inches into poplar- wood. Until recently I myself was incredulous ; but personal acquaintance with one of The earliest and best instructors in the Ecole de Tir, and I • Letter in the nnes, January 3.

having gone over the practice-ground with him, make me feel quite certain of the truth of what I assert. The ground is marked out for the recruits, beginning at 200 yards from the target, and increasing by 100 yards finishes at 1150 yards. It is found by calculation that at 328 yards a man has the ap- pearance of one-third his height,-at 437 yards oneiburth, at 546 one-fifth. By a very simple instrument of the size of a penknife, called a stadia, dis- tances can be measured accurately to 500 yards, and the sights of the rifle can be adjusted to the space indicated by the stadia. I have tried this stadia and measured the distances indicated, and pacing the ground found it correct. At a distance of 765 yards, this rifle would to a certainty knock down a Life-Guardsman in spite of his cuirass, and a front of 10 men, at 1100 yards."

So much for experimental practice : in the previous passage to which he alludes, Sir Charles Shaw states an incident in the field which may astonish some of our friends at the Cape, who find the Caffres and their pranks so troublesome.

"The loss of officers and men in Algeria was so great, that in 1838 the Duke of Orleans, before going to Africa, organized a battalion of the Tirail- leurs de Vincennes (then called Chasseurs d'Afrique) to take with him. 'As an instance of the perfection of this weapon even in 1838, it may bo men- tioned, that the Duke while reconnoitering was annoyed at the pranks played by an Arab Sheik at a distance of about 650 yards. He offered five francs to any soldier who would knock the Arab down. A soldier (M. P.) stepped out of the ranks of the Chasseurs d'Afrique and instantly shot this Arab chief through the heart. The arches below the County Fire-office at the Quadrant, in Regent Street, are distant from the Duke of fork's pillar about 600 yards, so the officers of the Senior and Junior United Service Clubs may form some idea of the efficacy of these French rifles. But since 1838 many improve- ments have been made in Mr. Delvigne's rifle and its ammunition. In 1842 there were ten battalions of these Tirailleurs, armed with what was then thought the perfection of a rifle; but in 1846 great improvements were made. There are now in the French army a force of 14,000 men armed with this '1846 model rifle '—this unerring and murderous weapon, with its cylindro- conique hollow balL Orders have been lately given to rifle' the common muskets of the French army, and to provide the cylindro-conique hollow ball."

We do not venture to give any opinion on a professional sub- ject; but we say that it is very unpleasant to see statements of this kind made by military men of intelligence and experience, with grounds so intelligible even to unprofessional men. We re- member too the apprehensions expressed by the Duke of Welling- ton at the exposed state of our coasts. It would be most disagree- able news to learn that a great body of Gallic-Algerines were coming over, to visit England like Algeria, London like Rome, with nothing better to meet them than the red-coated gentlemen who can't knock down the Caffrea To meet the exigency, various suggestions have been made, and i continue to issue forth in all quarters. Some, we believe, would still rely on an exportation of tracts by the Peace Society ; but we doubt whether the number of such persons is still great. Others would augment our Army, in the usual way ; and it is observed that the recruiting-sergeants are active : but an addition of raw recruits on the (,`afire-life-insurance pattern—of remits not yet even up to that mark—would not be very encouraging. There is a desire to recruit the Army cheaply and without extending the mili- tary spirit; and a correspondent of our own would enlist paupers, and even criminals. He should know that regular workhouse paupers are almost always unfit for military service ; and that " ablebodied paupers" are precisely the class that furnish our re- cruits, if the word, in its most extemled signification, be taken to mean the wholetry.. On the other hand, criminals are pre- cisely the class or :VC= it would be most desirable to weed the Army ; for courage is a quality alinost universal, whereas order and discipline are the more difficult qualities to cultivate. We believe that the growing disposition of the public is to call out a militia. We have false notions of that force, from the wretched bodies of needy men and substitutes that the inhabitants of our large towns remember. But a true militia—or an appeal to the men of the nation—should consist of the picked men, not the refuse. The natural first division of the militia consists of the grown son of every family, or the young father; that body which guards every part of the American Union. In almost every State, if not in all, a man must belong to the militia or to a volun- teer company ; and many bodies enrolled for other purposes, such as the fire-companies, are volunteer corps. The fire-companies are so. The efficiency of that force in preserving order was seen in New York during the Macready riots ; and it has furnished large contingents to the army which made a conquest from Mexico. As to the ultimate result of any invasion of our own country, we have no apprehensions ; but the amount of suffering that might be endured in the process of expelling a foe is matter for grave consideration, and it would be great indeed if bodies of the people were called to a forgotten duty without being prepared for it. Above all, let us note that such a force, thoroughly united with the body of the people, could never be used for any anti-national purpose.