25 OCTOBER 1873, Page 21

History of the Royal Artillery. By Captain F. Duncan, M.A.

Vol. I. To the Peace of 1785. (John Murray.)—" The Royal Regiment of Artillery " had its first beginning in the year 1716. The man who suggested its creation was the Duke of Marlborough, and the occasion was the shameful break-down of the artillery which had occurred in the Jacobite campaign of the preceding year. It consisted of two companies without any staff, and was maintained at an annual expense of .£4,893. Why does not some military economist cry out for a return to arrange- ments so blissfully cheap? Its first captain was Albert Borgard, soldier of fortune, whose services, as described by himself in a diary of the simplest and most unpretending kind, were sufficiently varied. He began his military life in the service of the King of Denmark, in the year 1675, and was present at the siege of Wismar, in Mecklenburg, which was taken that year from the Swedes. In this service he remained some thirteen years, fighting chiefly with Swedes, but in 1603 having a turn with the Turks before Vienna. Then ho fought for the King of Prussia against the French, and against the Turks again ; and then "entered as Firomaster into the English Artillery," where he continued for all but sixty years, dying in 1751 at the ago of ninety- two. Here his chief services wore during the War of Succession in Spain. The history of the regiment thus started, Captain Duncan traces it for the next century and a half in a most interesting narrative, not the leas interesting because more than once it takes us into bye- places of history where we do not commonly find ourselves. Such, for instance, is the siege of Belleisle, an event which, as having little im- portance, the historians commonly pass over rapidly, but which it is well worth while to read about in the detail in which our author narrates it. It was, as he says, " a Sebastopol in miniature," though it did not last nearly so long as the famous siege, extending to about eight weeks. "The expenditure of ammunition was 1,500 barrels of powder, 17,000 shot, and 12,000 shell." The share of the Artillery in the great defence of Gibraltar—and a most important share it was—and the ser- vices of the regiment in the American War of Independence supply the subjects of interesting chapters. Captain Duncan has dis- interred some carious details of official management, for which indeed ho does not seem to entertain an enthusiastic admiration. One strange practice was the custom of keeping on the regimental rolls dummies, whose pay went for various purposes which the Board of Ordnance did not think proper to state explicitly." On the muster- roll of each company there was a dummy whose pay went to the Widows' Fund; another per company, for what was called the Non-effective Fund; and a third, whose pay went to remunerate the piper." "In short, of 1,088 matrosses in the marching companies, no lees than 115 had no existence." Of more modern abuses there is one which wo think the writer quite right in denouncing, and that is the way in which the two services of the Engineers and the Artillery are officered from Wool- wich. The plan is that commissions in the Engineers are offered to those who come out at the upper part of the final list, and commissions in the Artillery to those whose names stand in lower places. Theo- retically, the Engineers ought to get all the cleverest men ; practically they do not the results of paper-work trials being corrected by actual life, but of course they do get more than their share.