MUZZLE-LOADERS.
ONE fact seems to have been deeply impressed upon all who saw the great battle which ended the other day in the un- conditional surrender of 80,000 men, and of a not insignificant fortress, at a cost to the victors which, compared with their terrible loss in former battles, must be considered insignificant. " Let our soldiers and statesmen at home make note of this," says the Times' correspondent who describes the fight, " the issue of that battle was decided solely and entirely by artillery fire." The Emperor himself asserted that be had been crushed by the weight, range, and precision of the Prussian artillery only. These are the kind of facts which strike not soldiers only, but nations, and in a country so governed as ours there can be little question that non- professional pressure will and ought to be brought to bear on the Government, to induce them to place in a thoroughly efficient condition the arm which it is most difficult to improvise, and the supreme importance of which has thus become apparent to all men. We are very anxious, however, lest the pressure should assume a wrong direction. That the beat men we can get to do it should be appointed to decide what changes in equipment we require, that neither professional jealousy nor official red-tape should be allowed to trammel their action or influence their decisions, are points of the utmost importance, and which it falls directly within the province of journalism to discuss and to enforce. But there is very great danger lest a weight should be attached to the exact words and form in which a correspondent from the seat of war reports what he has seen, and lest he should be allowed to dictate to us on points with reference to which his evidence cannot be very valuable. We cannot think that questions of technical detail, however important, can be rightly decided through mere newspaper discussion.
It chances that the Prussians have, from motives not necessary for us to refer to, adopted a system of loading by the breech, while the French use muzzle-loading artillery. The Times' corre- spondent is very anxious that, on the strength of this fact, we should assume that the breech-loader is superior to the muzzle- loader, and, on the strength of his observations in the battle, should upset a series of most careful experiments, conducted by three successive Committees, of exceedingly able officers, who have
each reported that from the actual war-experience we have had with the breech-loaders, and from experiments made to test them with the most accurate care, under circumstances akin to war, the muzzle-loader is the superior arm.
The superiority which the Prussian Artillery has obtained in the field was carefully prepared for by them during the years which followed the Austrian campaigns, in consequence of the loss which they then sustained from the superiority of the Austrians in that arm, and in consequence of their firm belief that when breech-loader met breech-loader the tug of war would be decided by artillery. But the point to which they directed their attention was not the one which alone has absorbed the attention of the Times' correspondent. The ablest writer who has touched on the sabject of their military position and on the points to which they were directing their attention has explained what it was that they considered vital.
" In the next war," says the author of " The Campaign of 1866, a Tactical Retrospect" (reputed to be either Prince Frederick Charles himself or a writer inspired by him, we quote from Colonel Ouvry's translation), "that side will obtain an unconditional tactical pre- ponderance which best knows how to make use of its artillery, or rather that side which does not put off this practice till the moment that the war commences, that is, the side whose artillery has had the best tactical training." If now we tarn to the admirable account of the battle of Sedan given by the correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette of Monday week, we think it will be plain to any reader, whether he know little or much of military science, that it was the knowledge "how to make use " of their artillery on the field, and the facility with which they were able to use it, as that knowledge taught them it ought to be used, which made the artillery action so deadly to the French, so saving of life to the Prussians. The single battery which, placed just across the Meuse, full on the flank of the two French batteries, was able to silence both of them, and be then employed on the infantry as well, so as to render the whole lower ridge of the hill between Floing and Sedan untenable, owed its success evidently to its admirably-chosen position, not to its superiority, as the Emperor would have us believe, in " weight, range, and precision. Again, when the fate of the fight at La Garenne Hill was brought to a sudden conclu- sion, it was because cas diables de Prussiens ' had contrived, Heaven only knows how, to get a couple of 4-pounders up the steep ground, and had opened on the French."
It is evident, we think, that the Times' correspondent saw these effects produced, and jumped to the conclusion that in order to achieve similar results we must adopt in a lump the Prussian artillery equipment. No people would more utterly deride such a proposition than the Prussians themselves. What is vital in this matter, what it does fall strictly within the pro- vince of newspaper writers to urge, is that the facility of move- ment and the training to rapid movement which the Prussians
themselves consider all-important for their artillery, shall not be lost to ours through any ignorance or false economy of our Secretary of State for War. The subject on which Mr. Cardwell thinks it more safe to economize than on any other is the one which decided the battle of Sedan. Two years ago, when he came into office, our artillery was by the admission of all foreign officers superior in this one point at all events to every other in Europe. Mr. Cardwell has not only adopted in practice, but declared as a deliberate policy, the system of reducing the Artillery in peace-time to a condition in which it is impossible for them to have any tactical training whatever. He told the House of Commons expressly that it would have been recklessly improvident during peace-time to have kept up more horses, as " the horses for the guns were supplied, and only those for the waggons were not." He left on his hearers the false impression that he spoke of certain heavy waggons to move slowly along roads. Neither they nor he knew that the " waggons" he spoke of were the only means by which the men who were to work the guns could in the field batteries move with them at all, and that for every horse he reduced he was removing from effective service in war a trained driver as well as a trained horse, and was at the same time rendering impossible the general training of the whole battery. In no one of the Aldershot sham-fights of this year have any of the batteries been able to turn out for effective use without borrowing horses from others, and the season is now over. Clearly for this year the " tactical, not technical training " of the Artillery, which the Prussians consider the element of future suc- cess in war, has been rendered impossible by the ignorance of our present Secretary of State for War.
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