THE MECHANISM OF WAR. VII.-THE GUN.

NOTHING in science is more fatal than the possession of "fixed ideas," and.no occupation of man is more prolific of them. For men pursue science more often in the hopes of capturing by a coup de main some general principle or deduc- tion which has dazzled them than from any love of the slow siege-work of premise and particular reasoning to which Science alone will yield her citadeL All the world is athirst for truth, dying for it in the karrooa of error, but strange tricks are played with the eyes of men -in these straits ; cold pools and cascades appear beckoning irresistibly in the empty air, and the dry lips pant on for mile after mile whisper- ing thankfully, "There is water at last!" sucking in greedy anticipation at a mirage, at a fixed idea which can give no life because it is itself but a lifeless phantas- magoria. How many philosophies have worn themselves to death labouring thus across the sand after errors, beautiful philosophies and beautiful errors, keeping their beauty, perhaps, for thousands of years, yet forced, like poor Ayesha, to die at last all the more hideous and wizened because their ugliness has lived so long and falsely beneath a fair exterior. A lie, like a flower, may be exquisite, however poisonous; one may lose oneself in its loveliness so long as one does not suck at it for honey, for there is nothing in its gorgeous life but death and corruption. All of which is evidence of some sort that in pursuing even the most reasoned science men must resign themselves to the thought that they may be floundering after nothing at all. The science itself may be a " fixed idea," gigantic and wrong, a very Pied Piper to the children of men, leading them out with pleasant music into the mountains, and vanishing for ever with its innocent dancing prey. Science is no timid quarry ; men who hunt her must take care that they are not hunted themselves. Like the buffalo of the Deccan, she may fly in apparent terror into the thicket, and crouching there, will spring upon and gore to death the ardent sportsman who dashes in expectantly after. It is probable that in the divine scheme she was never intended to be " reduced into possession " by man at all. Knowledge itself was but a by-product of Creation, produced by a misapplication of the great formula, apparently unforeseen, if one dare say so, even by God Himself. And who can doubt that the perfect co-ordina- tion and systematisation of this forbidden thing is for ever forbidden, and that the great primeval accident has been per- mitted to endow the speculations of mankind with nothing more than liability to perpetual accident ? Science has obviously no finality ; its end is invisible, and may be totally erroneous. We have learnt a little truth at least about this search for truth, that its proclaimed ends are as often as not mirages. And one refuses to accept as safety the beginning and middle of theories of which the end, for all one knows, may be destruction, as the sagacious elephant on a dark night-march will jib until Doomsday at the month of a bridge whose farthest span he suspects, though he cannot see, has been carried away by the flood.

Having thus successfully, I hope, destroyed the reader's faith in preconceived notions, it is time to descend from the cloudland of generality to the clear valley of particularity ; and here, in the very middle of the plot of ground set apart for the cultivation of the science of war, we come upon the squat, sober little form of the gun, a science in himself, and, alas! hitherto also a " fixed idea," full of error to most of the men whose business it is to study him. And how he has been studied; every part and aspect of him, every potentiality, every disability, every record of his past feats in war, every future feat which prophecy could assign to him, are they not all chronicled in tomes so bulky, in monographs and reports of lectures so innumerable, that the average young man running to read is fain to run away again after one look at the battalions of book-covers which guard the science of the gun? That science had apparently reached as much finality as any human speculations could ; the gun itself was more perfect than any human creations have any right to be, and more sufficient than the philosophy it served ; which is the way with the instruments of philosophy, telescopes being more complete than astronomy, and battleships than naval tactics. Man is a tool-making animal, and makes them so miraculously that a simple beast of the field might be excused a wonder whether he does not sometimes invent uses for them afterwards ! But his limitations are shown in the very perfection of his implements. Were the manipulation of them as consummate as their manufacture, man's knowledge would surround all causes as with a. ring-fence, which is the for- bidden, impossible thing.

So the gun itself is well-nigh perfect; if not the pattern in the British Service, at any rate the best pattern in the world, which the British Service might have had for the asking. And a word as to that may not be out of place, though these columns are no proper lists for the everlasting tournament of bores, internal pressures, gas checks, and obturators which renders a conversazione of artillerymen a regular "Irish night " of controversial ballistics, pneumatics, and all other "ica " in their deadly phru-macopceia. The best gun is, of course, better than one not so good; but the Transvaal War has by no means, to my mind, issued final instructions as to the comparative merits of the field-pieces which fought each other across the kloofs. It is the fashion to say that we were outgunned because the Boer weapons smote our troops at ranges exceeding the outside limits of our powers of reply. This is true enough; but the projectiles of the Dutch field- pieces able to strike at these long ranges were small and in- effective, often paltry, and every soldier knows the excellent tonic value of useless shells on the morale of the shelled. The " high-velocity " gun so admirably manipulated by the State Artillerymen was a nasty little weapon, but whole rows of mere " nastiness " would be unable to stop, or even shake, the advance of determined and equally " nasty " infantry soldiers. The question seems to be, then, that between a gun formidable at medium ranges, like our own, and one com- paratively futile at any, though capable of striking at im- mense distances, like the 3 in. spitfire of the Boer Army. Both characteristics can be vouched for, for the army of Natal was shelled as often by the one weapon as the other ; and it was a common remark after a crack in the air that seemed to rend the rocks beneath, and a rush and a splash of lead tearing the earth as the white squall tears the Mediter- ranean, " That's one of ours !" a prophecy invariably borne out when the shell-case with its broad arrows and its Arsenal numerals bounded and jangled itself to rest within reach of any one curious enough to pick it up for examination. They say, do the experts, that our shrapnel has but a small " cone of dispersion." That may be, but on the word of a practical experimentalist, if it is little, like an oyster, it is remarkably good.

As to the heavy artillery—the naval monsters on our side, the long Frenchmen on the other—here again there is much to be said of patterns that will not be said here. Both were very big and very terrible, roaring like great lions on the hunt at each other from the peaks, hurling their ponderous steel caskets of unspeakable death at each other, smothering each other• and the tiny soldiers far beneath, so tiny that they hardly seemed to call for so much quaking of earth and air. The mobile gun of position is the new boy in the school of war, and the battle- field has gained in grandeur from his great grim presence and his deep voice calling from the mountain ranges to the valleys.

He is a fine creation, Pythagoras's music of the spheres ; the grandest conception that ever flamed in a poet becomes intel- ligible to men who are not poets when a number of great guns are singing their evening chorus across the country from their lonely eyries ; the song of the whirling spheres must sound

something like that if one could only hear it as Pythagoras heard it. The long guns are solitary giants, and like a hill

to themselves, if possible, to shout from in the daytime, on which to sleep at night, sheeted and anchored down, and guarded in their majestic slumber by a company or two of humble little infantrymen. They are fine fellows altogether ; but as to their tactical value, the Transvaal War has taught us but little after the first surprise of their presence in the field at all is over. They were often useful, sometimes in- valuable, and occasionally a nuisance; but it is not easy to legislate at once upon their possible performances in theatres of war more normal than the South African veld. Both camps and marches, to be undisturbed, must be made further from the enemy; or if unavoidably within seven miles of a hostile big-gun embrasure, the former must be strongly en- trenched, and the latter performed in open order. A projec- tile which kills at eleven thousand yards must be respected, even if it hits but once in a thousand times, for, like the terrible little tailor in the fairy tale, it may claim seven at a blow," and that for the flies is an uncomfortable and disconcerting possibility. * On the other hand, few European countrysides, still fewer European atmospheres, and probably no European armies will allow of a range of vision of the distance named, so that possibly Leviathan will find himself automatically relegated to his old role of gun of position, the " heavy father" of the military drama, and will no doubt ruminate regretfully upon those halcyon days in the pellucid air of South Africa when he frolicked as a field- piece and coursed about the grassy stage as spry and handy as any " junior lead" in the cast.

So much for the tools themselves ; it is less with them than with the spirit which manipulates them that our interest lies. Great Tubal-Cain, their father, need not be ashamed of them, nor of their guiding spirit. The latter would be something to his mind, for, grand old artist that he was, he loved to wrap his plain implements, his hammers and his melting-pots, in a cloud of splendid invocation before setting them to work, throwing a spell around each, and giving each a soul. And our magnificent gunners, in the toils of the occult symbolism which has always bound men to wrought metal in war, to shields, to claymores, to suits of armour, have un- doubtedly invested their charges with a glamour which is always as beautiful as it is sometimes dangerous in war; and not only they, but soldiers of other arms. The gun ! how sacred an entity, almost a living body to the careful hands which tend it, quite a soul to the minds of its spellbound guardians and fellow-fighters. And the battery ! unit one and indivisible, perfect in its organisation, unequalled in its discipline, the very original and finite One of the military cosmos, who shall divide the, indivisible, or tear the limbs from a living perfect whole ? It is to be feared that, like the " Black African," we have all taken of wood and gun- metal, "and of these, cunningly combining them, fabricated for ourselves an Eidolon, and named it Mumbo-Jumbo." But Dagon fell, and he, too, was a false god and a " fixed idea." So all false gods and most fixed ideas must fall and be broken, more's the pity, for they are often pretty things, and with them the sanctity of the gun and the inviolability of the battery. The gun has no soul, or none worth saving at the expense of precious human bodies. It must be used with boldness ; the heavy skid of the fear of capture which has so long imprisoned its wheels must be cast off ; capture must on occasions even be courted, for there are times when one angry, busy piece at close quarters is worth a whole arsenal full of guns idle away back with the reserves. Colonel Long's dibcicle at Coleus°, so far from being a folly, contained the germs of genius in artillery tactics; the theory was none the less correct because any corporal would have improved upon the practice. And if a gun or guns in the lawful execution of their duty are captured, there must be none of that absurd despondency and wounded pride which has hitherto attended the mischance, nor must there be wild and

• On December 22nd, 1899, a shell, from Bulwana falling in the Helpmakaar Road defences killed six and wounded nine men of the Gloucester Regiment. On the same day another shell from Telegraph Hill wounded five officers and three sergeant-majors of the 5th Lancers. On December 27th Bulwana again scored with one shell, killing two and wounding seven officers of the Dermas us they sat in their strongly fortified mess " dug out." On September Bth, 1900, the leading company of the Gordon Highlanders, advancing against the Manch- berg in col of route, was struck by a heavy shell at a range of seven miles. Nineteen won fell, of whom three were killed, sixteen wounded. These were all, of mine, "sensation shells," but the ranges were in all cases immense, and when the solitary Dutch guns responsible for them are multiplied by ten or twenty, the probible equipment of a European army, it will be impossible to ignore the hearr gun as a tactical factor in future campaigns.

disastrous attempts to win them back. Let them go, generals, and you gunners, who fought them fairly and squarely to the last, will be docked your evening rum if you hang your heads any longer at the loss of your loves!

And the necessity for the subdivision of batteries in action into groups of two, or even into single guns, has been forced so often upon the priests of the false god by the exigencies of the Transvaal War that it has become a commonplace in every intelligent mind but theirs. In South Africa, it is true, battery commanders have got used to it ; they no longer see their charges dragged to all corners of a battlefield with the pangs of men who are being dismembered ; the anti-vivi- gunner-section crusade died a natural death very early in the war, making its last moan upon the _precipitous flanks of Cingolo. But there are signs that the lesson is in danger of an application too particular, that the concession is for South Africa alone, and that ultimate truth still rolls before the gunner's mental vision in a mirage of stately unchange- able lines and columns of brigade divisions.

They may be right; ultimate truth is, as I have said, far too distant a thing for any man to snatch at and shout ""I have

it! " - But if actual observation may in some degree answer for mental blindness and experience for prophecy, one cannot but present certain considerations which seem pregnant with truth if truth is not to be born of them after all :— (1) That our massed batteries failed against the scattered Dutch pieces.

(2) That our batteries were numerous, and the Dutch guns few.

(3) That once at least, at Monte Cristo, a split battery was master of the Boer guns, and practically won the, battle.

(4) That in every war one side or the other must -do the attacking, and that it will probably be ourselves !!

LINESMAN.