MAJOR CLAR,KE ON FORTIFICATION.*

TEN years ago we reviewed Major'Clarke's masterly study of The Siege of Plevna, which formed a volume of the Pro- fessional Papers of the Royal Engineer Institute for 1880, and which, it is to be regretted, has not as yet had a wider circulation. In his preface, Major Clarke pointed particularly

to three great lessons taught by Osman's magnificent defence, —the slight results produced by the Russian artillery on the Plevna earthworks, the tremendous losses caused by the rapid and distant rifle-fire of the Turks, and the great development of defensive power thus and otherwise obtained from their hurriedly improvised works . Much study since of ancient and modern sieges, and personal observation of the more important experiments at home and abroad of cannon against earth and iron, have confirmed the lessons taught by the inexpugnable Turk, and shown how they may be yet further developed and expanded. The result is a treatise written with singular clearness, knowledge, and force, on a subject hitherto too often treated with bewildering technicality, and which we do

not hesitate to say is the most important addtion to British military literature since General Hamley's Operations of War was published.

Permanent fortification, even in the days of Vauban, opposed to poor powder and light artillery, had yet little to show for itself in the way of results. Major Clarke has care- fully tabulated the sieges of the wars of Marlborough and Eugene, and found that, excepting Toulon and Turin, which were successfully defended, all the other twenty-nine strong places—beginning with Cazal in 1695, and ending with Philipsbourg in 1734—fell, the average duration of a siege being only thirty-four days. It is well noted, in the case of Turin, that the Duke of Savoy used up two millions of fascinea in supplementary earthworks, and that at Toulon the perma- nent defences were below the average, but were augmented by new field-works. Not the least instructive part of Major Clarke's book to professional students will be the appendices containing similar analytical tables of the sieges of the Peninsular War and of the Franco-German War of 1870,—of which last war it may be, without much exaggeration, said that all the great fortified places of France simply served as traps in which to shut up her best soldiers until time enabled the Germans to starve or shell them into surrender. It was to his contemporaries somewhat difficult to understand Wellington's often complained-of prejudice against engineers and gunners. Perhaps he hardly realised himself, we do not think he ever expressed, his sense of the waste of time and force involved in conducting war, as he felt obliged to do, in conformity with ancient tradition, by a series of sieges in a country studded with small walled towns. But, at all events, he set to the ages the great object-lesson of the engineer's art in his ever, memorable instructions to Colonel Fletcher of October, 1809. Here, Major Clarke well says,-

" The Duke of Wellington showed genius of the highest order, and there is nothing in all his career which evinces more inde- pendence and originality of thought than the conception of the lines of Torres Vedras. If the idea violated some cherished principles, so also did the works. A line 29 miles long was held by a force providing only about 1,600 men per mile. Flank defence of ditches, attempted in a few of the earlier redoubts, was given up altogether, the traces being based on the ground alone. The redoubts did not flank each other, and were in many cases more than a mile apart. Yet Massena did not even attempt to attack the position, and there can be no doubt whatever that he was right."

It was, in truth, as we now look back to it, as great a lesson in the art of natural fortification as fighting in line was in that

of tactics.

Major Clarke has carefully studied the sieges of the American Civil War. On that unadorned continent there were no towering keeps of monumental architecture, tempting doom from the first gunners who made real use of rifled artillery. The American engineer lay low, took nature as he found it, and improved its smiling face to meet the occasion. "Never before," says Major Clarke, "was so much originality

• Fortification: its Past Achievements, Recent Development, and Future Pro- gress. By Major G. Bydemhana Clarke, 0.11.0., Royal Engineers. With 58 Illustration& London: John Murray.

displayed during a period of hostilities, and Europe owes much to the ingenuity evolved at this time of dire national necessity. The authorship has not in all cases been adequately acknowledged, and we have 'since re-invented some of the commonplaces of the Transatlantic operations." He succinctly describes the sieges of Fort Pulaski, Forts Henry, Donelson, and Wagner, Vicksburg, Fort Fisher--(" probably the heaviest bombardment on record:" on Christmas Eve, 1864, " Admiral Porter shelled the work with 33 vessels, the average rate of fire being 115 projectiles per minute ;" yet, after he had spent all his shot in the course of Christmas Day, the place was considered " substantially uninjured as a defensive position ") —and Petersburg, " the Confederate Sebastopol ;" and Atlanta, which Sherman promised he would make " too hot to be endured," but which he never ventured to assault, and which Hood, after an unshaken defence, successfully evacuated. Thus, says Major Clarke, "the provisional works of Atlanta made a resistance of forty-one days, and served their purpose as forts quite as perfectly as the most costly erections copied from Antwerp would have done."

During the Franco-German War, twenty-four fortresses

were attacked, of which one, Bitsch, was never taken, and six made no real resistance. The average duration of the defence in the other cases was forty-one days,—or, excluding Paris and Metz, only thirty-three days. But " the French fortresses

were, almost without exception, defended by the rifle alone ; " and at Paris particularly, "the low command and comparative invisibility of the works constructed after the investment "- gave them great advantages over the ponderous scientific structures on which Louis Philippe spent so many millions of money. It has been already suggested how Plevna condenses and enforces the same lessons.

At this point it is a natural question to ask how far these lessons have been applied to our own works of fortification. Major Clarke truly says we were in a far more favourable position when the recent defences of England were designed, and the works of her great foreign fortresses revised, than the engineers of the fortifications of Paris were in 1840. The new artillery had been rapidly brought to a high state of per- fection mainly through the inventive skill of English civilians like Armstrong and Whitworth. Our soldiers had taken part in one of the greatest sieges the earth has seen. There was no end of money, and no unwillingness to spend it. The result is accurately described in these crisp and perhaps uncon- sciously caustic sentences :—

" Taken as a whole, the guiding principle of these works seems to have been to provide large enclosures secure against assault—so long as they were not subjected to the fire of siege-guns. As fighting positions, many of these forts cannot be described or criticised; since as regards the essentials of such positions, judged by the experience of Sebastopol, they remain to be completed. The measure of security against assault—not preceded by an artillery attack— reaches the highest standard which the most exacting theory would be likely to demand; but this ideal was only attained by an ex- penditure so heavy as to cause a reaction, which prevented the defences themselves from being properly finished."

The italics are ours. The spirit of Ethelred the Unready seems to have had more influence on English history than is generally acknowledged. In fine, Major Clarke feelingly admits that "some of these works might have been designed by clever cadets, quick to recognise the niceties of technical artifice ; but unable, from sheer immaturity of thought and want of study, to grasp the broader aspects of the science in its relation to war." This is comforting. Happily, we have reverted to the wisdom of our ancestors in such matters, and may find, if the " silver streak " is ever crossed, in some Danes' mound or aboriginal barrow, promptly supplemented by the navvy's cunning spade, a vastly superior fighting-screen to bastion or caponier or battlemented wall.

There is an extremely able critical chapter on the recent proposals of General Brialmont, Colonel Schumann, and other foreign engineers, to use iron alone, or in combination with earth and concrete, in fortification. Major Clarke has no faith in these new methods, and contends that the experiments at Bucharest and elsewhere have been quite inconclusive as to their merits. The real increase of force of the defence will, he strongly holds, consist instead in the magazine rifle, and in high-angle fire from rifled howitzers and mortars. The machine-

gun must also be regarded as a most important addition to the power of the defence :— " The fire of the Maxim gun delivering about 700 bullets per minute can be entirely directed by one man, who need not

show more than his head (easily shielded) above the parapet, the feed being tended by another man completely covered. The gun may even be controlled by signals given from an observing station to a man completely covered. In the special qUalities of the automatic gun, there is a distinct advantage to the defence arising from the fact that an intense frontal fire can be suddenly developed by a few sentries without waiting for the complete manning of the parapets by the garrison of a work sheltered in their casemates."

Smokeless powder will, he holds, probably add another distinct advantage to the defence. Smoke affords cover to the advancing attack. It may shroud the defenders when clear aim is essentially required. On both these points the defence certainly gains. Whether the besieger may not benefit by the increased invisibility of his batteries, remains to be seen. In regard to the effect of the new explosives, such as the French melinite, Major Clarke does not share the alarm commonly felt, and derides the idea lately expressed by a military rhetorician that it may be possible to "clear the Channel by picrates." He says their destructive effect against masonry will no doubt be great, but the important experiments at Lydd showed no increase of results against earthworks. It remains to be ascertained what will be the shock-effect of such explosives upon men. The horrible possibility has been alleged that a whole battalion may be asphyxiated in an instant through concussion of the air or some analogous effect, caused by the explosion of a single dynamite shell. Long may the problem occupy an undisturbed place in the realm of theory! But, while eoprewhat doubtful of the effect of high explosives in siege operations, Major Clarke entertains a very favourable opinion gi the Zalinski pneumatic dynamite-gun as a weapon for coast-defence. One of these guns has lately been bought by the Government of Victoria, and is now at Shoeburyness awaiting trial. The American experiments show that great accuracy of aim can be attained with this terrible weapon, which can fire a shell containing 600 lb. of blasting gelatine over 2,000 yards. It is expected that such a shell exploded on a ship would destroy, and if exploded at all near, would disable it.

Space forbids more than a mere reference to the interesting and valuable chapters on coast-defence, in which the study of the bOmbardment of Alexandria contains remarkable lessons. Major Clarke holds that had the Egyptian gunners known how to handle their rifled guns as well as they did the smooth- bores, the ships would have been defeated without difficulty. In conclusion, we may quote the few simple and weighty sen- tences in which our author summarises the argument of his book :-

" The principles which it has been sought to lay down may be ex- pressed in a few words. The fortification which has given the most brilliant results in the past has been that of the soldier, not the pro- fessor. Take the best of that fortification, and carhfully preserving all that conferred such great advantages upon it, add everything which time, both for labour and thought, renders possible. A Plevna thus completed, properly armed and fully organised, will fulfil all the requirements of defence ; and whatever may be the advances in the weapons of attack, can never become either so hopelessly inadequate, or so difficult to renovate, as now are most of the masterpieces of the schoolmen."