ARTILLERY
In the matter of armament and the quality thereof, French artillery is
second to none; but in the matter of numbers the Field Artillery might
have been stronger when considered relatively with the total strength
of the French Army. If the conscript electing to join either infantry
or cavalry considers himself in for a hard time, then it would be
difficult to say what are the anticipations of the conscript who goes
to service with the guns, for his work is practically twice as hard as
that of the average infantryman. Still, he makes up for increase of
work by a relaxation of discipline, and, after all, the conscript's two
years comes to about the same thing in the end, no matter what branch
of the service he may choose. For, just as there is a limit to a man's
endurance or efficiency, so there is a limit to the amount of knowledge
that a man can absorb in a given period. The infantry conscript absorbs
all the knowledge possible in the allotted time: the artillery
conscript can do no more.
It may be said, in fact, that the artillery conscript has a better time
of it than his fellows in either infantry or cavalry, for his work
is rendered more interesting than theirs by reason of its being more
varied. The artillery driver, certainly, is in much the same position
as the cavalryman, for his life is made up of horses and stables,
riding, driving, grooming, and care for the fitness and cleanliness of
harness and saddlery. He has a very busy life, this artillery driver,
and his remarks, on coming in on a wet day after two or three hours'
parade with the guns, might cause a little consternation in what is
known as polite society, for two muddy horses with their saddlery
and fittings, all to be dried and cleaned for the battery officer's
inspection within a given time, are not conducive to elegance of
expression or to restraint.
But compensation comes in the relaxation of the rigid discipline
which the infantryman, and to a certain extent the cavalryman, have
to undergo. This will appear more clearly when one understands that
infantrymen and cavalrymen alike need supervision throughout the whole
of their day's work. Their tasks are mainly of drill and routine: made
work, a good bit of it, in order to render them thoroughly efficient
soldiers. The made work of the artillery driver consists in rendering
him efficient in the art of controlling two of the horses which draw
the gun, under all possible and many impossible conditions. By the
time his training is completed, he has learned to harness up and turn
out quickly, and is capable of obeying without hesitation any word of
command the battery officer may give with regard to the evolutions of
the battery as a whole. He is trained in the matter of casualties; that
is to say, he is taught to regard one of his horses as suddenly injured
or dead, and knows exactly what to do to make the best of the loss, in
case such a casualty may occur. "Unlimber" and "limber up," as words
of command, find him equally unmoved and equally alert; he is, at his
best, a confident, self-reliant man, a far different being from the raw
youth who, on a certain first of October, came to be initiated into the
mysteries of artillery driving.
These things comprise very nearly all of what may be termed the made
work of the artillery driver, the work that is arranged with a special
view to making him an efficient soldier in time of war. The rest of
his work is absolutely necessary to the well-being of himself and the
two horses under his charge. As a matter of course, he must keep
himself and his kit smart and clean--as smartness is known in the
French Army. He must groom his horses, and keep their equipment in good
order; he must keep the stables clean; he must assist the gunners in
the _corvées_ necessary to the maintenance of health, good order, and
efficiency in the battery. Bearing in mind the fact that this one man
is responsible not only for himself, in the way that an infantryman
is, but is also responsible for his two horses and all their outfit,
it will be seen that there is not much time for the discipline which,
in the case of the infantryman, is practically indispensable to the
thorough control of the man and the full efficiency of the regiment.
The artillery driver is a busy man, who considers himself, by reason of
the amount of work that he gets through, a far more capable man than
either an infantryman or a cavalryman; in the driver's estimation, the
only class of man who comes anywhere near him as regards efficiency and
soldierly qualities is the gunner, and, the driver will say, the gunner
is not quite so good a man as the driver. This spirit, common to each
branch of the French Army, augurs well for the efficiency and fighting
value of all arms of the service.
Gunners in the French Army, as far as Field Artillery is concerned,
differ from English gunners in that they only ride on the limber
and on the gun when there is actual need that they should accompany
the gun. English gunners always ride, but in the French Army it is
considered better to save the horses by reducing the weight that they
have to draw to the lowest possible amount. On long marches the gunners
turn out two or three hours earlier than the drivers, and march like
infantry to the appointed destination for the day. Although turning out
later with horses and guns, the drivers usually reach camp at the end
of the day quite as soon as the gunners, for the trot is maintained
where possible, and, with a light load to draw, artillery horses are
able to get over ground quickly. This system has much to commend it; it
hardens the gunners, and is far better for their general health than
sitting on a gun or limber which jolts, springless, along a country
road; at the same time, it increases the mobility of the artillery, and
renders horses more fresh and fit for their work in case of several
days in succession, devoted to marching to a distant destination. The
only drawback to the practice consists in its being useless in time of
war, when the gunners must at all times accompany the guns and be ready
for instant action.
The work of the gunners is quite as hard as that of the drivers of
Field Artillery, and quite as varied. Coming to the battery with
absolutely no knowledge of the ways of using a gun, the raw conscript
is taught the work of half a dozen men, for, as in the case of the
drivers, each man has to be able to replace casualties in the ranks.
The actual drill to which a gunner is subjected is a complicated
business; there is a good deal of hopping and jumping about and aside,
for each man must learn to perform his part in loading, sighting, and
firing his gun, and at the same time each man must keep out of the way
of the rest. A gun crew amounts to a dozen or so of men: there are the
men concerned in the getting out of ammunition, others busied over the
actual loading, and yet others engaged in sighting the gun and firing
at the word of command; each of these men must be taught the duties of
all the rest, for, when a battery is actually in action, casualties
must be anticipated, and the men who are loading must be prepared to
get out ammunition if required, must be able to set the time fuse of a
shell for a given range, able to load, sight, and fire the gun. Thus
one man has to learn the various tasks which a dozen perform, though to
each is allotted a definite place, and each is specially trained for
the performance of a definite part.
Naturally, this training fully occupies all the two years of the gunner
conscript's service, and there is little time to spare. The fuss and
fret of discipline is correspondingly reduced; when a man is thoroughly
busy, and interested in his work as any man must be over a gun, if
he is in the least mechanically inclined, he needs no undue pressure
to keep him up to his work; the gunner, if he has any sense of the
responsibility and nature of his work, gets sufficiently interested in
it, and sufficiently keen over the points that he has to master, to
render him independent of more than actual tuition. The pleasure that
comes to the sportsman over a remarkably successful shot, or to the
cricketer over a good boundary hit, is akin to the feeling experienced
by the gunner as he learns part after part of his gun, and finds
himself well on the way to gaining complete control over the tremendous
power that the gun represents.
But this comes late in the training period, and is not attained easily.
There is so much to learn; the way in which a shell is timed, for
instance, is a complex piece of work that must be understood, to a
certain extent, by the gunner who has to do the timing; that is to say,
the mechanism of the shell, and the nature of the timing apparatus,
have to be taught the man as well as the mere action of turning the
ring to the required point and "setting the fuse." Traversing and
sighting the gun, elevation and depression, are movements that explain
themselves as they are taught; sighting to a given range seems easy,
but is not so easy in practice, for the sighting of a gun has to be
done swiftly and accurately--there must be no mistake in the range, for
a shell costs more money than the total pay of the conscript during his
two years of service, and to throw those costly projectiles to points
at which they explode without effect is a silly business.
To each man his part in the whole, and absolute efficiency in the
part--that is the ideal to which the training of the gunner is
directed; the quality of the French field artillery in action in
this, their latest real experience of war, attests how well the ideal
has been realised. Outnumbered by their opponents in batteries and
regiments, often confronted with guns of far heavier calibre than their
own, they have given good account of themselves, and shown that the
crews of the 75-millimetre gun are capable of holding their own as far
as lies within the bounds of human possibility.
With regard to the custom of sending forward gunners on foot, this
practice is also followed in the case of reserve drivers, or drivers
who are not needed for the actual transport of the guns and limbers on
the march. They are formed up in rear of the gunners, and are marched
off on foot with the latter instead of adding to the weight that the
horses have to pull, leaving only such officers and men as are actually
necessary to travel with the guns.
The artillery officer's training course is more severe than that
undergone by any other branch of the service, as, in view of the
complicated and responsible nature of his duties, it needs to be.
An artillery officer, gaining his commission after the fashion of
a British officer who elects to join the Army by way of Sandhurst
or Woolwich, goes first to the École Polytechnique, the highest
engineering school of France; after completing the course here,
the officer of artillery is sent on to the artillery school at
Fontainebleau, where a year is spent in further training, and then the
youngster is considered competent to take his place as lieutenant in an
artillery battery. The percentage of artillery officers gaining their
commissions from the ranks is smaller than that of other branches of
the service, and it is seldom that such officers reach higher than the
rank of captain, for, in order to learn all that is required of the
higher ranks of commissioned officer in the artillery, an officer needs
to start young, and a course at the École Polytechnique is almost an
essential. By the time a man has worked his way through the various
grades of non-commissioned officer and is thus eligible for such a
course, he is usually too old to take kindly to school work.
Altogether, artillery service is not a light business in the French
Army--it is not in any army, for that matter. Both gunners and drivers
must take themselves seriously, and officers of the artillery must
take themselves most seriously of all, with the possible exception
of engineer officers. The modern rifle is a complicated weapon when
compared with the musket of a hundred years ago; but in comparison
with the rifle, the big gun of the Army of to-day has advanced in
construction and power to an enormously greater extent. The character
of the projectile has changed altogether from the old-fashioned round
shot to a missile which is in itself a gun, carrying its own exploding
charge and small projectiles within itself. The range of the modern gun
is limited only by the necessity to make the gun mobile in the field,
and by the range of human sight or power to judge the position of the
target. The gunners of to-day, and the officers who command them,
must be skilled workmen, possessed of no little mechanical ability in
addition to their military qualities. They must be not only soldiers,
but artificers, mechanics, engineers, mathematicians--skilled men in
every way. The efficiency of the French artillery to-day is largely due
to the French turn of mind, which is eminently suited to the solving of
those mathematical problems with which the work of those who control
the big guns abounds.