ARTILLERY AND ENGINEERS
The Royal Artillery of the British Army is divided into three branches,
known respectively as Horse, Field, and Garrison Artillery. In
normal times the Royal Horse Artillery consists of some twenty-eight
batteries, distinguished by the letters of the alphabet, together with
a depot and a riding establishment. On parade the Horse Artillery
batteries take precedence of all other units, with the exception of
Household Cavalry. The Royal Field Artillery consists of 150 batteries
and four depots, and the Royal Garrison Artillery consists of 100
companies and nine mountain batteries.
“A” Battery of the Royal Horse is officially designated the “Chestnut”
troop, from the colour of its horses, and the Horse Artillery as a
whole is one of the few corps of the service which retains the stable
jacket for parade use. In the case of the R.H.A. this garment is of
dark blue with yellow braid, and the head-dress of the horse gunner is
a busby with white plume and scarlet busby-bag, similar to that of the
Hussars. The Field and Garrison Artillery wear tunics in full dress,
and their helmets are surmounted by a ball instead of a spike.
While the weapon of the Field Artillery is the 18½-pounder quick-firing
gun, and gunners ride on the gun and limber, the R.H.A. is armed
with the 13-pounder quick-firing gun, and its gunners are mounted
on horseback. The object of this is to obtain extreme mobility. The
Royal Horse are expected to be able to execute all their manœuvres
at a gallop, and to get into and out of action more quickly than the
Field Artillery. They are designed specially to accompany cavalry in
flying-column work; their mobility is only achieved by a sacrifice
of weight in the projectile which the gun throws, and they are only
expected to hold a position supported by cavalry until the heavier guns
come into play. The horse gunners may be regarded as the scouts of the
artillery, in the sense in which the cavalry are the scouts of the
whole army.
Since, in the Royal Horse, gunners as well as drivers are mounted,
the number of horses to a battery is greater than in the Field
Artillery, and work is consequently harder. Officers of the Royal
Horse are specially selected from the R.F.A., to which they return on
promotion, and the rank and file are picked men, chosen for physique
and smartness. It is a maxim of the service that the work of the R.H.A.
is never done, and when one takes into account the fact that gunners
have a horse and saddle apiece to care for as well as their gun, while
drivers have two horses and two sets of harness apiece to keep in
condition, it will be seen that there is a certain amount of truth in
the statement. In old times, when field-day and manœuvre parades were
carried through in review order, the horse gunner was eternally in
debt over the matter of the yellow braid with which his stable jacket
is adorned, for these jackets are particularly difficult to keep
clean. The general adoption of service dress for working parade has
neutralised this disability. The horse gunner of to-day is a very good
soldier indeed in every respect, both by real aptitude for his work and
by compulsion.
Not that the men of the Field Artillery are not equally good soldiers,
for they are. The Field Artillery, however, divides itself naturally
into two branches, drivers and gunners. Each driver has two horses
and two sets of harness to manage, and, if the cavalryman has reason
to grouse at the length of time he spends at stables, the driver
of the “Field” has more than four times as much reason to grouse.
Moreover, the cavalryman is permitted to clean his saddlery during
the official stable hour, but drivers of the R.F.A. are expected to
concentrate their attention on their horses during the time that they
are officially at stables; they can stay in the stables and get their
sets of harness cleaned and fit for inspection in their own time. They
are then at liberty to clean up their own personal equipment, and,
until the turn for guard comes round, have the rest of their time to
themselves.
Gunners of the R.F.A. have all their time taken up by the care of the
gun, its fittings and appointments, as well as by the various separate
instruments connected with the use of a gun. For instance, all arms of
the service possess and make use of range-finding instruments, known
as mekometers, but in the artillery the mekometer is a larger and more
complicated affair, for the range of the gun is several times greater
than that of the rifle, and range finding is consequently a far more
complex business. The simple gunner must understand this, just as he
must understand the business of “laying” or adjusting the sights of the
gun to the required range, the use of telescopic sights, the delicate
mechanism of the breech-block, the method of putting the gun out of
action or rendering it useless in ease of emergency, and a hundred and
one other things which involve really complicated technical knowledge,
and lie in the province of the commissioned officer rather than in
that of a private soldier. The reason for teaching these things to the
private soldier lies in the accumulated experience which shows that
on many occasions all the officers and non-commissioned officers of a
battery have been blown to pieces by the enemy’s fire, and there have
remained only a few private soldiers to do their own work and that of
their officers as well. It is to the eternal credit of the Army, and
especially to that of the artillery, that men thus placed have never
once failed to do their duty nobly, and the present war has already
afforded more than one instance of single men sticking to their guns
to the last. Desertion of the guns has never yet been charged against
British artillery, nor is it ever likely to be.
Field-guns are always accompanied by an escort, sometimes of cavalry,
but more often of infantry, for the gunner is admittedly helpless
against infantry at close range or against charging cavalry. The charge
of the Light Brigade at Balaclava forms an instance of what cavalry can
do against unescorted guns, and, though the pattern of gun in use has
changed for the better, the projectile being far more powerful, and
the number of shells per minute far greater, such feats as that of the
immortal Light Brigade are still within the range of possibility.
The business of the gunner in an army assuming the offensive is to
open the attack. The fuse of the shrapnel shell is so timed that the
missile, which contains a quantity of bullets and a bursting charge
of powder, shall explode immediately over the position held by the
enemy. When a sufficient number of shells have been fired to weaken
resistance, the infantry advance in order to drive the enemy from
the chosen position. In defensive action the use of the gun lies in
retarding the advance of the enemy, and inflicting as much damage as
possible before rifles and machine-guns can come into play.
For this business ranges must be taken swiftly and accurately. Loading
must be performed expeditiously, and, though the pneumatic recoil of
the modern field-gun renders it far less liable to shift in action,
the sights must be correctly aligned after each shot. A gun crew must
work swiftly and without confusion, and peace training is devoted
to attaining that quickness and thorough efficiency which renders a
battery formidable in war.
There is, perhaps, less show about the work of a gunner than in that of
any other arm of the service with the exception of the Royal Engineers.
A good bit of his work is extremely dirty; cleaning a gun, for
instance, after firing practice with smokeless powder, is a hopelessly
messy business, and the infantryman, who pulls his rifle through and
extracts the fouling in about five minutes, would feel sorry for
himself if he were called on to share in the work of cleaning the
bore of an 18½-pounder after firing practice. There is a considerable
amount of drill of a complicated nature which the field-gunner has to
learn in addition to ordinary foot-drill; there is all the mechanism
of the gun to be understood; there are courses in range-finding,
gun-laying, signalling, and other things, and on the whole it is not
surprising that it takes at least five years to render a field gunner
thoroughly conversant with his work. The finished article is rather a
business-like man, quieter as a rule in his ways than his fellows in
the cavalry and infantry, rather serious, and little given to boasting
about the excellence of service in the Royal Field Artillery. He knows
his worth and that of his arm too well to waste breath in declaring
them.
The driver of the Field Artillery has even more of riding-school work
to do than the average cavalryman. It would be idle to say that he is
a better rider, for the average cavalryman is as good a rider as it
is possible for a man to be. Artillery horses, however, are heavy and
unhandy compared with cavalry mounts, and the driver has not only to
drive the horse he rides, but has also to lead and control the horse
abreast of his own. The principal responsibility for the path which the
gun takes lies with the lead or foremost driver, though almost as much
responsibility is entailed on the man controlling the wheel or rearmost
horses, and, compared with these two, the centre driver has an easy
time of it in mounted drill and field work.
Notwithstanding the extremely hard work to which drivers of artillery
are subjected, the same trouble over harness as obtains over cavalry
saddlery is experienced in some batteries. “Soft soap and oil” are the
cleaning materials prescribed by the regulations, but certain battery
commanders enforce the use of steel-link burnishers on steel-work, and
brilliant polish on leather, the last-named polish being obtained by
the use of a mysterious combination of heel-ball, turpentine, harness
composition, and, according to legend, old soldiers’ breath. The
mixture is known among the drivers as “fake,” and “fake and burnish”
is synonymous with unending work in the stables. It is the fetish of
smartness, a misdirected enthusiasm, which brings things like this to
pass and inflicts extra work on men whose energies should be devoted
solely to the attaining of fitness for active service, where “fake and
burnish” have no place.
The Royal Horse and Royal Field Artillery are the only branches of the
service in which substantial prizes are given annually to encourage
men in their work. In each battery three money prizes are offered for
competition among the drivers; the amounts offered are substantial,
and the general result is a spirit of healthy emulation, though far
too often, and with the full sanction of the battery officer, this
degenerates into the “fake and burnish” craze. This, however, is not
the fault of the prize-giving system, but of the officers who not only
permit, but encourage and even order this unnecessary work, which,
while entailing added labour on the men, assists in the deterioration
of the leather-work in harness. For all leatherwork requires constant
feeding with oil in order to keep it fit and pliant, while the “fake”
dries the fibres of the leather and starves it, rendering it liable to
cracking and perishing.
The branch of the Artillery of which least is heard is that of the
Royal Garrison Artillery, whose hundred companies are scattered about
the British Empire in obscure corners, engaged in the work of coast
defence and the management of siege guns. It is fortunate for the
garrison gunners that they have no “long-faced chums” to worry about,
for they are admittedly the hardest-worked branch of the service as
it is. Gibraltar houses several companies; you will find some of them
managing the big guns at Dover, and at every protected port. They are
big men, all; strong men, and lithe and active, for their work involves
the hauling about of heavy weights, combined with cat-like quickness
in loading and firing their many-patterned charges. The horse and
field gunner have each to learn one pattern of gun thoroughly, but the
garrison gunner, employed almost entirely in garrisoning defensive
fortifications, has to learn the use of half a hundred patterns, from
the little one-pounder quick-firer to the big gun on its disappearing
platform, and the 13·4-inch siege-gun. The horse and field gunner may
complete their education some day, for the pattern of field-gun changes
but seldom, and the present pattern is not likely to be improved on
for some years to come. The garrison gunner, however, is the victim of
experiment, for every new gun that comes out, after being tested and
passed either at Lydd or Shoeburyness, is handed on to the garrison
gunners for use, and there is a new set of equipment and mechanism
to be mastered. In order to ascertain the quality of their work, one
has only to get permission to visit the nearest fort, when it will be
seen that the guns are cared for like babies, nursed and polished and
covered away with full appreciation of their power and value.
Garrison gunners suffer from worse stations than any other branch of
the service. They are planted away on lonely coast stations for two
or three years at a time, and Aden, the bane of foreign service in
the infantryman’s estimation, is a pleasant place compared with some
which garrison gunners are compelled to inhabit for a period. Lonely
islands in the West Indies, isolated places on the Indian and African
coast, forts placed far away from contact with civilians in the British
Isles--all these fall to the lot of the garrison gunner, and the nature
of his work is such that, unlike his fellows in the field and horse
artillery, he gets neither infantry nor cavalry escort.
Reckoned in with the Garrison Artillery are the nine Mountain
Batteries, which, organised for service on such hilly country as is
provided by the Indian frontier, form a not inconspicuous part of the
British Army. In these batteries the guns are carried in sections on
pack animals; Kipling has immortalised the Mountain Batteries in his
verses on “The Screw Guns,” a title which conveys an allusion to the
fact that the guns of the Mountain Batteries screw and fit together
for use. The use of these guns can be but local, for they are not
sufficiently mobile to oppose to ordinary field-guns on level ground,
nor is the projectile that they throw of sufficient weight to give
them a chance in a duel with field-guns. They are, however, extremely
useful things for the purpose for which they are intended; they form a
necessary factor in the maintenance of order on the north-west frontier
of India, and, together with their gun crews, they instil a certain
measure of respect into the turbulent tribes of that uneasy land.
A consideration of the various branches of the service would be
incomplete if mention of the Royal Engineers were omitted. The
Engineers are looked on as a sister service to the Royal Artillery,
and consist of various troops, companies, and sections, according
to the technical work they are called on to perform. Thus there are
field troops of mounted engineers for service with cavalry, field
companies for duty with the field army, fortress companies for service
in conjunction with the garrison gunners, balloon sections and
telegraph sections for the use of the intelligence department, and
pontoon companies for field bridging work. Every engineer of full age
is expected to be a trained tradesman when he enlists, and the special
qualifications demanded of this branch of the service are acknowledged
by a higher rate of pay than that accorded to any other arm. The motto
of the Engineers, “Ubique,” is fully justified, for they are not only
expected to be, but are, capable of every class of work, from making a
pepper-caster out of a condensed-milk tin to throwing across a river
a bridge capable of conveying siege-guns. There is no end to their
activities, and no end to their enterprise, and in the opinion of
many the Engineers, officers and men alike, are the most capable and
efficient body of men in any branch of the Government service.
Their work is little seen; to their lot falls the task of constructing
the barbed-wire entanglements with the assistance of which infantry
battalions can put up a magnificent defence against any kind of attack;
the Engineers are responsible for the construction of the bridge by
means of which the cavalry arrive unexpectedly on the other side of
the river and spoil the enemy’s plans by getting round his flank; it
is the Engineers, again, who repair the blown-up railway line and
permit of the transport of trainloads of troops to an unexpected point
of vantage, thus again upsetting the plans of the enemy. One hears of
the magnificent defence maintained by the infantry; one hears of the
brilliant exploits of the cavalry on the flank of the enemy; one hears
also of the skill of the commander who moved the troops with such
suddenness and disconcerted his enemy; but the work of the Engineers,
who made these things possible, generally goes unrecognised outside
military circles, and the Engineers themselves have to reap their
satisfaction out of the knowledge of work well done.