present temper of the continental governments, and in the absence of any recognised body of public engagements, we have, it must be confessed, but little confidence in the permanence of peace; and in presence of the altered condition of Europe, no man can be surprised that the efficiency of the military institutions of France has become the most absorbing subject of interest to that great people.'

It is unnecessary to remind the reader that these remarks were written in 1867, three years before the occurrence of the present war. In the interval Marshal Niel succeeded in reorganizing and re-arming the French army, which had suffered greatly under the feeble administration of his predecessor Marshal Randon.

170

RIFLED ORDNANCE IN ENGLAND AND

FRANCE.

[Reprinted from the EDINBURGH REVIEW, April 1864.]

THESE Parliamentary reports, and the meritorious publication of Sir Emerson Tennent, suffice to give the reader a very exact notion of what has been spent, produced, and invented by England in order to solve the great problem which perplexes the military Powers of the world. About twenty years ago, the manifest improvements effected in the structure and manufacture of small arms appeared to threaten with a total overthrow the ancient superiority of field guns and heavy ordnance. The Minié rifle, as it was called in the first instance, from the name of the ingenious inventor of the new form of projectile which it carried, seemed to have reduced to a far narrower scope the part heretofore borne by field artillery in war; and in an article of the Moniteur,' attributed to the Emperor Napoleon himself, the term 'hand artillery' was not unadvisedly applied to those new and powerful weapons, which

11. Reports from the Select Committee on Ordnance, together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index for 1862 and 1863. Ordered by the House of Commons to be Printed. July 1863. 2. The Story of the Guns. By Sir Emerson Tennent. London 1864.

appeared likely to supersede guns of heavier metal. With a rifled musket a skilled marksman can send a ball with precision to a distance of 1,200 or 1,300 yards—a distance equal to the first graze of a cannon-ball from the smooth-bore field-gun formerly in use, and double the range of the same gun firing canister or case-shot. But in addition to this advantage of the rifleman over the artilleryman, the fire of the rifle is beyond comparison more accurate than the fire of the smooth-bore cannon. It was therefore obvious that a field battery, which required for the full complement of its half-dozen guns and their carriages and ammunition no less than 200 horses and 200 men, must in most cases produce on the field of battle much less positive effect than a single company of 100 skilled riflemen. As skirmishers, or under cover of the nearest hedge, or wood, or wall, the hundred rifles could with ease pick off their 200 antagonists. The battery could only return their fire by six comparatively ill-directed shots against an unseen enemy; whilst its own position, the horses, the caissons, and all the picturesque splendour of a well-appointed field-gun, exposed it to the unerring fire of these scattered assailants. Like the lion in the fable, the king of the forest might exhaust his strength in vain efforts to shake off or escape these gad-flies of battle, stinging him to death.

It is true that the fire of artillery is still formidable to masses; but the first result of these changes has been to modify the tactics of Europe, and to cause the deep formation previously used by continental armies to be abandoned: moreover, the effect of the

fire of modern rifles is to compel guns to pass out of range of the denser bodies of troops. Case-shot or canister at short distances are still no doubt to the advantage of artillery, but the range of hollow shot from the old field-guns was extremely limited and its direction uncertain. To this it must be added that artillery is of all arms the most costly, the most cumbrous, and the most difficult to handle on broken ground or under adverse circumstances. To maintain the ascendancy of guns, it became indispensable to construct cannon which should be to the old fieldpieces what the Enfield rifle is to Brown Bess. To those who are at all conversant with the subject it is superfluous to remark that in order to give rotation to elongated projectiles in their flight by means of grooves cut spirally down the length of the bore, either the projectile itself must have projections on its surface to fit into these grooves-and this is the French system, as well as that of Cavalli in Italy and of Wahrendorf in Germany; or else a portion of the projectile must be of soft material, so that like the Armstrong shell, coated with lead, the missile is forced by the explosion into the grooves of the gun. All the systems of rifled ordnance may be reduced to one or the other of these two principles; and the selection of the arm best adapted for the service is the great problem which every military Government has had to deal with as best it could: we believe that it has been satisfactorily dealt with by England and France, but by these Powers for field-guns only. But we shall not attempt in the following remarks to enter upon the subject of German ordnance, tried for the first time in Sleswig, where the

Danish smooth-bore cannons were unequally opposed to the Prussian rifled guns. The Russian Government has made prodigious exertions to remodel its whole artillery, but we believe in the main they have adopted the French system. As for heavy ordnance, in all its varieties,-battering guns and guns of position, coast defences and naval guns-it is still, to say the truth, in a state of probation and experiment: but we shall endeavour to show the point which these inventions have really reached in both the great States of Western Europe.

The heavy guns used by the Americans at the siege of Charleston, in their batteries and in their iron-clad ships, must still be classed in this experimental category. The hooped and rifled guns with which several of the vessels now in commission in the French navy are at this time armed, can only be considered as an expedient, which has enabled the French Government to make use of an enormous store of iron guns at very little expense : if the French had set to work to construct an entire system of artillery new in all its parts, as has been done in this country, and in no other, they would probably have produced a more perfect arm. But even in our own service, the 70 and 100-pounder Armstrongs which have been distributed among our ships, are admitted by everybody not to be the final and satisfactory result of our experiments in naval armaments. It may therefore be said, that modern rifled artillery has only been entirely adopted and introduced into the field service of the French and English armies. The structure and form of heavy guns and their projectiles is still under discussion: France has rifled