persons belonging to the same category is to be deprecated, it is important that the area of information and opinion drawn upon should be as wide as possible. This was especially the case in the present instance; for the movement for the reorganisation of the Royal Artillery originated among the younger officers, and is chiefly supported by them. Out of the thirty-seven witnesses examined, not one was below the rank of major; yet the Proceedings of the Royal Artillery Institute and the Journal of the Royal United Service Institution afford conclusive proof that officers below that rank possessing enlarged views on the organisation and tactics of their own arm abound. Extensive reform of any body is rarely advocated by the older men who have grown up under a certain system, have acquired distinction in it, have learnt to love and revere it, and whose minds are not sufficiently plastic to accept freely new ideas. The senior artillery officer was a few years ago notorious for his conservatism, his feeling that he was a soldier apart from the rest of the army, and a conviction that the sun rose and set on Woolwich common.

The combined result of the composition of the Committee, of the exclusion of captains and subalterns from the ranks of the witnesses, and the undisguised, nay, very openly avowed, hostility of the Duke of Cambridge to any radical change in the artillery, is that the Committee have recommended a compromise which will only mitigate, not remove, the defects of the Royal Regiment of Artillery. Indeed, it is creditable to the firmness of the majority of the Committee that the recommendations of the latter have gone as far as they have, for two members of the Committee-viz. Sir Robert Biddulph and Major-General Hay, and especially the latter-dealt with some of the witnesses as if they were under hostile cross-examination in a criminal case. These two members acted as if the object of the Committee had been to defend a system, instead of to examine into its conflicting merits and defects.

The existing system may be briefly described as follows: The Royal Regiment of Artillery numbers altogether about thirty-five thousand men of all ranks. It is divided intoHorse Artillery organised in two brigades, one of eleven and the other of nine batteries, each brigade having in addition a depôt battery; Field Artillery in four brigades of twentythree, twenty, twenty, and eighteen batteries respectively, with a depôt battery for each brigade; Garrison Artillery of eleven divisions, of which the first brigade in each division is

composed of regular troops, the remaining brigades being militia artillery. In addition, a certain number of Volunteer artillery corps are affiliated to each division. The first brigades have eight of them, ten service batteries with a depôt battery, while three have nine service batteries with a depôt battery each. There is, in addition to the above, a coast brigade officered by promoted non-commissioned officers, the men being old soldiers. In the Royal Artillery proper the officers, non-commissioned officers, and men are transferable from one branch to the other at the pleasure of the authorities, but the practice is, as a rule, to retain the noncommissioned officers and men during the whole of their service in the branch of the regiment to which they are posted on enlistment. The officers, on the other hand, are promoted or transferred into any branch, with the exception of the Horse Artillery, for which the officers are selected. On promotion-with the exception of the Horse Artillery-officers are posted according to their fall,' i.e. according to the vacancy which may occur. This unwritten law is almost invariably observed. The regimental lieutenant-colonels are distributed about the world in command of groups of two or three batteries called brigade divisions,' or in charge of artillery sub-districts, while the officer in command of the Royal Artillery of divisions or districts is a regimental lieutenant-colonel having the brevet rank of colonel; for the rank of regimental colonel has lately been abolished. The brigade organisation is purely administrative, and it is often if not generally the case that a lieutenant-colonel commands an artillery sub-district in which there is not a single battery of his own brigade. Owing to the enormous size of the regiment and the continual change of officers in a battery, there can be but little esprit de corps, or rather, the esprit de corps being spread over the entire army of artillery, it becomes diluted; while esprit de brigade, or de batterie, is impossible. In a regiment of infantry or cavalry there is an unbroken chain of tradition and associations. Frequently it happens that two or three generations of officers and men have served together: the sergeant-major has perhaps received his first stripes from the father of the last joined subaltern. In all regiments there are many officers and men who have served continuously together during many years of peace and war. Hence arises a clannish feeling which is not to be found, which in fact is impossible, in the artillery. In the latter branch of the service, indeed, the lieutenant-colonels are but little brought into personal contact with the men under

their command. Batteries are detached from the group to which they belong, and even when three or four batteries are united at one station under a lieutenant-colonel they are constantly being changed. As regards the battery itself, which is practically not only the tactical, but also the administrative unit, the changes among the officers are frequent. Cases might be cited in which in the course of a single year every officer has been changed; but, to confine ourselves to some of the instances given by the officers who gave evidence to the Committee, we find such statements as the following. Major E. O. Hay says:

I myself have done duty with fourteen batteries, and I have belonged to nine in my service, which is not yet twenty-one years. It makes a great deal of difference when you go about with men that you know, and have to face new difficulties and discomforts, whatever they are, with men that you have always been with. Then I do not see myself how you can expect esprit de corps under the present system; it is more than human nature can possibly do to maintain an esprit de corps for such an enormous thing as the Royal Artillery.'

Colonel Yeatman-Biggs, Brigade-Major R.A. at Aldershot, says:

In many ways, I think, all our men suffer from the continual change of officers. There is a battery at Aldershot, where, speaking from memory, they had two majors, three captains, and seven subalterns in two years. The majors are continually changing. I find that, as staff officer at Aldershot. I do not think myself that the continuity of the system of command and the care of the men can possibly be as well carried out in this state of constant change. The above remarks are from the men's point of view. From the officers' point of view I think the same thing obtains, and that you lose a great deal of hold over the young officers. In a regiment, when a young man joins it, it is everybody's business to bring him up as a good soldier and a perfect gentleman, and to look after him in every possible way. The tendency, I think, in a huge body like the regiment of artillery, is to let a young man more or less grow up by himself.'

The fact that there is no connexion whatever between the peace organisation and the war organisation cannot but be regarded as a great defect in the present system. In peace the group is brought together by chance, and its component parts are being constantly changed. On the outbreak of war, not even the casual groups above mentioned are taken advantage of, but a completely new arrangement is made. For example, the three batteries which constitute the artillery of a division would be taken-save by accidentfrom as many different stations, and would be commanded,

probably, by a lieutenant-colonel serving at a fourth station, while his adjutant would possibly come from a fifth. Indeed, it is quite on the cards that not only each battery would be strangers to each other and the lieutenant-colonel and his adjutant, but also that all of the three majors had only been appointed to their respective batteries a few weeks previously, perhaps in one of the three cases from the garrison artillery. Now, if there is one principle in the art of war more established than another, it is, that the tactical and administrative units should be identical, and that the groups of units in peace should be identical with the groups of units in war. The importance of the latter requirement being met becomes more and more obvious as the tactics of field artillery develope and the practice of combining the action of several batteries becomes daily more general. It is difficult with our colonial service so to arrange that the groups of either infantry, cavalry, or artillery should be identical in peace and war, but it is quite possible to so arrange that there should be some sort of connexion between the different units stronger than the fact that they each belong to the same arm of the service.

A minor objection to the existing system is that artillery officers who obtain brevet promotion for service in the field derive no advantage therefrom as regards command in their own corps. As long as the fiction is maintained of the artillery being one regiment, commands of artillery must go by regimental seniority. This diminution of the value of brevet promotion as a reward for distinguished conduct in the field would not occur if the army of gunners were broken up into several regiments.

The chief defect of the present system, however, is to be found in the keeping of all the officers on one general list. The result is that not only is an officer on promotion transferred from the horse or field artillery to the garrison artillery, and from the latter to the field artillery, but also that in consequence the garrison artillery, as the least attractive service, is for the most part officered by men wanting either in merit or its equivalent-interest; likewise that those officers who have been transferred from the other two branches to it are discontented, feel humiliated, and strain every nerve to get out of it. One consequence of the feeling is that the esprit de corps of the garrison artillery, and therefore its discipline, suffer. A priori, the same man cannot be equally suited for each of the three branches; hence the service does not get the best work of the best men in their respec

tive branches. On this point there is abundant evidence in the Blue Book. Lord Wolseley says:

'My idea is that the officers of artillery, and of the army generally, believe that the present system is fatal to the officering of the garrison artillery, and that is very easily proved, because as soon as a man becomes a well-known officer of ability in the garrison artillery, the chances are a very large number to one that he will be transferred, because he is such a good man, either into the field artillery or into the horse artillery; and the common general wish of the young men, as I understand it, is to get into the mounted portions of the artillery. Officers who have been a certain number of years, I may say all their career, in the horse artillery or field artillery, when suddenly turned into our large forts, say at Portsmouth and at Plymouth, where they have to manipulate numerous guns, of which they know nothing whatever, find themselves in a very difficult position. Many of them have told me themselves that they looked upon it as quite beginning their career again, and being put to work of which they absolutely knew nothing. They have to deal with enormous weights, and the movement of enormous weights. In olden days a man who could serve an ordinary 9-pounder field battery gun had really very little more to learn, if you turned him into a heavy battery or a siege battery which was armed with 32-pounders, or even 68-pounders; the manipulation of the guns was exactly the same, although the guns were mounted on different carriages. But now there is the greatest possible difference between field-guns and those 9-inch guns and 10-inch guns and 100-ton guns that are at present in use in our coast defences. . . . I think that the most highly scientific men ought to belong to the garrison artillery. I think that there is not more affinity between the garrison artillery and the horse artillery than there is between the horse artillery and the cavalry. I think that a cavalry officer is quite as capable, after a very short training, of making a good horse artillery officer, as a horse artillery officer is of making a good garrison artilleryman.'

In reply to further questions Lord Wolseley said :—

'I think that an officer selected for the garrison artillery should be a man who has a very good turn for mathematics and mechanics; and, as I have already said, I think he should be a more highly scientific man by his education, and perhaps, as you say, by his inclination, than a man who may become a horse artilleryman or even a field battery officer.'

Asked by Sir Archibald Alison whether he considered that, as in other professions, progress in science should be regarded as a reason for subdividing the artillery, he said:

'That is my idea. As I have already said, an organisation which is good for a small corps of 4,000 or 5,000 men, which was the strength of the artillery in days gone by, is entirely inapplicable to a corps