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.
