The fore carriage of the gun and that of the caisson are identical. They carry a chest containing thirty-six cartridges, and are capable of accommodating four men.
The back carriage of the caisson carries two chests like that of the fore carriage.
The total weight of the gun and fore carriage loaded is 3,790 lbs., and that of the caisson 4,330 lbs.
On reading over this description of the French 3" Creusot gun, it seems to me that the kind of axle used with it is first class and should be used in our field carriages for quick-firing guns; it must certainly take the strain of recoil off the centre of the axle, which recoil we found cracked our axles as we used them (once in my own guns) so badly that the whole thing had to be shifted and replaced. Another advantage it has is to lower the whole gun and mounting, and the centre of gravity of the weight of it and carriage, and therefore the gun is much harder to upset on rocky ground or going up steep precipices, as we had to do in Natal. This detail of wheels and axle is, I think, the most important one almost in a field carriage. The axle I mention is one bent down in its centre for about two-thirds of its length.
In regard to the ammunition. The cordite charges in their brass cylinders and zinc-lined boxes did admirably, and the amount of knocking about which the cases and boxes out here stand is marvellous. At one time early in the campaign before Colenso and Ladysmith, a decided variation in shooting of our guns was noticed, and was put down in many cases to the variation of the cordite itself, the brass cases sometimes lying out, in fact, in a powerful sun for hours, while the guns were waiting or in action, and often becoming then too hot to touch. Now, however, I personally don't think that this theory was right but am of opinion that the variation then noticed, and even after in the shooting, was simply due to the varying recoil of guns on different slopes of ground and with indifferent drag-shoes. Royal Artillery officers confirm one in this opinion.
As for the shells, both common and shrapnel, they stood the knocking about well, and I never saw or heard of a single common shell used with 12-pounders not exploding on striking, which speaks well for the base fuse. The shrapnel I am not quite so sure about; one noticed often a great deal of damp collected in the threads of the fuse plug and nose of the shell; owing, I presume, to condensation in their shell boxes under the change of heat and cold. Still they did very well and I think seldom failed to burst when set the right distance. I say the right distance because this at first was a slight puzzle to us, the subject of height in feet above the sea-level of course never having before presented itself to us as altering very considerably the setting of the time fuse; and I don't think that a table of correction for this exists in the Naval Service; at any rate, I have never seen one.
To illustrate this, we found at Spion Kop (about 3,500 feet above the sea-level) that it was necessary to set the time fuse for any given range some 500 yards short to get the shell to burst at all before striking; and on the top of Van Wyk, fronting Botha's Pass (some 6,500 feet above sea-level) I had to allow the fuse 800 to 900 yards short of the range, and similarly at Almond's Nek. This is, I take it, due to the projectile travelling further against a reduced air pressure at any height than it does for the same sighting of the gun at sea-level, for which of course all guns are sighted. I should like to talk to experts regarding this as we are not quite sure about it up here.[6]
Of course this firing from a height gives one therefore some 1,000 yards longer range with shrapnel, say at 6,000 feet up, which is a most important fact to remember in shore fighting, and was well illustrated by the Boer 6" gun at Pougwana Mount (7,000 feet) over Laing's Nek, killing several of our Infantry on Inkwelo (Mount Prospect) at 10,000 yards range; of course this was helped by the height they were up, as well as by their superior double-ringed time fuse which we have picked up on their shrapnel, and which gives them in shrapnel fire a great advantage over any of our guns, which have not got these fuses at present. It is interesting to note that many 4.7 lyddite shells were picked up, or rather dug up, by our own men and others, quite intact—this, of course, was always in soft ground, noticeably near the river (Tugela), and shows that the "direct action fuse" should have been screwed into the nose of the shell, instead of the "delay action fuse" that it had in it for use against thin plates of ships.
Before leaving this subject of the gun and its fittings (12-pounder), I again wish to emphasise the fact of how important is the question of recoil. At one time, in front of Brakfontein with the 8-gun 12-pounder battery, we all dug trail pits and blocked the trails completely up in rear to prevent the guns recoiling at all on the carriage. This most certainly gave a gun thus blocked up over one allowed to recoil on the level an advantage of several hundred yards at an ordinary range of say 6,000 yards; but of course it threw on our weak makeshift wooden trails an undue strain, and after a couple had been smashed had to be given up. Still, although I would never advocate doing this to any field gun (i.e., bringing a gun up short as it shakes the mounting too much) the fact remains that the range or shooting power of the gun may be varied with the recoil in a great degree, and that therefore what I mention about a system to check recoil uniformly and with certainty seems to me to be an important one with our Naval field guns. This fact of increased range, got by blocking up a gun, is useful to remember in many cases, especially in this war when the Boers had the pull of our guns at first, and when it might have been worth while just temporarily disabling one gun, and to get one shot into them and so frighten them off.
The newspaper controversy, very hot at one time, as to whether the Boer guns were better or not than ours, and the ridiculous statements one both read and heard from persons who knew little about the matter, were rather amusing and perhaps a little annoying. I unhesitatingly state that on all occasions the British Naval guns inch for inch outranged and outshot the Boer guns; and that the 4.7 Q.-F. even outranged, by some 2,000 yards, the Boer 6" Creusot. This I saw amply proved, at least to my own satisfaction, at Vaal Krantz, when the Boer 6" gun on about the same level as our 4.7 was, on Signal Hill, vainly tried to reach it and couldn't, whilst our gun was all the time giving them an awful hammering and blew up their magazine.