The British Army from Within

by Evelyn Charles Vivian

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.