Through all the subsequent changes of armament up to the Crimean War, from solid shot to shell-fire, the truck carriage maintained its place of favour. In 1811 Colonel (afterwards Sir William) Congreve had published a treatise demonstrating the defects of the truck carriage and proposing in its place a far more scientific and ingenious form of mounting. It lacked, however, some of the characteristics which, as we have seen, gave value to the old truck carriage. Except where special conditions gave additional value to its rival, the truck carriage kept its place. In 1820 an iron carriage was tried officially, for 24-pounders, but gave unsatisfactory results. In 1829 the Marshall carriage was tried, offering important advantages over the standard pattern. Its main feature was a narrow fore-carriage separate from the recoiling rear portion, this fore-carriage being pivoted to a socket in the centre of the gun-port. But still the truck carriage survived the very favourable reports given on its latest rival.
As concentration of fire became developed new fittings such as directing bars, breast chocks and training racers made their appearance and were embodied in its design. As the power of guns and the energy requiring to be absorbed on recoil increased, the rear trucks disappeared and gave place, in the two-truck Marsilly carriage, to flat chocks which by the friction of their broad surfaces against the deck helped more than trucks to deaden the motion of the carriage. The quoin, perfected by the addition of a graduated scale marked to show the elevation corresponding to each of its positions, gave place at length to various mechanical forms of elevating gear. The elm body was replaced by iron plates bolted and riveted together. And then at length, with the continuous growth of gun-energy, the forces of recoil became so great that the ordinary carriage constrained by rope breechings could no longer cope with them. The friction of wood rear-chocks against the deck was replaced by the friction of vertical iron plates, attached to the carriage, against similar plates attached to a slide interposed between carriage and deck, and automatically compressed: the invention, it is said, of Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy. The truck carriage, as it had been known for centuries, had at last been left behind in the evolution of naval artillery.
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With the advent of modern gun mountings the old anomaly of the divided responsibility of War Office and Admiralty became unbearable; the necessity for a close adaptation of each gun to its ship-position, for careful co-ordination of the work of artillerist, engineer and shipbuilder, produced a crisis which had important effects on future naval administration. A single paragraph will suffice to show the position as it presented itself in the early ’sixties. “There were a thousand points of possible collision,” wrote the biographer of Captain Cooper Key, the captain of the Excellent, “as it became more and more certain that gun carriages, instead of being loose movable structures capable of being used in any port, were henceforth to be fixed in the particular port which was adapted for them, with special pivoting bolts and deck racers—all part of the ship’s structure. Where the War Office work began and the Controller’s ended in these cases, no one knew, but the captain of the Excellent came in as one interfering between a married pair, and was misunderstood and condemned on both sides.”
In 1866 the solution was found. Captain Cooper Key was appointed to the Admiralty as Director-General of Naval Ordnance.
CHAPTER VII
THE SHELL GUN
The chief function of land artillery in its earlier days was the destruction of material. The huge engines of the ancients were of value in effecting from a safe distance what the tortoise and the battering-ram could only do at close quarters: the breaching of walls and the battering-in of gates, doors and bulwarks. After the invention of gunpowder the use of artillery remained, we have seen, substantially the same. Apart from the moral effect on horse and man of the “monstrous roare of noise” when in defence, the offensive object of ordnance was almost entirely the breaching of the enemy’s works. The guns were literally “pieces of battery,” doing their slow work by the momentum of their large projectiles.
Thus considered, artillery was not a very effective instrument. And, just as in earlier times it had been sought to supplement mere impact by other effects—by the throwing into besieged fortresses of quicklime, for instance, “dead horses and other carrion,”—so, after the arrival of gunpowder, endeavour was made to substitute incendiarism or explosion for the relatively ineffective method of impact. The use of grenades, hand-thrown, was discovered. And then followed, as a matter of course, their adaptation to the mortars already in use for the projection of stones and other solid material. These mortars, as in the case of the early cannon, were at first made of an inconveniently large size; and, also as in the case of cannon, they came later to be cast of more moderate proportions to facilitate their transport and thus render them more serviceable for operations in the field. Artillery was now devoting its attention to the personnel. The result of this evolution was the howitzer, a weapon whose value to land armies was greatly enhanced by the discovery, by Marshal Vauban at the end of the seventeenth century, of the efficacy of the ricochet. Under this system the fuzed bomb or grenade, instead of being projected from a mortar set at a high elevation, to describe a lofty and almost parabolic trajectory, was discharged from a howitzer at a sufficiently low elevation to cause it to strike the ground some distance short of its objective, whence it proceeded, leaping and finally rolling along the ground till it came to its target, where it exploded.
