METALLIC CARTRIDGE OF 1864–65.
Among the many advantages possessed by the breech-loader over the muzzle-loader, the principal ones are greater rapidity of fire, ease of loading in any position, diminished danger of accidents in loading, and the impossibility of putting more than one charge in the piece at the same time. This last advantage is by no means slight. Among 27,000 muzzle-loading muskets picked up on the battlefield of Gettysburg, at least 24,000 were loaded. Of these about half contained two charges, one fourth held from three to ten charges, and one musket contained twenty-three cartridges.
The failure of the Americans to produce during the great war a practical breech-loading field-gun is doubtless due to the fact that the field artillery in use at that time answered fully all the requirements then existing. Owing to the nature of the country in which the armies were operating, the range of the 3-inch rifled gun was fully as great as could have been desired; and on the broken and wooded ground which generally formed our field of battle, the smooth-bore Napoleon gun, firing shrapnel and canister, seemed to have reached almost the acme of destructiveness. Moreover, the muzzle-loading cannon, both rifled and smooth-bore, were served with such celerity as to make it a matter of doubt for some years after whether the introduction of breech-loading field-guns would materially increase the rapidity of fire. It was not until infantry fire had greatly increased in range and rapidity that a further improvement in field artillery became necessary. In siege artillery, heavy rifled guns of the Rodman and the Parrott type appeared. The Parrott gun was of cast iron, strengthened by shrinking a coiled band of wrought iron over the portion of the piece surrounding the charge. The famous “Swamp Angel,” used in the siege of Charleston, was a Parrott gun. The sea-coast artillery consisted mainly of smooth-bores of large calibre, which were able to contend successfully with any armor then afloat. It is a curious fact that the war, so to speak, between guns and armor has been incessantly waged since the introduction of the latter, every advance of armor towards the degree of invulnerability being met with the production of a gun capable of piercing it. The sea-coast artillery of the United States in the Civil War met fully every demand to which it was subjected.
The War of Secession produced the first practical machine-gun,—the Gatling,—though such guns were not used to any extent. The machine-gun has, in fact, passed through a long period of gestation, and it is only in recent years that it can be said to have attained its full birth. Our great war was also noted for the introduction of torpedoes. These peculiar weapons had, it is true, been devised may years before; and Robert Fulton had, in the early part of the century, devoted his inventive genius to the production of a submarine torpedo, which, however, was never practically tested in war. It was not until the contest of 1861–65 that torpedoes were of any practical use. The high explosives of the present day being then unknown, these torpedoes depended for their destructive force upon gunpowder alone. Yet crude and insignificant though they were in comparison with the mighty engines of destruction now known by the same name, they accomplished great results in more than one instance. The destruction of the Housatonic off Charleston, the sinking of the Tecumseh in Mobile Bay, and Cushing’s daring destruction of the Albemarle, gave notice to the world that a new and terrible engine of warfare had made its appearance.
But it was not merely by the production of new weapons that the great American war was characterized. It marked the turning-point in tactics as well. The first efforts of our great armies of raw volunteers were as crude as the warfare of untrained troops always is, and it was fortunate that we were opposed to a foe as unpracticed as ourselves; but as the troops gained experience in war, acquired the necessary military instruction,—in brief, learned their trade and became regulars in all but name,—they displayed not only a steadfast prowess, but a military skill that placed the veteran American soldier at the head of the warriors of the world. The art of constructing hasty intrenchments on the field of battle grew out of the quickness of the American soldier to appreciate the necessity of providing defensive means to neutralize, in some degree, the greatly increased destructive effect of improved arms. In this respect he was thirteen years in advance of the European soldier, for hasty intrenchments did not appear in Europe until the Turco-Russian War. True, intrenchment on the field of battle was as old as war itself; but the American armies were the first that developed a system of quickly covering the entire front of an army with earthworks hastily thrown up in the presence of the enemy, and often actually under fire. Skirmishers were no longer used merely to feel and develop the enemy; but in many of our battles, notably in Sherman’s campaign in Georgia, the engagement was begun, and fought to the end, by strong skirmish lines successively reinforced from the main body, which they gradually absorbed in the course of the action. Here, too, the American soldier was fully six years in advance of the European warrior; for it was not until the Germans had been warned by the terrific losses incurred in their earlier battles with the French, in 1870, that they evolved from their own experience a system of tactics, the essential principles of which had already been demonstrated on the Western Continent.
The increased range of artillery again received a practical illustration; for at the siege of Fort Pulaski the Union batteries first opened fire at ranges varying from 1650 to 3400 yards from the Confederate fort. At the siege of Charleston shells were thrown into the city from a battery nearly five miles distant.
In 1866, the brief but bloody war between Austria and Prussia suddenly raised the latter nation from a comparatively subordinate position to the front rank of military powers. The greatness of Prussia was born in the sackcloth and ashes of national humiliation. Forbidden by Napoleon, after her crushing defeat in 1806–7, to maintain an army of more than 40,000 men, her great war minister, Scharnhorst, conceived the plan of discharging the soldiers from military service as soon as they had received the requisite instruction, and filling their places with recruits. In this way, though the standing army never exceeded the stipulated number, many thousands of Prussians received military training; and when Prussia declared war against Napoleon, after his disastrous Russian campaign, the discharged men were called back into the ranks, and there arose as if by magic a formidable Prussian army of trained soldiers. The principle of universal military service, thus called into existence in Prussia in time of war, had been continued through fifty years of peace, and enabled Prussia, with a population scarcely more than half as numerous as that of Austria, to place upon the decisive field of Königgrätz a larger army than that of her opponent.
The Prussian system, which has since been copied by all the great military nations of Europe, is, in its essential features, as follows: Every able-bodied man in the kingdom, upon reaching the age of twenty years, is available for military service; and each year there are chosen by lot sufficient recruits to maintain the army at its authorized strength. The great body of the male population is thus brought into military service. There are a few exceptions, such as the only sons of indigent parents, and a small number of men who are in excess of the force required. Any man who escapes the draft for three successive years, and all able-bodied men exempted for any cause from service in the regular army, are incorporated in the reserve. The term of service in the regular army is two years for the infantry and three for the artillery and cavalry. After being discharged from the regular army the soldier passes into the reserve, where he serves for four years. While in the reserve, he is called out for two field exercises of eight weeks’ duration each, and the rest of his time is available for his civil vocation. At the end of four years in the reserve he passes into the Landwehr, in which he is required to participate in only two field exercises of two weeks’ duration each. After five years in the Landwehr proper, he passes into the second levy of the Landwehr, where he is free from all military duty in time of peace, though still liable to be called to arms in case of war. From the second levy of the Landwehr he passes, at the age of thirty-nine years, into the Landsturm, where he remains until he reaches his forty-fifth year, when he is finally discharged from military duty. The soldier in the Landsturm is practically free from all military duty, for that body is never called out except in case of dire national emergency. By this system Prussia became not only a military power but “a nation in arms,” in the blaze of whose might the military glory of Austria and of France successively melted away in humiliating defeat.
The careful military preparation of Prussia in time of peace was by no means limited to measures for providing an army strong in numbers. Every year her troops were assembled in large bodies for practice in the manœuvres of the battlefield. This mimicry of war, at first lightly regarded by the military leaders of the other European nations, produced such wonderful effects in promoting the efficiency of the army that it has since been copied in all the armies of Europe, and is now regarded as the most important of all instruction for war.
Though breech-loading rifles were, as we have seen, used in the War of Secession, the Prussian army was the first that ever took the field completely armed with such weapons. The Prussian rifle was not new, for it had been invented by a Thuringian gunsmith, named Dreyse, about the time that the Minié rifle appeared. Dreyse’s arm was known as the “zundnadelgewehr,” or needle-gun, and its effect in the Austro-Prussian war was so decisive and startling as to cause muzzle-loading rifles everywhere to be relegated to the limbo of obsolete weapons. Yet the needle-gun was but a sorry weapon in comparison to those now in use, and was distinctly inferior to the Spencer carbine. Its breech mechanism was clumsy, it used a paper cartridge, it was not accurate beyond a range of three hundred yards, and its effective range was scarcely more than twice that distance. The German infantry fought in three ranks, and its tactics was not equal to that employed by the American infantry in the War of Secession. The Prussian field artillery was the most formidable that had yet appeared, and consisted mainly of steel breech-loading rifled guns, which were classed as 6-pounders and 4-pounders, though the larger piece fired a shell weighing fifteen pounds, and the smaller projectile used a shell weighing nine pounds. In the Austrian army the infantry was armed with a muzzle-loading rifle, and the artillery consisted entirely of muzzle-loading rifled guns.