“Bravery will never do without knowledge and skill, it seems.”
“Not, at least, in a case where the attacking party is so strong as that at the siege of Acre. An engineer should be well acquainted with mining, or the art of blowing up rocks and fortifications with gunpowder, and this he cannot be unless he can ascertain with correctness the heights, depths, breadth, and resistance of the materials he has to displace.”
“What a many things are necessary to be known by soldiers and sailors!”
“Sappers are men who work at the trenches, or ditches. If a brigade of eight men are employed at any point of the works, you will see half of them working away at the sap, or trench, while the others are busily occupied in supplying gabions, fascines, and such other things as may be wanted.”
“Why, there is no place safe in time of war, for what with the cannon and riflemen above ground, and the miners and sappers below, you are always in danger.”
“A soldier’s life is a life of danger, and every one should do his duty; but, for all that, no sapper should undermine the reputation of his comrades, and no rifleman should aim at a lower mark than honour. Gunnery is the art of determining the motions of bodies, whether they are projected from cannon, mortars, or howitzers. Without a knowledge of gunnery an attack or a defence would be very feeble. The power of well-charged and well-directed cannon is very great. A good gunner never sends a ball on an useless errand.
“In the battle between Lord Hawke and the French, the gallant admiral, finding so much to depend on the capture of the French admiral’s ship, the Soleil Royale, desired to be laid alongside her; but the pilot hesitatingly replied, that he feared to do so, from the rocky shoals of the coast off which the battle raged. Hawke, however, was not to be dissuaded, and bore down upon her, with every gun double-shotted. The captain of a French seventy-four gun ship, the Surveillante, aware of Hawke’s design, gallantly threw his ship between Hawke and the French admiral, in time to receive Lord Hawke’s fire, which saved the French admiral, but sent the Surveillante and every soul on board to the bottom.”
“Then, the Surveillante was sent down with a single broadside?”
“She was. And a well-managed and effective battery will make a breach in the strongest wall that ever was built, in a very short time. War is a dreadful weapon, and it ought never to be wielded in a bad cause.”
“What thousands and thousands of Englishmen must have been killed by gunpowder!”