The final aim of the artillery instruction in the third cœtus must be a higher degree of preparation for the future practical ability of the students. As regards the material portion of the artillery, the students are to acquire a general knowledge of the construction, fabrication, and proving of the matériel, and for the tactical part, it is above all things to be made an object that they be made capable, by the instruction given them, of greater dexterity and confidence in dealing with special cases in the field or in siege operations.
The instruction commences with:—
1. Organization of the artillery service. The general relations of the artillery service are to be explained according to its different purposes, as an arm both in technical and administrative respects, then the principles for the organization of the service and of its separate portions in peace and war are to be developed, and comparison made with those carried out in the principal foreign artilleries.
At the same time, on the one hand, more details are to be gone into on the different branches of the artillery service (field, siege, fortress, and coast artillery, the technical and the administrative branches,) than was done in the second cœtus; and on the other, those considerations must be kept sight of in which the artillery appears as a portion of a greater whole, as in its relation to the Army and to the State.
2. Artillery, regarded as an arm. Since the elementary rules for the use of artillery in war have been given already in the second cœtus it will be the object in the third cœtus, first, to develop the principles of artillery tactics in the field, and in sieges, from an extended point of view, and then to apply the rules for the movements, placing in position and fighting of the artillery to the bodies now actually used in war, and to examine the great questions that may hence arise. For the field artillery, the tactics of single batteries and of masses of artillery and the collective relations of the artillery of a corps d’armée and of an army, must be shown. For sieges there will be less occasion to treat of the separate means of defense by artillery than of the various combinations under different circumstances, of its diversified applications.
To give this instruction its most practical tendency, historical examples of battles are to be taken, and not merely their results adduced, but the circumstances gone through in detail. These are to be compared with the rules previously given, and the causes and effects of any discrepancies, as far as practicable, and with caution, explained.
Themes are then given out of campaigns and sieges, in working which the students are to show applications of tactical rules under given circumstances.
As regards the preparation for the field and the conduct in marches, quarters, camps, or bivouacs, what was necessary has already been taught in the second cœtus, as far as concerns a corps of artillery as large as a battery. In the third cœtus, therefore, only more extensive and important relations have to be explained.
Finally, as the students at the close of the third cœtus are to enter immediately into active service in the regiments, it will be useful to give them a general view of artillery duties in time of peace, of which no mention was made in the first and second cœtus, and to show the principles on which they rest. Further, the education of the men, the selection, management, and care of the artillery horses, instruction in riding and driving, the various exercises in serving and moving the guns, artillery practice, the different fatigue duties, conduct in manœuvres, detachments, &c., are to be particularly explained.