36 



NATURE 



[May 12, 1887 



inclination of the slopes affords the farther protection 

 derived from the shot glancing off them. 



But even the partial recognition of the principle of 

 concealment, the principle of opposing a bank of earth 

 rather than walls of masonry or iron to the tremendous 

 missiles of the present day, flickered and died out ; and the 

 War Office, returning to its evil ways, has, within the last 

 few years, erected at enormous cost batteries made as con- 

 spicuous as possible, often more than one story high, and 

 has sought to keep out the fire, which these arrangements 

 are calculated to draw, by clothing the batteries with more 

 iron armour, or protecting the embrasures with stronger 

 iron shields ; while to make the work of the enemy more 

 easy, and our defence more difficult, the guns have been 

 massed together in the orthodox style, so that but a portion 

 of them are ever likely to come into action, while the men 

 in the whole battery will be " demoralised " — this, we 

 believe, is the technical expression — by a shell bursting 

 in any one of the convenient funnel-shaped openings 

 considerately presented for their reception. 



The smoke, likewise, of so many guns is certain to 

 prove most prejudicial to good shooting, and within the 

 forts themselves are generally placed the barracks, which 

 must necessarily soon be reduced to ruin, either by direct 

 or by curved fire, and thus increase the confusion and loss 

 of life in action. No human being, it seems to us, can with 

 impunity stand the constant strain of such conditions on 

 the nervous system. When off work, the garrison of a 

 fort should be safe, their lodging should be secure, their 

 meals should be eaten in peace and security, and the sick 

 and wounded should not be harassed by noise and turmoil. 

 For these reasons the barracks should be at a distance 

 from the battery, and should be hid away out of the 

 enemy's sight, and connected with the battery by covered 

 or screened ways. 



In elevated positions, such as are occupied by some of 

 the forts in the Isle of Wight, the natural features of the 

 ground should have been taken advantage of, so as to 

 render them invisible, the guns mounted in open barbette 

 should be painted such a colour as to render them incon- 

 spicuous, instead of the uniform black now adopted, and 

 Nature should be allowed to obliterate as much as possible, 

 by the growth of brushwood and grass, the changes which 

 the Engineers may have been compelled to make in the 

 contour of the country. The Inspecting-General and the 

 public generally, would, no doubt, not be able to gaze with 

 delight on the trim slopes, the regular lines, and the 

 frowning cannon, but ample compensation for this will be 

 found in the circumstance that, in time of need, the enemy 

 would be equally at fault. 



Again, in coast defences near to the water, the guns, 

 instead of being concentrated, should be dispersed, each 

 gun should have a wide lateral range, the guns should 

 retire out of sight and of exposure, except for the few 

 moments required to lay and fire them. The emplace- 

 ments should be connected with each other and with the 

 barracks by screened roads, and bomb-proof rooms 

 should be provided for the use of the men on duty when 

 not required to work the guns. The screened roads, 

 having parapets towards the sea, and towards the land 

 also if necessary, would serve the triple purpose of 

 intrenchments, interior lines of communication, and em- 

 placements for light artillery to repel landings. 



It may be urged that such work would prove costly on 

 account of the large area of land required, but that would 

 not be the case. The strips of land for roads or military 

 tramways, and the small plots for emplacements, would 

 be as cheaply obtained as for a railway, and by virtue of 

 similar powers ; in most places the cost of land would not 

 be greater than that of armoured structures, the slopes 

 and glacis would be just as available after as before for 

 cultivation, and need not even be purchased, while, if 

 definite plans could at once be adopted for our extensive 

 coasts, a most useful class of work would be available in 



bad times, such as now press upon us, for the unemployed, 

 and the relief would be widely felt because works are 

 needed all over the kingdom. 



The recent experiments at Portland have proved beyond 

 all question that it is next to impossible for a ship at even 

 so small a range as 800 yards, to hit a gun appearing out 

 of a pit for three minutes, when the pit is so arranged, as 

 it is the essential feature of the Moncrieff system that it 

 should be, that its position cannot be detected from the 

 sea. But three minutes is at least six times as long an 

 exposure as is necessary ; indeed, the art of determining 

 the exact position of ships approaching coast batteries 

 has been brought to such perfection that the officer in 

 command of each gun would receive from the observing 

 station messages as to the exact position of the enemy, 

 the training and elevation to be given to the gun, the 

 proper moment for raising it into action, and even, by 

 means of electric fuses, the guns may be fii"ed by the 

 observing officer without risk to a single man, and with 

 an exposure of the guns of less duration than the time 

 required for the flight of a projectile at long range. 

 Contrast such arrangements as these with the open 

 barbette battery at Inchkeith, constructed as if on purpose 

 to offer a conspicuous target, and which recent experi- 

 ments have proved to be correspondingly vulnerable ; or 

 with the quite recently constructed turret, mounting a 10- 

 inch gun at Eastbourne, where the projectile of a machine- 

 gun disabled the 27-ton cannon, and one shot from a 

 6-inch breech-loader knocked off several feet of its barrel. 



A careful study of the numerous papers on coast 

 defence read before the United Service Institution, and 

 the discussions, in which many eminent officers of all 

 branches of the service took part, convinces us of the 

 correctness of the views we are maintaining, and the 

 need which exists for laying down organised plans of 

 defence not only for places already protected, but for our 

 long, and in many cases easily accessible, coast-lines. 

 The smoke, which all the speakers agreed in recognising 

 as a great evil in concentrated batteries, would scarcely be 

 any impediment when the guns are scattered, partly 

 because, under most circumstances, the smoke would 

 blow away from each emplacement without obscuring its 

 own gun, or the others, and partly because the observing 

 officer would be above the smoke, and could always make 

 out the enemy. 



The smoke itself offers a very feeble indication of the 

 precise locahty of the gun which produced it, partly 

 because it is projected a good way from the emplacement 

 at once, partly because the wind in most cases will blow 

 it away to one side or the other. This was fully proved 

 at Portland, when the puffs of smoke sent up as the gun 

 disappeared proved of no assistance to the attack. 



But it may be urged, by those unacquainted with the 

 subject, that so formidable a work as raising a heavy gun 

 into the firing position, and checking its recoil and its fall 

 at the same time, would involve cumbersome machinery 

 and the employment of steam or other power. The answer 

 is, that the energy of the discharge itself has been utilised 

 to do all that is required. 



The public has been much interested of late in the 

 beautiful mechanism by means of which Mr. Maxim has 

 utilised the energy of recoil, not only to run out the barrel 

 of his gun at every shot, but also to perform all the opera- 

 tions of loading and firing automatically, and that at a 

 rate which almost baffles the imagination. Six hundred 

 shots per minute can be fired without any external power 

 being used. The energy imparted to the shot must have 

 its counterpart in the movement of the gun and carriage 

 in the opposite direction ; and Colonel Moncrieff, twenty 

 years ago, showed how, by suitable mechanical arrange- 

 ments, guns of all sizes could be made to recoil under 

 cover and be raised again into the firing position without 

 the application of external force. There are two systems 

 by which this is accomplished, by means of counter- 



