COMMENDED ESSAY, 1898. 
333 
At what period in the battle the strain may come is uncertain, but 
it is quite certain that batteries may be called upon to sustain a rapid 
fire for a very considerable time, far longer than is possible with their 
present supply. 
Take for example the Prussian Guard Artillery during the attack on 
St. Privat; for more than half an hour the Infantry attempted in vain 
to reach that village, and during the whole of that time, and before the 
actual advance, the greatest possible support was required from the 
guns : Prince Kraft speaks of it as “the continued necessity for a rapid 
fire,” and tells us that on this day the 15 batteries of the guard fired 
between 8000 and 9000 shells, an average of about 100 rounds per gun, 
and practically all they carried. How much of this ammunition was 
expended whilst preparing the Infantry attack on St. Privat is not 
stated, but there can be no doubt that if these batteries had been armed 
with quick firers they would have fired away every round they could 
during that trying half hour, and would then have had only the column 
ammunition for the remainder of the battle. 
It may be argued that if these Prussian batteries had been armed with 
quick firers they would have beaten down all resistance so quickly that 
there would have been no necessity for the long continued rapid fire, 
but it must be remembered that the point from which the Infantry 
started, west of Ste. Marie aux Chenes, was some 3000 yards from 
St. Privat, and during the whole of that advance, until masked, it was 
the duty of the guns to keep down the defenders fire, which would 
certainly have reasserted itself had the guns slackened ; and, as the 
Infantry could not, under the most favourable circumstances, have 
hoped to reach their goal under half an hour, the gunners, no matter 
what they were, must have been in action and maintaining for the whole 
of that time a more or less rapid fire. 
From the above it is clear that with quick firers a much larger supply 
of ammunition must be carried either with the battery, or with the 
column or with both, and that if the supply with the battery is not 
increased the divisional ammunition columns must be so placed on the 
line of march as to be able to supply the batteries at a far earlier period 
in the fight than they can at present. 
Now whichever of these necessary changes be adopted, it must be a 
decided disadvantage. An inciease of battery ammunition means extra 
wagons, extra horses and extra men, brought together at the last moment 
(for it is very unlikely that they would form part of the peace establish¬ 
ment) requiring extra supplies of food and assisting to block the roads. 
It may be suggested that a solution for this difficulty would be 
to decrease the number of guns in a battery to four, replacing the two 
guns by two wagons, and thus giving an extra wagon to each gun with¬ 
out increasing the number of vehicles in the battery ; and an argument 
in favour of this would be that the battery of four Q.F. guns would 
probably be at least as powerful as a battery of six field guns, and that 
to effectively fight a battery of six quick firers might be more than one 
Commanding Officer could do ; but past experience has shown that six 
guns is the best number for a battery, and until further experience 
shows that, under the altered circumstances, it is too many, it would be 
a great mistake to reduce the number, especially as the object to 
be gained is, not to make the new batteries as powerful as the old, but, 
as powerful as possible. 
These same objections, in a lesser degree, hold good with regard to 
increasing the ammunition column. 33 
