Q.p. GUNS FOE FIELD AETILLEEY. 
447 
certain job ; and necessitates an alteration of fuzes, which after years 
of struggling you can never manage always to do quite right. Give 
up the fuze question, cease to think that the number of balls in the 
shrapnel is a vital matter, and you will sweep every difficulty out 
of the way of Field Artillery. It will be found that batteries throwing 
heavy shells will be found necessary to supplement the high velocity 
rapid hitting guns I have indicated. We shall still have to use some 
sort of high angle, common shell, because there is no doubt that a 
high velocity rapid firing gun would not search out hollows or destroy 
earth works effectively. 
There has been much talk about spades on the trail. Any attempt 
to stop the recoil by the trail alone is faulty from the first. Do away 
with the spade in the trail and you can get the good traversing powers 
which you need for the field. There is one other thing which I do 
not think any of the essays mention and that is that you can always 
seat the numbers on a Q.F. gun and so gain weight to stop the recoil 
a great deal. With equipment such as I seem to see in my mind it 
would not require more than half the number of guns you now have 
in the field to produce a greater effect in a very much shorter time. 
The difficulty of ammunition supply will be much the same as at 
present because in reasonably skilful hands no greater weight of am¬ 
munition is used for a given task than is required for the same job 
when working by slow methods. There is however another point 
which has to be considered. Only the other day I fired some thousands 
of rounds rapidly out of a Maxim, and the difficulty then is the heat¬ 
ing of the gun. I believe it may be got over. The new artillery will, 
at first at any rate, have to use lighter projectiles than the present 
12 or 15-pr. high explosive shell with a tolerably thick wall, breaking 
by lines of least resistance into fairly large pieces with a head of a 
shape to cause ricochet. 
This will revolutionize many of our existing arrangements for Field 
Artillery work. There is no reason why the gun itself should not be 
somewhat on the lines of the Maxim. The existing Maxim, deadly as 
it is, will not do at all owing to the difficulty of seeing effect especially 
at night, but where I should like to see an experiment is in the line 
of gradually enlarging the Maxim until a perfect view of the effect is 
seen up to 5,000. 
Lieutenant C. Holmes Wilson, R.A.:—In view of the large amount 
of information which the essays already contain, it would perhaps be 
well if we could limit the discussion of their contents to the more im¬ 
portant points to be considered by avoiding the repetition of un¬ 
necessary detail and alluding solely to the principal features of the 
problem. It has been generally acknowledged that the adoption of 
quick firing guns has become, not a question of choice, but a matter 
of absolute necessity. On the Continent a large proportion of the 
field artillery have already been re-armed, France has been forced to 
follow the lead of Germany and now we must certainly appear bound 
to follow the example of both. Yet whilst abundant proofs of the 
policy of our neighbours have been constantly forthcoming, the indi¬ 
cations of our own activity have been limited to a few unimportant 
