Q.F. GUNS FOR FIELD ARTILLERY. 
459 
I have already spoken of the fact that the Maxims in the recon- 
naisancc to which Lord Charles Beresford alluded were not by any 
means the only quick firing guns that appeared in Egypt, but I wish 
we could have had more particulars about the two batteries at the 
Atbara. There have been several men in England who were at the 
battle of Atbara, and I was very much in hopes that we might have 
had some of them here this afternoon, but I do not think there is 
anybody here who can give us details of the action of the quick firing 
guns then. Similarly, I was hoping we might have caught somebody 
who had seen something of the American and Spanish business; but 
I am afraid nobody has come back from there who can help us about 
that. 
The question of the recoil and the number of the detachment seemed 
to me not to have been adequately dealt with in the essays. Most of 
them assumed that it was impossible for field-guns, to get rid of recoil 
but practically, as Lieut. Dawson has shown, that has been done. I 
could not make out that any of the essayists adequately recognised 
the importance that it would be to us, apart from quickness, to have the 
recoil diminished, in reducing the labour at the gun and therefore the 
number of men exposed at the gun. In some of those experiments by 
Messrs. Vickers which were seen by a large number of officers the 
other day, under Lieutenant Dawson’s guidance, only two men were 
required for the working of the gun. Now if we can reduce the 
numbers at the gun to two men that of itself will be an immense gain. 
In the first place because our great difficulty is to get a sufficient num¬ 
ber of men for the artillery ; secondly, because it will diminish the ex¬ 
posure of the gunners at the gun very much and thirdly, because we 
must have a large number of men behind and that would give us a 
continually fresh supply of men at the front which would keep up our 
power of firing to a much later date. 
In passing back to the earlier part of the discussion I am rather in¬ 
clined to fortify myself with the words of Lord Charles Beresford, of 
Sir George Clarke, and I may add also of Colonel Hale in saying that 
any discussion as to whether we are or are not to have a quick firing 
gun is quite a thing of the past. We must have it. That is the sense 
I think uf the meeting generally, that we may discuss the method in 
which we shall use quick firing guns, but we cannot discuss whether 
we are to have them or not. Therefore I think those experiments 
which Lieutenant Wilson has been carrying out for us of the rapidity 
with which fuzes can be set by a little different arrangement and still 
more the suggestions which Sir George Clarke has thrown out of im¬ 
provements in mechanism by which fuzes can be very rapidly set be¬ 
come of vital importance to us. There is one thing that becomes a 
necessity from the moment that we adopt quick-firers, that is a vast 
improvement in the whole arrangement of the supply, from the park 
right up to the front, of ammunition. I am inclined to believe that 
in the course of battle you will not expend many more rounds with 
the quick firing gun than with the present one because the rapidity of 
decision will be so much greater that you will merely in a given part 
of the battle expend rounds more rapidly ; but still it will become ab- 
