THE ROYAL ARTILLERY INSTITUTION. 
215 
many necessary improvements were suggested and reported to the depart¬ 
ment at home; but their adoption having been refused, the artillery took the 
field in 1794, little otherwise benefited by the preceding campaign than by 
the knowledge of its own defects.Although the remedies 
to these defects were simple and obvious, yet we find, even in the home 
encampment near Swinley, in the year 3 800, the system was not abandoned. 
.By this time, the superior efficiency of the horse artillery, 
from having its officers, men, and horses regularly appointed, and constantly 
fixed to the same guns, became apparent; and the reflective part of the 
corps could not but hope that a system so obvious to reason and so demon¬ 
strably proved by practice, would be generally adopted in the field 
artillery.Yet nothing was done, and no brigades or 
organised bodies of field artillery were formed.'” 1 The contract drivers 
and horses attached to the guns were partly English, partly Dutch. 2 Add 
that the battalion gun system was in full force, and the picture is complete. 
As might be expected, numbers of guns were lost during these unfortunate 
campaigns, 3 in spite of prodigies of valour performed by the artillery officers 
and gunners. But such mishaps were then thought lightly of, and the loss 
of a quantity of ordnance at the battle of Mouveaux, 1794, was communi¬ 
cated to the army in the following words:—• 
“ Head-Quarters, 
Tournay, 19th May, 1794. 
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ffe' 
“In fact, the enemy has little to boast of, but the acquisition of some 
pieces of British artillery.” 4 
Some pieces of British artillery ! This order has only been surpassed by 
that of another commander who, nineteen years afterwards, lost his guns at 
Tarragona. “ They were of small value : old iron ! He attached little im¬ 
portance to the sacrifice of artillery; it was his principle.” “ Strange indeed !” 
says Napier. “ Great commanders have risked their own lives, and sacrificed 
their bravest men, charging desperately in person to retrieve even a single 
piece of cannon.Sir John Murray's argument would have 
been more pungent, more complete, if he had lost his colours, and pleaded 
that they were only wooden staves bearing old pieces of silk.” 5 
In 1798, as Qr.-Mr. Tate relates, the Commandant of Woolwich inspected 
some guns manned by gunners of the 8th Battalion, B,A. The guns were 
each drawn by three horses in single file, which were driven by contract 
1 “ Remarks, &d.,” by Sir Augustus Frazer, K.C.B., R.H.A. p. 50, et seq. 
2 I have unfortunately lost my notes on this point, and am obliged to quote from memory an 
article in an old number of “ Colburn’s United Service Magazine,” entitled (I think) “ Woolwich, 
Fifty Years Ago.” 
3 I was at some pains, ih 1866, to calculate the number of guns we lost during these campaigns, 
from MS. documents in the French War Office, to which I gained access through the kindness of 
Col. Cleremont, the English Military Attache, and Marshal Niel, the French Minister of War. My 
labour was in vain, however, as the French generals only reported the total number of guns taken 
in each action from the allies, without specifying the number belonging to the Dutch, Hanoverians, 
Germans, and English respectively. 
4 General orders byH.R.H. the Duke of York, quoted in the a British Military Librai*y,” Vol. II: 
5 Napier’s “ Peninsular War,” Vol; V. p; 159; 
