OKEHAMPTON EXPERIENCES,, 1893 . 
81 
and it was most desirable with such a fire that no part of the village should be 
left as a refuge. The same remark applies to what he has said about the stories 
of a house or distribution in depth in a wood where the lisiere has already been 
made untenable. 
I think I may, perhaps, have left a false impression, which I am anxious to 
correct, by the use I made of the phrase about 100 guns. I was enforcing this 
particular point, that though the best way in which we can silence guns is not 
that of directing our fire to the destruction of materiel, but to that of disabling 
gunners, yet that our success against artillery can only be measured by the num¬ 
ber of guns silenced and not by the number of gunners hit. If by hitting 40 
men I silence a battery I produce an incomparably greater effect than you do if 
you kill 50 or more men at the rate of one man per gun. You then do not 
silence one gun. It must depend on a variety of circumstances how many 
batteries you employ in silencing one battery in the first instance. All I say is 
you cannot do it too quickly and suddenly if you want to produce moral effect. 
There is one of the experiences of Okehampton that I should have liked Major 
Hughes to have enforced rather more emphatically than he has done, although it 
comes out most admirably in these tables. I maintain that these tables alone, if 
nothing else (and I think the whole experience of war bears it out x ) show de¬ 
cisively that the worst target that artillery can ever be employed against is artillery. 
Just look at the numbers as they run down here. The “ percentage of artillery 
targets destroyed 95 begins at 2‘41, the last average so far as artillery is concerned 
is 2 ; but the moment you get the most difficult of all forms of infantry, the 
kneeling dummies in line, you run up at once to 3‘32 and 4*46, and directly you 
get to standing dummies in line you run up to 5‘12 and 3‘76. When you begin 
to get to columns of fours you get to 8 and 7 and 12 per cent. Compare that 
with the little more than 2 of the artillery, and yet the artillery target fairly and 
truly represents the actual artillery target that you have to fire at as nearly as 
possible ; for dummies between guns are not less exposed than men in war. On 
the other hand, as for these infantry targets, I should like anybody to go and 
look at the sort of targets you get at the infantry and cavalry manoeuvres at 
Aldershot and judge for a moment whether the 50 dummies forming a target 3000 
yards off at Okehampton represents in any way the kind of infantry targets that 
artillery would get in actual warfare. I say that those figures of the tables, 
though absolutely decisive in themselves, do not represent a fourth of the fact. 
I am sure that anybody who has looked at the masses of red men as they appear 
on any field-day and thinks what sort of target they represent will agree with me 
that those Okehampton infantry dummies are so -very much more difficult a target 
than the real one that these comparative losses in no sense represent the difference 
in the effect we can produce respectively on artillery and infantry. Therefore, I 
say that when we can get it the best target for us is infantry, and as long as I 
have a good infantry target I should always like the enemy’s artillery to fire at 
me, because I should know then that they were not preparing the way for tlieii 
own infantry, which is the one decisive work for artillery. Therefore, it is on 
those grounds that I am most anxious to insist that this assumption of the 
necessity of firing at everyone of the enemy’s guns lest they should have a 
chance of firing untouched at you, means that you will not be able to use your 
arm for the thing that we all care about, namely, the winning of the victories of 
the country. 
As regards one further point it is very important that it should be settled one 
way or the other. Major Hughes speaks here of all of us who were at Oke¬ 
hampton being all agreed as to the dispersion of batteries with regard to battery 
1 e.g., as a result of the Duke of Wellington’s long experience our artillery at Waterloo was 
forbidden to fire at the enemy’s artillery at all . 
11 
