113 
SOME FURTHER REMARKS ON 
HORSE ARTILLERY GUNS AT WATERLOO, 
IN ANSWER TO MAJOR MURDOCH, RA. 
CONTRIBUTED BY 
COLONEL F. A. WHINYATES, late R.H.A. 
In discussing in the December Number of the R.A.I. “ Proceedings” 
the point as to the number of light 6-pr. guns that were used at Water¬ 
loo/Major Murdoch considers the authority upon which I based the 
statement that there were twenty guns of that calibre in the field on the 
18th June, 1815, unreliable. It is proposed to answer his objections 
seriatim. 
Major Murdoch does not seem to have taken much notice of the 
paragraph in Sir John May’s letter which accompanied the return, 
and to which attention was drawn by note No. 1 in my former paper, 
and consequently he is hardly in a position to judge whether the docu¬ 
ment is trustworthy or otherwise. Let us again look at the portion of 
the letter referred to :—“I enclose a return of the troops and brigades 
employed in the battle of Waterloo. Also a memo, from which with 
the return, I conceive you may make out something fit to meet the 
public eye, and I beg you will do so.” If the return in question did 
not give the particulars concerning the artillery at the time of the 
battles of Quatre Bras and Waterloo, as Major Murdoch contends, but 
had reference to some previous period, one is at a loss to understand 
what could have been the object of sending it to enable an account of the 
artillery and its doing on those occasions to be drawn up for publica- 
cation. That the form was carefully examined by Sir John May is 
evident, for in the body of it, he has made a correction in his own 
handwriting. Major Murdoch remarks that the return is not in Sir 
John’s letter book. It was not likely to be put there, being a docu¬ 
ment sent privately to a brother officer for a special purpose in no way 
official. 
While fully admitting that numerous changes took place in the 
equipment of the artillery in Belgium in 1815, it seems extremely un¬ 
likely that a staff officer of the ability and experience of Sir John May, 
who had served as Brigade-Major and Assistant-Adjutant-General to 
the Royal Artillery in the Peninsula from 1809 to 1814, should not 
have been acquainted with the changes of armament, etc., made in the 
troops and brigades of the artillery force under his charge, and that 
3. VOL. XXI. 
