DISCUSSION ON ARTILLERY. 
79 
the power of these shells. Nearly opposite us on the river there was a 
small fort containing four guns. While the gun-boats were running 
up close to this fort there were two shells fired at us, which sang not far 
over our heads, and one of which was subsequently picked up. We 
turned our fire from the tomb on to the fort and put one or two shell into 
it. It is not easy, I take it, to drive a gunner of any nation from his 
gun, and the Dervish is not inferior in courage to any race on 
earth. That fort never fired another shot. I went into it after¬ 
wards and there were traces of only about two men having been 
killed there and one of our blind shell was lying in the middle of it. 
Therefore, the Dervish gunners were driven from their guns by the 
moral effect of one or two shell. 
The effect of the noise of continuous firing upon the numbers of the 
gun was very marked. One of my Nos. 2 was completely deafened by 
it and several times fired late during the salvos and we failed to get a 
good salvo owing to his not being able to hear the word of command. 
I think if the signal of the No. 1 to fire the gun were re-instated it 
might do away with that objection. The Germans, I believe, tell 
their men to put their fingers into their ears. 
As regards the direction of the fire in firing at the Mahdi’s tomb, it 
was a long range and it was very difficult to get shots on the 
target; they went right and left and the trails dug deep holes in the 
ground and often swerved off to right or left, and sometimes the trail 
would have been just poised on the edge of a hole so that it was 
necessary to change the position of the gun in order to obviate the 
difficulty. I believe a suggestion was made some time ago to 
broaden out the trail to obviate that. In the very heavy muddy ground 
the disadvantages of the want of some such arrangement were very 
noticeable. 
The Chairman :—Now gentlemen as nobody else seems to wish to 
say anything about the howitzers, I will end the discussion about 
them by saying a few words myself. I think it must have been very 
interesting to us all; I know it has been to me, and I have learnt a 
good deal. 
First of all I would say about these 5-inch howitzers, as regards 
their role , that we had an experiment at Okehampton last year or the 
year before, when we had comparative fire between a field battery 
with shrapnel and the 5-in. howitzer with shrapnel firing at different 
kinds of targets, stationary targets and moving targets. The 
Ordnance Committee were present, and the result of that trial was that 
from our point of view it was established that, weight for weight of 
shrapnel carried, the 15-pr. field battery would do more with shrapnel 
than the 5-in. howitzer battery. There was also a trial for mobility, 
and it was perfectly clear that the howitzer battery, which does not 
mount its gunners and cannot go out of a walk, is not so mobile as 
the 15-pr. field battery. And the Ordnance Committee expressed 
the opinion that the role of the howitzer battery was to search out with 
high explosive shells men behind cover which could not be searched 
by shrapnel.—To that conclusion we were led by those experiments, 
