324 role of Horse artillery. 
of the attach is to give up many of the peculiar advantages of the 
initiative. The commander is more or less tied down to a certain line of 
action ; the position and strength of the assailants’ artillery, as well as 
the ground over which he must advance to the decisive stage of the 
attack, is made apparent to the enemy, and the power of so placing his 
guns with regard to the position of the enemy, as to bring a flanking or 
converging fire to bear upon the chief points of attack, is either left to 
chance or absolutely thrown away. It is evident that the necessity for 
a scientific handling of the artillery increases in the inverse ratio to the 
size of the army, and this is a fact which we in this country would do 
well to remember. Where very large armies are engaged, the difficulty 
of manoeuvring the artillery will, no doubt, be enormously increased on 
account of the impossibility of finding space for the bringing into 
action of large masses of guns. 
The second point of importance in connection with the employment of 
the corps artillery is—How far is it possible to separate the action of 
the horse artillery from that of the field batteries ? That it is desirable 
to separate them can hardly admit of a doubt, both because when they 
are kept together, the special advantages of one or the other must be in 
some degree sacrificed, and also because, when batteries of different 
calibres are intermixed, the supply of reserve ammunition, a matter of 
the greatest importance at the present day, becomes exceedingly com¬ 
plicated. Yet in the great battles of the Franco-German War, the 
artillery masses of the Germans were formed of batteries of different 
calibres, mixed indiscriminately, without regard to their special features. 
In some measure this may be accounted for by the peculiar and 
exceptional nature of the artillery fights in the chief battles; but it 
may be fairly questioned whether it will not be possible in the future 
to improve upon the German artillery tactics of 1870. It seems 
probable, however, that when large artillery masses are employed, the 
intermixture of batteries of different calibres will be always to a certain 
extent unavoidable, and this will be the case more especially when the 
ground will only allow of the action of a limited number of guns. 
In order to minimise the inconvenience resulting from the mixing of 
batteries of different calibres, it will be necessary to insist on the 
artillery divisions being kept together, except when this is absolutely 
impossible. The neglect of this rule must inevitably result in a great 
loss of manoeuvring power, and probably also of unity of action; the 
links connecting each battery to its corps or division commander 
will be snapped, and the services of the staff of the artillery division 
will be lost to some, if not to all, of the batteries of the division at the 
moment when they are most needed. A further advance or a retire¬ 
ment under these circumstances would hardly be carried out without 
great confusion. 
But there are occasions when the action of horse artillery will be 
sufficiently distinct. Owing to the great sacrifice of life which must 
attend any attempt to pierce the centre of a position defended by 
breech-loading rifles, it seems probable that an army on the offensive 
will almost always attack one or both flanks of an enemy. In the 
