386 
RUSSIAN ARTILLERY TACTICS. 
Lessons of 
the war. 
shrapnel fire such as threatened the utter annihilation of the defenders. 
The hill, rendered untenable by the artillery fire alone, was easily 
stormed by the Russian Grenadiers. A correspondent of the “ Daily 
News " who was with the Russians during the attack, and visited the 
position shortly after it was captured, has given so graphic a description 
of what he saw, that it is worth recording here as an instance of what 
field artillery can effect when properly used. He, at any rate, does not 
seem to have considered the material effect of rifled guns to be “ very 
slight," for he writes as follows :— (C Rows of dead Turks, some horribly 
disfigured by shell fragments, were to be seen upon the earthworks 
and at the bottom of the ditches. Some were literally torn to pieces by 
the shrapnels. I think most of them were killed by the artillery, which 
indeed had done its duty this time. The inside of the redoubt was 
ploughed with shells and strewn with their fragments and bullets, 
flattened on the stones. I don't think," he goes on to say, that the 
Russians have sustained great losses by that assault; because the 
shrapnels told terribly on the Turks, and had greatly diminished their 
number and demoralised them before the storming began." To this 
testimony of an impartial eye-witness must be added that of Mukhtar 
Pasha himself, who, in a conversation after the battle, attributed his 
defeat, as Napoleon III. attributed his at Sedan, to the superiority of 
the artillery which was brought against him. Aladja-Dagh was, in fact, 
the Sedan of the campaign. The capture of the Aulia-Tepeh broke 
the Turkish centre, and the Russians gained a victory which, due as it 
principally was to the brilliant action of the artillery, is not unworthy 
of being placed side by side with some of the artillery feats of 
Napoleon I. 
There is, I venture to think, from the late war both a conclusion to 
be drawn and a lesson to be learnt. 
The conclusion which a careful study of the war will surely lead us 
to draw is not, as has been asserted, that the role of artillery is played 
out, but, on the contrary, that the arm is more than ever necessary on 
the field of battle. The General who orders infantry to attack an 
entrenched position which has not been previously submitted to a 
searching artillery preparation is sending his men to certain slaughter. 
If any troops in the world could do what the experience of the last war 
shows to be impossible, the Russian infantry, led by such a man as 
Skobeleff, would surely have succeeded. Such attempts, however, can 
only end in crushing disasters, and if Zewin and Plevna will not satisfy 
the critics who assert that infantry are independent of artillery, let 
them go to that green hill side in Lorraine which is still marked by the 
graves of those 6000 Prussian guardsmen who fell in the short space of 
ten minutes at St. Privat—a ghastly testimony to the truth of the 
statement which is here made, viz., that infantry are helpless in battle 
without the aid of artillery. 
Is not the lesson which artillerymen can learn from the war the 
same which was, as long ago as 1866, pointed out by the author of the 
“ Tactical Retrospect," who recognised that it was the tactical not the 
technical training of the Prussian artillery which was chiefly at fault in 
the Austrian campaign ? What," he asked, “ is the use of an artillery 
