Achievements op field artillery. 
623 
Horse batteries, were responsible for a large share of the effective work 
done by the artillery during the first period of the war. 
When later on experience showed the deficiencies of the earlier 
arrangement, and batteries were united in brigades under a senior 
officer, the reserve diminished in importance, and was gradually reduced 
until it became little more than a depot where batteries hardly used 
in action might refit. 
But prejudice dies hard; the Divisional Commanders viewed the 
new arrangements with little favour, and endeavoured to neutralise 
them as far as possible by obstruction. Although, however, all the 
advantages which might fairly have been expected did not appear, 
enough was done to show the value of the more liberal system, and 
when the war was ended it had undoubtedly demonstrated its worth. 
The new powers as regards range with which rifling had endowed 
artillery could only be utilised and turned to account advantageously if 
guns were left free to select their own positions, apply their power 
in combination, and were no longer parcelled out at intervals along a 
line of infantry with whose movements they were expected to conform 
in the time-honoured manner which has come down, even to quite recent 
years, as a souvenir of muskets and flint-locks. 
Artillery which possesses range can, and should, be used for the 
benefit of the whole, and not for any particular part. “ Position,” as 
General Tidball well observes, “ is the chief factor in the use of 
artillery, and its importance increases in compound ratio with the range, 
accuracy, and power of the arm.” A position good or inevitable for 
infantry may be a very poor one for guns, and it is, and was proved to 
be, folly to cripple one arm by insisting on its remaining attached to 
another in a manner alike unnatural and unnecessary. 
The genius of Lee on the Confederate side early recognised the 
fatuity of such an arrangement, and, moreover, the weakness in point of 
numbers of that party authoritatively demanded such a wise application 
of them that no waste of force might take place. Before the first year 
of the war was at an end, therefore, Lee's batteries were united in 
battalions of from four to six in each. To the command of each bat¬ 
talion was assigned a Colonel or Lieut.-Colonel, while a Major was 
allotted to every two batteries. The “battalion,” in fact, corresponded 
very much with the Brigade-Division ” of our own day. 
The efficiency of the arm was so much increased by this system of 
organisation that the weak artillery of the Confederates was equal to 
coping with the much larger force of the arm on the other side, because 
its batteries acted in combination, whereas the others were dispersed. 
With these few words by way of preface we may now proceed to the 
consideration of a few of the principle occasions on which artillery 
during the lengthened struggle asserted its strength of effect. 
In the earlier days of the war, in accordance with what has already 
been said, little evidence of a combined use of the arm is to be found, 
nevertheless the action of the battery, commanded by the subsequently 
celebrated artillery General, H. T. Hunt, at the first battle of Bull Bun, 
on the 21st of July, 1861, deserves recognition at our hands. 
In the main action the Federal army was defeated on that day, but 
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