ACHIEVEMENTS OE FIELD ARTILLERY, 
449 
quarian research that we may glance at the achievements of the arm, 
even as far back as the days of the Seven Years' War. In the first 
place we may learn how massing of guns has ever most developed their 
effect, and, secondly, we may see that even in those, the primitive days 
of ammunition, guns constantly produced something more than the 
merely moral effect with which alone, up to our own day, they are 
often only credited. 
Not but that this latter is in itself of considerable value in war. 
If men be only defeated, the exact means by which they are beaten 
matters little. The moral effect with which some people are even 
too eager to endow the arm will always be left to it, and after all 
almost every success in battle is due to such an impression. An 
infantry attack, it is said, will come to a stand-still when 20 per cent, 
of the advancing force has fallen. 80 per cent, might still therefore 
go forward unhurt as well as retire backward, and what is it that 
denies them progress if it be not moral effect ? Fanatics, such as the 
Arabs of the Soudan, or savages with less sensitive organisations than 
our own, such as the Zulus, have exemplified this, and have rushed 
on when Europeans, deterred by moral effect, would have hesitated. 
Thus it is that, even if the actual result of artillery has sometimes not 
been commensurate with what might have been anticipated, the dread 
of its power has not been diminished, and its potentialities have replaced 
its performances. 
It is the fear of what may happen as much as that what has actually 
occurred that holds men spell-bound. The annals of war have more 
than once related how troops that have unflinchingly supported the 
most searching fire have given way panic-stricken like a flock of sheep 
when a perfectly imaginary cry of “a mine!" in their path was raised. 
The thought of what the effect of a shell bursting in their midst might 
be similarly appeals forcibly to the emotions of the very bravest soldiers, 
while, even in the days of solid shot, the picture presented to the 
imagination by the thought of a ball ploughing its way through a 
column, scattering destruction to many on its path, is a sufficiently 
vivid one to be deterrent. 
This, however, is but a digression, and in the following pages an 
attempt will be made to show that when the artillery has been rightly 
understood, and where its capabilities have been correctly turned to 
account, the effect which it has produced has been physical as well 
as moral, and in numerous examples to be culled from the cam¬ 
paigns of the great masters of war, it has decisively influenced the 
fortunes of the day, not by what is usually meant by the term moral 
effect alone, but by the moral effect which was the direct outcome of a 
markedly physical one. 
It is not proposed, however, to write anything like a complete history 
of the achievements of the arm, nor to discuss its rise and developments 
historically. It will better answer our purpose to consider what has 
been accomplished since the period when guns became endowed with 
sufficient mobility to enable them to manoeuvre, and co-operate in all 
the phases of the fight with the other arms, when in fact they developed 
into Field Artillery from being merely guns of position. 
