COMMENDED ESSAY, 1895. 379 
In the Regular Artillery, as in the army generally, instruction is 
woefully hampered by the inordinate demands of administrative duty, 
and if is positively startling to think of the enormous proportion of 
officers, N.-O.C.’s and men who are employed every day in merely 
conducting their own house keeping, so to speak. 
In the Militia the shortness of the annual trainings and the constant 
changes in the muster roll are the chief enemies to advanced instruction, 
and in the Volunteers and Colonial forces, any limpness there may be, 
is due, as a rule, to want of the knowledge of what would be really 
expected of them in the presence of an enemy. 
Putting aside instruction other than what is distinctly for war, we 
may consider the training of the Garrison Artillery in two parts. 
Ist. The separate training of the units. 
2nd. The combined trainings of the Fortress Garrisons. 
The training of Regular Artillery has to be carried beyond the point 
of what is required locally. The Service Companies, we must remem- 
ber, are available for duty in any part of the world. They are training 
schools for their own reserve, and have to provide a sufficient number 
of specialists to supply the wants of the other branches as well as their 
own, when mobilised for war. 
In training the Regular Artilleryman therefore, we have first to make 
him a soldier, and by the aid of precise exercises instil into him those 
habits of implicit obedience without which a soldier is worse than use- 
less. ‘This we do at a depot or other place of instruction for recruits 
before he joins a Service Company. Having made him a soldier, we 
have to make him a gunner, that is to say a soldier who has become so 
intimate with guns and their adjuncts that he will afterwards instinc- 
tively fall into his proper placein any drill or other Artillery duty he 
may be called to, although the precise detail may be new to him. 
Company training, further includes the sorting of the gunners 
according to the military aptitudes of each individual, with a view to 
the making of specialists and the selection of N.-C.O.’s, both matters of 
the utmost importance. 
But concurrently with this general training should come the pre- 
paration of each man for his particular duties of the local scheme of 
defence. The duties of the company men (with the exception of Gun 
Captains and gun layers) will itis true be generally unskilled, still some 
education of hand and eye is needed for their due performance. A 
soldier may, for instance, be told off as No. 5 ina 9:2-in. B.L. Gun De- 
tachment. His duty will be merely to stand on the left of the gun, 
attend to hoisting tackle, raise projectile, ram home, run wp and elevate, 
but it is surely the business of the Officer Commanding his company to 
see that whatever other accomplishments he may happen to possess he 
can at least do that duty and do it perfectly ; also that he is able at a 
pinch to do the work of the other man at the same gun, whose place he 
may have to take. Thus while the main object of company training is 
to carry out preliminary instruction and select probationers for the 
district establishment it should also include the preparation of a certain 
In the Regu- 
lay Artillery. 
In the 
Militia and 
Volunteers. 
Aspects of 
Training in 
the Garrison 
Artillery. 
Separate 
Training of 
the Regular 
Artillery. 
Company 
Training. 
