inured to war. Therefore it is that they do not enforce resort to cover" with so much solicitude as I have noticed British officers do. They know that in every company there are men who will "lie if allowed too great independence of individual action; and "cover at all risks" impairs every link in the chain of supervision. Again, they know that it is good for soldiers to die a little occasionally. The dead, of course, are "out of it"; but then death encourages the others. It seems brutal to write in this tone, but is not war all brutal? And it is the solid truth. It may be written down as an axiom that fire-discipline unaccompanied with casualties is weak. I remember standing with a German general before Metz watching a skirmish. The German battalion engaged happened to consist chiefly of young soldiers, and they were not very steady. The old general shrugged his shoulders and observed, "Dey vant to be a little shooted; dey vill do better next time." All young soldiers want to be a "little shooted"; and it is only by exposing them somewhat, instead of coddling them forever behind cover, as if cover, not victory, were the aim of the day's work, that this experience can befall them. All soldiers are the better of being "blooded"; they never attain purposeful coolness till they have acquired a personal familiarity with blood and death.

The British catastrophe at Isandlwana was due partly to the error of employing loose formation against great masses of bold men, whom a biting fire would deter no whit from advancing; but, in the end, from the scared inability to redeem this error by a rapid, purposeful resort to close formation in square or squares. Once the loose fringe of men dodging for cover was impinged on, all was over save the massacre. The test of fire-discipline failed whenever the strain on it became severe. The men had worked up to their skirmishing lessons to the best of their ability; when masterful men brushed aside the result of those lessons, there was no moral stamina to fall back upon, no consuetude of resource to be as a second nature. A resolute square formed round an ammunition wagon might have made a defense that would have lasted at least until Lord Chelmsford came back from his straggling excursion; but no man who saw how the dead lay on that

ghastly field could persuade himself into the belief that there had been any attempt at a rally. The only fragment of good that came out of the Isandlwana catastrophe was the resolution, in any and every subsequent encounter, to show the Zulus a solid front; and the retrospect of Isandlwana infused a melancholy into the success of Ulundi, where the most furious onslaughts recoiled from the firm face of the British square.

The Majuba Hill affair was simply a worse copy of Isandlwana. There was no methodised fire-discipline. It has been urged as the lesson of Majuba Hill that the British soldier should have more careful instruction in marksmanship. Probably enough, that would do him good-it could not do him harm — but it was not because he was a bad marksman that Majuba Hill was so discreditable a reverse. It was because he is so much a creature of cover and of dodging that he went all abroad when he saw a real live enemy standing up in front of him at point-blank range. It may be contended that there were fire-seasoned soldiers who participated in this unfortunate business. Yes; but these, with no stronger morale to begin with, because of their early training in assiduous cover" tactics, had suffered in what morale they might have possessed because of previous reverses.

One regiment was represented on that fatal hill-top which had not participated in those reverses, and was indeed fresh from successes in Afghanistan. But Afghan fighting is a poor school in which to acquire prompt, serene self-command when, in old Havelock's phrase, the color of the enemy's moustaches is visible. It was only once, or at most twice, when the Afghan did not play the dodging game. He does not care to look his enemy full in the face, and he tries all he knows to prevent his enemy from having the opportunity to look him in the face. Fire-discipline of

an alert yet sustained character was not to be learned among the rocks and stones of Afghanistan. When the adventurous Boer breasted the crest of the Majuba he and the British soldier confronted each other at close quarters. It was no time for long-range shooting, it was simply the time for fire-discipline of the readiest practical order to make its effect felt. I imagine Briton and Boer staring one at

the other in a perturbed moment of mutual disquietude. Who should the sooner pull himself together and take action on returning presence of mind? The Boer had the better nerve; to use the American expression, he was quicker on the draw. And then, for lack of firediscipline, for want of training to be cool, and to keep their heads within close view of a hostile muzzle, the British went to pieces in uncontrollable scare, and the sad issue was swift to be consummated.

Tel-el-Kebir furnishes an incidental illustration of our shortcoming in firediscipline, which, as I contend, has its main cause in the effects of too stringent urgency to cover. Wolseley showed that discernment, which is one of his most valuable characteristics, in refraining from submitting his soldiers to the strain of a "swarm attack' up to the Egyptian position in fair daylight; and in choosing instead, as a minor risk, a night advance, spite of all its contingencies of hazard, with the hoped-for culmination of a surprise at daybreak. The issue proved his wisdom; and an episode of that issue, set forth with soldierly frankness by Sir Edward Hamley, must have given him a thrill of relief that he had conserved the spirit of his troops for the final dash, without exposing them to a previous ordeal of fire. That dash made, while yet the gloom of the dying night lay on the sand, General Hamley tells us, was 150 yards long, and it cost the brigade that carried it out 200 casualties ere the Egyptian entrenchment was crowned. It was done with the first impulse; no check was let stop the onward impetus of the élan; fire-discipline was not called into exercise at all. The whole of the first line pressed on into the interior of the enemy's position. The second line followed, but Hamley, with a wise prescience, "stopped the parts of it that were nearest to him as they came up, wishing to keep a support in hand which would be more readily available than such as the brigade in rear could supply."

It was well he did this thing; but for his doing of it, the shadow of a far other issue to Tel-el-Kebir lies athwart the following quotation: "The light was increasing every moment; our own men had begun to shoot immediately after entering the entrenched position, and aim could now be taken. The fight was

at its hottest, and how it might end was still doubtful, for many of our advanced troops had recoiled even to the edge of the entrenchment" (beyond which they had penetrated 200 or 300 yards into the interior); "but there I was able to stop them, and reinforcing them with the small body I had kept in hand (that had remained, I think, in the ditch) I sent in altogether, and henceforth they maintained their ground." They recoiled, and they recoiled by reason of their weakness in fire-discipline. It is a fair query How severe was the strain?

As regards its duration, but a few moments' fighting sufficed to bring about the recoil; that is made clear by the circumstance that the supporting brigade, following close as it did, was yet not up in time to redress the dangerous situation. In regard to its severity, General Hamley permits himself to use language of the most vivid character. "A hotter fire it is impossible to imagine." The brigade was "enclosed in a triangle of fire." "The enemy's breech-loaders were good, his ammunition abundant, and the air was a hurricane of bullets, through which shells from the valley tore their way." "The whole area was swept by a storm of bullets."

Stronger words could not have been used by an enthusiastic war correspondent gushing his level best about his first skirmish; General Hamley's expressions are fuller-volumed than those used by the compilers of the German staff chronicle in describing that Titanic paroxysm, the climax of Gravelotte. What stupendous damage, then, did this hottest of all hot fires, this hurricane of bullets, effect? The casualties of the whole division reached a total of 258 killed and wounded. Of these "nearly 200," General Hamley distinctly states, occurred exclusively in the first brigade in the rush up to the entrenchment. If we assume that the second brigade had no losses at all, and that the whole balance of casualties occurred to the first brigade when in "the triangle of fire," the fall of some sixty men out of 2,800 was hardly a loss to justify the "recoil even to the edge of the entrenchment" of troops possessed even of a moderate amount of fire-discipline.

Hamley explains that but for the darkness and the too high aim of the enemy, "the losses would have been tremendous." In other words, if an actual loss of two per cent., and the turmoil of the hottest fire imaginable, yet fortunately aimed over their heads, caused the troops "to recoil even to the edge of the entrenchment," the "tremendous losses" that a betteraimed fire would have produced, it seems pretty evident, would have caused them to "recoil" so much farther that Tel-el-Kebir would have been a defeat instead of a victory. The Egyptians did not shoot straight because they were flurried, that is, were deficient in fire-discipline; the

British "recoiled" after a very brief experience of a devilish but comparatively harmless battledin, because the ardor of the first rush having died out of them, fire-discipline was not strong enough in them to keep them braced to hold the ground the rush had won them. It was fortunate that in Hamley they had a chief who had prescience of their feebleness of constancy, and had taken measures to remedy its evil effects.

During the afternoon and evening of August 18th, 1870, six regiments of the Prussian guard corps made repeated and ultimately successful efforts to storm the French position of St. Privat. What that position was like the following authentic description sets forth: "In front of St. Privat were several parallel walls of knee-high masonry and shelter trenches. Those lines, successively commanding each other, were filled with compact rows of skirmishers, and in their rear upon the commanding height lay like a natural bastion, and girt by an almost continuous wall, the town-like village, the stone houses of which were occupied up to the roofs." There was no shelter on the three-quarters of a mile of smooth natural glacis, over which the regiments moved steadfastly to the attack; every fold of it was searched by the dominant musketry fire. They tried and failed, but they kept on trying till they succeeded. And what did the success cost them? The six regiments (each three battalions strong) numbered roughly 18,000 men; of these 6,000 had gone down before Canrobert quitted his grip of the "townlike village." One-third of their whole number! It was the cost of this sacrifice that caused the Germans to adopt the unprecedented step of altering their attacking tactics in the middle of the campaign. But the change was not made because the troops had proved unequal to the task set them, but because the cost of the accomplishment of that task, in the face of the Chassepot fire, had been so terrible. Now I am not concerned to exalt the horn of the Prussian fighting men at the cost of the British soldier. I will assume, and there is precedent in favor of the assumption, that the British soldier of the pre-dodging era could take his punishment and come through it victoriously as stoutly as any German.

Of the 10,000 British fellows whom Wellington sent at Badajos, 3,000 were down before the torn old rag waved over the place. Ligonier's column was 14,000 strong when the Duke of Cumberland gave it the word to make that astounding march through the chance gap, a bare 900 paces wide, between the cannon before the village of Vezon and those in the Redoubt d'Eu, right into and behind the heart of the French centre on the bloody day of Fontenoy. There is some doubt whether those quixotic courtesies passed between Lord Charles Hay and the Count d'Auteroche, but there is no doubt whatever that when the column, thwarted of the reward of valor by deficiency of support, had sturdily marched back through the appalling cross-fire in the cramped hollow-way, and had methodically fronted into its old position, it was found that at least 4,000 out of the 14,000 had been shot down. Carlyle, indeed, makes the loss much heavier.

Yet a more notable example of the British soldier's gluttony for punishment is fur

nished in the statistics of the Inkermann losses. The total force that kept Mount Inkermann against the Russians amounted to 7,464 officers and men. Of these, when the long fierce day was done, no fewer than 2,487 had fallen, just one-third of the whole number. The manner in which our soldiers successfully contested their fearful odds in this battle is a phenomenal example of fire-discipline of the grand old dogged type. It is but one, however, of the many proofs that the world has no stauncher fighting man than is the British soldier intrinsically.

Than "annihilation " there is no more favorite word with the critics of manoeuvres and sham-fights. In truth it is as hard a thing to "annihilate a body of troops as it is to kill a scandal. In a literal sense there is scarcely a record of such a catastrophe; if used in a figurative sense to signify a loss so great as to put the force suffering it hors de combat, there is amazing testimony to the quantity of "annihilation" good troops have accepted without any such hapless result. Here are instances taken almost at random. The Confederates, out of 68,000 men engaged at Gettysburg, lost 18,000, but Meade held his hand from interfering with their orderly retreat. Of that battle the climax was the assault of Pickett's division, "the flower of Virginia," against Webb's front on the left of Cemetery Hill. Before the heroic Armitage called for the "cold steel" and carried Gibbon's battery with a rush, the division had met with a variety of experiences during its mile-and-a-half advance over the smooth ground up to the crest. "When it first came into sight it had been plied with solid shot; then half-way across it had been vigorously shelled, and the double canisters had been reserved for its nearer approach. An enfilading fire tore through its ranks; the musketry blazed forth against it with deadly effect."

This is the evidence of an eye-witness on the opposite side, who adds, "but it came on magnificently." Yes, it came on to cold steel and clubbed muskets, and, after a desperate struggle, it went back foiled, to the accompaniments which had marked its advance. But heavy as were its losses, it was not "annihilated." Pickett's division survived to be once and again a thorn in the Federal side before the final day of fate came to it at Appomattox Court House. In the September attack on Plevna, of 74,000 Russo-Roumanian infantry engaged, the losses reached 18,000. Skobeleff commanded 18,000 men, and at the end of his two days' desperate fighting, not 10,000 of these were left standing. But there was no annihilation, either literally or conventionally, if one may use the term. The survivors who had fought on the 11th and 12th September were ready at the word to go in again on the 13th; and how they marched across the Balkans later is one of the marvels of modern military history.

Those examples of stoicism, of fire-discipline strained to a terrible tension, but not breaking under the strain, were exhibited by soldiers who did not carry into practice the tactics of non-exposure. The Russo-Turkish war, it is true, was within the "cover" era, but the Russians in this respect, as in a good many others -such, for instance, as in their lack of a propensity to "recoil" - were behind the times.

ceive that it has been disturbed, has been forcibly set to moving. The clouds move. Why? Because the wind impels them. The tree-tops wave to and fro for the same reason. A baseball is seen flying through the air, and we are perfectly sure that either it has been thrown or has been batted by some person, even though we may not have seen the act performed. So unvarying is our experience in this regard that we hold the fact to be beyond the possibility of question that an inanimate body cannot move itself, but is only moved when acted upon by some force outside of itself, and the physicist sustains us in this belief.

Before a body can move, then, force must be applied to it; it is powerless to move itself. Let us be quite sure that there is no mistake about this matter; for if a body cannot put itself in motion from a state of rest, there follows a consequence which we find it difficult to conceive, and yet which follows of necessity, that a moving body is powerless to stop its own motion. Once set to moving it must move forever, unless stopped by some opposing force. Here is a very important principle of mechanics, yet one which we find it difficult to assent to, since it seems to be contrary to experience. In all our experience a moving body comes to a state of rest, sooner or later, after the impelling force has ceased to act. Shut off the steam from a locomotive, and the moving train comes to a standstill. The flying baseball comes to the ground and stops. The tree-tops cease to wave as soon as the wind goes down. But if we reflect we shall see that none of these cases is an instance of self-stoppage.

Friction has stopped the train; gravity has drawn the ball down to the ground; and the rigidity of the boughs of the tree has stopped their waving. In fact, it is impossible to have motion in any body upon the earth's surface under circumstances such that there shall not be some opposing force to be overcome, which will stop the motion soon after the motive force has ceased to act. To find examples of perpetual motion we must look to the heavenly bodies. The moon has been circling round the earth for ages, because at some unknown epoch in the past she was set into motion by some force, whatever it may have been, and has never been able to throw the motion off. It is not the earth's attraction which

keeps the moon moving; this attraction merely binds the moon to the earth as a satellite. Were it to cease, the moon would still move, though no longer as an attendant of the earth. Again, the earth rotates on its axis, though the force or forces which set it to rotating ceased to act millions of years ago, and it will continue to turn on its axis to the end of time unless its rotation is stopped by some force outside of itself.

We are now prepared to give full assent to the first of Newton's three Laws of Motion which is this:

A body at rest remains at rest, and a body in motion continues to move with constant speed in a straight line, unless acted upon by some external unbalanced force.

The expression "unbalanced force" requires explanation. A body may be acted upon at the same time by two or more forces, which may be so applied as partially or wholly to balance one another. Let a body be pulled in opposite directions by two equal forces and the body will remain at rest; but let one of the forces be stronger than the other, and the body will move in the direction of the stronger pull.

Motion in any body is evidence, then, either that it has at some time been acted on by some force, which may have ceased to act, as when a ball has been struck with a bat, or that some force is still acting upon it, as is the case with a moving railway train. If the body is large and is moving rapidly, our common experience teaches us that the force which set it in motion is great; if the body is large and moves only slowly, we decide that the force, though great, is less than in the first instance. If the body is small, we likewise judge of the intensity of the force from the speed with which it moves. Our judgment in these cases, though correct, is only a rough one. The physicist, and the practical engineer or mechanic as well, aim to make exact measurements, and to facilitate the doing of this they make use of certain terms to express with precision the quantities they have to measure, as follows: