NATIONAL DEFENCE. [From the Spectator.]

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume VIII, Issue 734, 14 August 1852, Page 3

NATIONAL DEFENCE. [From the Spectator.]

The Kafir war, which Sir Harry Smith was to finish off by his mere appearance, continues, at a cost (says Sir Charles Shaw *) of £3,800 a day. Such is the cost, we presume to this country, for railit&ry expenses ; there is also the cost of an indefinite but large sum daily to the colonists, their lands being traversed by marauders wl'om Sir Harry has stirred up, but cannot put down. There is, however, one use which, as the Times suggests, the Kafir war has furnished to vs — it has exposed the inefficient state of our infantry and of our fire-arms, both in construction and practice. " Fiat experimentum : " it is luckily done chiefly at .the expense of the Cape. We have, however, had ugly experiences before. The abandonment of Cabul was not, quite creditable to our military history: the troops at Canton were furnished with arras so ineffective that they might have been exposed to destruction, had the enemy but conjectured the true state of the case ; but it is in Kaffraria that the worst becomes known : the British soldier cannot compete with.a Kafir in ball-practice! The Kafirs despise our men — they venture so freely even into the British camps, that they have taken the oxen out of General Somerset's own baggagewaggon. Our men have not the same contempt for the Kafirs ; they protest against being sent to be " targets for savages," and being " butchered like cattle." The savages treat our men with contemptuous disregard, and come within distances humiliating to our military renown. A battalion of the Rifle Brigade has been sent over to strike terror into the black breast by shooting a few of our harassing foes ; and perhaps we may at last get the better of them. Meanwhile, we have ascertained a momentous fact : it may almost be said that, taken in the lump, with his bad equipments and stinted in his practice, the British soldier -is not equal to a Kafir 1 Now a Kafir, we take it, is not equal to a Kabyle ; a Kabyle is not equal to a Frenchman; j and thus it follows, by the rule of proportion, .that an Englishman is not equal, by at least three degrees, to a Frenchman — an Englishman, who was " equal to three Frenchmen ! " The Frenchman, we know, " cannot stand cold steel," at least so it is said, though he proves tolerably willing to stand it pretty often in the Bois de Boulogne ; for the Frenchman adheres, in- duelling, to the use of the sword, which 'the Englishman has discontinued. Tt would scarcely do to rely upon the cold- steel presumption. When we come to the reasons for the unpleasant disparity between the Englishman and the Kafir, the case looks even more ugly. "An Old Officer of Light Division," writing to the Times, ' ascribes it to the bad construction of the rqusket, which is without even the improvement of the " double-pipe swivel " lock, that is now generally used by sportsmen in this country, and is as much behind the improved muskets and rifles of France and Prussia as the old flint lock or even matchlock is behind a modern weapon. — The musket is a heavy piece of artillery, with ball that does not fit it, and does not strike a broad quiel^ target once in ten ; the ammunition is heavy, adding to the burdens of the soldier, which amount, with knapsack and clothing, to sixty pounds weight. It W-as, long before official men would trust the percussion-lock as a substitute for the flint : they will perhaps, introduce the double-pipe swivel, now that the Minie rifle is geneially adopted elsewhere ; and by the time that some still further improvement on that arm has been effected abroad, tbe English will have grown used,to experiments with the Minie. An Old Officer of Light Division ascribes the Inefficiency partly to want of practice — thirty rounds of ammunition being allowed to each soldier for the practice of a year ! It is not without more practice that the Tirailleurs de Vincennes have attained such skill, that- their unerriog aim, at the siege of Rome, raised a- suspicion of trea,-_ chery among the defenders themselves — so certain was trie death of an artilleryman who showed bis head above the walls ;' so impossible

to account for it, when not a foe could be seen on the ground before him. Sir Charles Shaw relates some striking facts respecting practice : " The present Fiench musket, 4 fusil de munition,' model 1840, is fully as good as »he musket now useuin the British army ; and 1 here give the result of 300 shots of model rifle 1846 (with balls before they were made hollow,) and of 300 shots of the musket (as good as the British,) these 600 shots being fired by the same men, at a distance of 656 yards. The targets fired at were five panels, made of boards of poplarwood, each about an inch thick. The four were placed directly in the reor of the first, at a distance of a yard from each other. Each panel was 13 feft long an.d 6 feet high, thus representing a column of sections composed of six men in front (a man -in the ranks occupies 22 inches.) The model rifle, 1846, put in the target out of the 400 s'aots 127 balls, of which 33 went through the whole of the five panels ; and out of the 300 shots fired from the French musket (equal to the British) only 33 balls struck the target, eight of which only penetrated the first panel and two hals the second. Thus, the 14.000 French, with, their present rifles,' can hit a section of six men in front 40 times in 100 shots, whfe the Britisb muskets, wi h similar distance and number • f shots, can hit only 1 1 times. But since the late invention of the hollow cylindro-conique balls by Captain Mtoie, and now used at Vincennes, as precise firing can be done at 1150 yards as I have above stated at 656 yards, and Capt. Minie himself will undertake to hit a man at a distance of 1420 yards three times out of five shots. This ball always enters with the po : nt, and if fired at a distance of 1500 yards, will penetrate 2 inches into poplar-wood. Un:il recently I myself was incredulous ; but personal acquaintance with one of the earliest and best instructors in the Ecole de Tir, and 1 having gone over the practice-ground with him, . makes me feel quite certain of the truth of what I assert. The ground is marked out for the recruits, beginning at 200 yards from the target, and incieasing by 100 yards, finishes at 1150' yards. It is found by calculation that at 328 yards a man has the appearance of one-third his height ; at 437 yards, one-fodrth ; at 546, one-fiftb. By a very simple instrument of the size of a penknife, called a stadia, distances can be measured accurately to 500 yards, and the sights of the rifle can be adjusted to the space indicated by the stadia. I have tried this stadia and measured the distances indicated, and pacing the. ground, found it correct. At a distance of 765 yards, this rifle would to a certainty knock down a Life-Guardsman in spite of his cuirass, and a front of 10 men, at 1100 yards." So much for experimental practice. In the previous passage to which he alludes Sir Charles Shaw states an incident in the field which may astonish some of our friends at the Cape, who find the Kafirs and their pranks so troublesome. " The loss of officers and men in Algeria was so great, thit in 1838 the Duke of Orleans, before going to Africa, organised a battalion of the lirailleurs de V:ncennes (then called Chasseurs d'Afrique) to take with him; As an instance of the perfection of this weapon even in 1838, it may be mentioned that the Duke while reconnoitering was annoyed at the pranks played by an Arab Sheik at a distance of about 650 yards. He offered five francs to any soldier who would knock the Arab down. A soldier (M. P.) stepped out of the ranks of the Chasseurs d'Afrique and instantly shot this Arab chief through the heart. The arches below the County Fire Office at the Quadrant, in Regent-street, are distant from the Duke of York's pillar about 600 yards, so the officers of the Senior and Junior United Service Clubs may form some idea of the efficacy of these French rifles; but since 1838 many improvements have been made in Mr. Delvigne's rifle and its ammunition. In 1842 there were ten battalions of these Tirailleurs, armed with what was then thought the perfection of a rifle ; but in 1846 great improvements were made. There aie now in the French army a force of 14,000 men armed with this ' 1846 model rifle' — this unerring and murderous weapon, with its cylindro-conique bollo,w ball. Orders- have been lately given to ' rifle ' the common muskets of the French army, and to provide the cylindroconique hollow ball." We do not venture to give any opinion' on a professional subject, but we say that it is very unpleasant to see statements of this kind made by military men of intelligence and experience, with grounds so intelligible even to unprofessional men. We remember, too, the apprehensions expressed by the Duke of Wellington at the exposed state of our coasts. It would Le most disagreeable news to learn that a great body of Gallic-Algerines were coming over, to visit England like Algeria, London like Rome, with nothing better to meet them than the redcoated gentlemen who can't knock down the Kafirs. To meet the exigency, various suggestions have been made, and continue to issue forth in all quarters. Some, we believe, would still rely on an exportation of tracts by the Peace Society, but we doubt whether the number of such persons is still great. Others would augment our Army, in the usual way ; and it is observed that the Recruiting-sergeants are active : but an addi r tion of raw recruits on the Kafir-life-insurance pattern — of recruits not yet even up to that mark—would not be very encouraging. There is a desire to recruit the Army cheaply, and without extending the military spirit ; and a correspondent of our own would enlist paupers, and even criminals. He should know that regular workhouse paupers are almost always unfit for military service, and that " able-bodied paupers" are precisely the class that furnish pur recruits, if the word, in its most extended signification, be taken to mean the whole peasantry. On the other hand, criminals are preciVy the class of whom it would be most 'desirble to we el the Army — for courage is a quality almost universal*, whereas order and discipline are the more difficult qualities to cultitate. We believe that i\\e growing disposition of the public is to call out a mUtia. We have false notions of that force, from the wretched bodies of needy men and substitutes that the inhabitants of our large towns remember. But ajtrue militia — or an appeal to the men of the oation — should consist of the picked men, not the refuse. The natural first division of the militia consists of the' growD son of every family, or the young father —that body which guards every part of the American Union. la almost every State, if not

in all, a man must belong to the militia or to a . volunteer company ; anfl many bodies enrolled for other purposes, such as the fire-companies, or volunteer Gorps. . The fire-companies are so. The efficiency of that force in preserving order was seen in New York during the Macready riots; and its has furnished large contingents' to the army which made a conquest from Mexico. As to the ultimate result of an invasion of our own country, we have no apprehensions ; but the amount of suffering that might be endured in the process of expelling a foe, is matter for grave consideration ; and it would be great indeed, if bodies of the people were called to a forgotten duty without being prepared for it. Above all, let us note that such a force, thoroughly united with the body 0/ the people, could never be used for any anti-national purpose.