TACTICS.

History vs. Tactics.

Major E. S. May, R.A., is quite in accord with Dr. Miller Maguire as to the great advantage to be derived from the study of military history as a means of training for war. Major May regrets, as many others do, that nowadays we have so much "tactics” and so little military history in the course of study prescribed for regimental officers. The gallant gunner would have a cavalry officer familiar with the deeds of Seydlitz and Kellerman, Lasalle and Von Bredow, remember Rossbach, Zorndorf, Marengo, the pursuit after Jena and the surprise of Vionville, and eager with an ambition to emulate such deeds as those perpetuated in the accounts of these actions. Every artillery officer he would wish to see au courant with the story of Vittoria and Wagram, Hesse's and Gnügge's batteries at Gravelotte, of the "battery of the dead" at Königgrätz. Similarly all infantry officers should be persuaded of the invincibility of their arm; not because of the powers of modern rifles, but because infantry fought at Quatre Bras, at Inkerman, and at the Shipka Pass. Major May deplores the fact that "text books are now full of data as to the exact number of inches bullets will penetrate into various materials," and the actual time it will take to execute certain marches under given conditions. There is no doubt reason for the complaints of Dr. Maguire and Major May. The effect of much of our present examining has been to sicken men of service details and cause them to regard all military literature as more or less "a bore." In course of time we may hit upon the happy medium course, which all must be anxious to secure, for testing the capacity of our would-be Wellingtons. Meanwhile it should always be remembered, as Major May reminds us, that the chances on active service do not come to seniors only that "Bonaparte at Rivoli and Wellington at Assaye were younger than many of our subalterns at the present time."

It is the fashion to suppose that the officers of the Army read very little and knew very little of the science of war at the commencement of the century. But Dr. Maguire and Major May dispute this; they both have made known their astonishment at the evidence they have found to the contrary in the course of their researches in the department of military literature. As Major May puts it, one only has to read the letters of Colonel Siborne to realise the extent to which soldiers studied their profession even in the earlier years of the century, difficult as it was frequently, no doubt, for them to secure the books which were necessary to enable them to prosecute their studies. Major May puts the matter thus:

"When fighting on a grand scale was constantly going on and our opponents were the greatest military nation of Europe, it would indeed be surprising if some of our officers, at any rate, did not give some thought to a science on which their lives depended. When the Union Brigade went tearing down the slope on D'Erlon's corps and the third line was not held back in reserve, did not Lord Anglesey blame himself, and that the more so because he admitted that he ought to have known better from previous personal experience in Spain? And did not the officers know that it was all wrong, too, just as well