AN AMERICAN CRITICISM OF THE

EGYPTIAN CAMPAIGN.

It is among the features of modern international courtesy that professional representatives of foreign states are allowed to witness the military operations in which a nation within the pale of conventional civilisation may engage, and to have access to such official information as may enable them to report to their constituents on the progress of events and the lessons of a campaign, with what intelligence their critical acumen and industry may prompt. That military attachés on such a service do fulfil their function and send in reports may be assumed; yet there is to my knowledge but a single power that does not entomb the outcome of its representatives' labours in the pigeonholes of its military bureau. The Russian headquarters in Bulgaria were accompanied by a small army of foreign attachés. Japan had sent a colonel, and Sweden a highly-decorated major; Austria and Germany were represented by general officers, and England by an able and gallant Guardsman. Doubtless all those gentlemen were sedulous in the compilation of reports, but he who would undertake the task of writing the history of the Russo-Turkish war will search in vain for documents which could scarcely fail to be of material assistance to him. Among those generals and colonels there quietly moved a young lieutenant, the delegate from a great nation whose standing army is not so strong as a couple of Russian divisions. He was zealous in his appointed duty; with cool keen eye he watched the heart of every battle; and when the West Point lieutenant of Engineers went home to his normal duty of keeping in order the drains of Washington, he took with him and handed in to the War Department of the United States Government, a report on the war, so thorough, so detailed, so charged with independent yet temperate criticism, as to leave for the would-be historian, so far as the Russian share in it was concerned, an undertaking of sheer surplusage. First-Lieutenant F. V. Greene, of the Corps of Engineers, United States Army, had made his report an exhaustive record of the RussoTurkish war; but this work of so great importance might have gone into the limbo peopled by the reports of military attachés of other states, save for the practice of the departments of the United

States Government to present to the legislature, and thus, in effect, to constitute public property, documents conceived to be of general interest. Finally, Mr. Greene's report was reprinted, no longer as a state paper, both in America and in Europe; it has been translated into German and Russian, and the General Staff of St. Petersburg have given it their official imprimatur as a standard authority.

A military lieutenant had served Uncle Sam's turn in Bulgaria : to report to him on the operations engaged in by England in Egypt two years ago he nominated a naval officer, Lieutenant-Commander Casper F. Goodrich, of a United States squadron which happened to be at Alexandria when the operations began. West Point had scored in Europe; Annapolis, the U.S. academy for naval cadets, was now to have its show' in Africa. Commander Goodrich has forwarded to the secretary of the American Navy his Report of the British Naval and Military Operations in Egypt (1882); the work has been printed in the Government printing office, and an early copy of it now lies before me. It is not the custom of the Headquarters Staff of the British army to compile and issue an official narrative of the wars in which the troops who are under its direction have been engaged, in which respect it differs from the wise and useful practice of that great General Staff over which Count Moltke so long presided. It is not contended that Commander Goodrich's report on the operations in Egypt has the intrinsic weight or the fulness of detail that would entitle it to take rank as a substitute for such a narrative; but it has characteristics which make it of important value both to the strictly professional student, and to the general reader who is unwilling to content himself with the despatches of generals and the letters of war correspondents. Its author is a trained expert in his profession; the internal evidence of his work proves that he brought to it a keen eye, a shrewd intellect, and an independence in which there is no censoriousness. He acknowledges with frank gratitude the courtesy of the British naval and military chiefs in affording him. every facility for travel and for obtaining data and technical information. Of those advantages he has made the fullest use; and his two volumes-one containing the text of his report, the other a great number of admirably-executed photographs and elaborately-detailed plans-may with confidence be asserted to constitute the best history of the campaign yet contributed to the military literature of the world. It may be assumed that some English publisher will ere long make Commander Goodrich's report accessible to readers on this side of the Atlantic; meanwhile a short summary of the author's comments can scarcely be destitute of interest.

The broad inference which the reporter draws from the essential facts of the bombardment of Alexandria is that vessels are not, and never will be, able to fight on even terms with forts: that is, when the object of the vessels is to reduce the forts-the ability of forts

to stop the progress of modern ships is another question. He does not deny that for the latter enterprise the works of Alexandria would have been utterly powerless against the British fleet, which need hardly have paid them the compliment of a passing shot.' But in the case of fight between ship and fort, he points out that the responsibility of the attack belongs to the former, while the latter gains the credit of a drawn battle. The former cannot continue the action beyond a certain time, limited by the capacity of shell-rooms and magazines. The garrison of the latter may quietly wait under cover until the ship's fire slackens, can then return it with interest, and continue it until the ship, if she be able, retires re infecta. Notwithstanding the preponderating weight of fire from the British guns, the bombardment of Alexandria, he contends, was not in a technical sense a triumph :

The forts [he writes] were badly bruised, but the more modern parapets were not seriously harmed. In the generality of cases the real damage they sustained could easily have been repaired in a single night. If the bombardment was directed against the forts in this, their defensive capacity, it must be pronounced a failure. If its object was the dismounting of the new rifled guns (the really dangerous weapons), it must be conceded that such results as attended the work of the inshore squadron (only one gun of this type being seriously affected), or even such as were achieved by the offshore squadron (less than one-half being permanently disabled), do not justify the verdict of success.

Of course there is no contention but that in the wider sense of having driven the garrisons from their batteries, and having silenced the forts,' the fleet was unquestionably victorious.

But into this product, Commander Goodrich is careful to accentuate, entered the important element of morale. He testifies, indeed, with a soldierly warmth, to the conduct of the Egyptian defenders. Overmatched as they were in weight and skill of fire, he bears witness that they stood to their batteries with unexpected and admirable courage.'

When the Inflexible's' 1,700-pound projectiles struck the scarp of the Lighthouse Fort immediately under an embrasure, they would throw up a cloud of dust and fragments of stone as high as the lighthouse itself. To the looker-on it seemed impossible to live under such a fire, yet after a few minutes the dust would clear away and the gun's crew would pluckily toss another shell back at their huge opponent.

But the strain of the unequal strife, and the heavy casualties broke down the resistance offered for a time so courageously by the Egyptian artillerymen. Commander Goodrich specifies the 'Condor's' share in the action, and the conduct of the landing party under Lieutenant Bradford of the Invincible' as the two brilliant episodes of the day.' But just as Fort Mex was in his opinion the only one of the Alexandrian defences that could not have renewed the action on the following day, and that because of the damage wrought it by Bradford's spiking-party, so he holds that if the con

stancy of the garrison had been of a higher type, the task of that landing party would have been very arduous. He thus pithily and idiomatically expresses himself:

The actual garrison was whipped, and thoroughly whipped, after a most creditable and determined resistance, but it is hardly to be doubted that if it had been of a personnel similar to that on board the attacking fleet, the spiking-party would have had difficulty in executing their task, and on the 12th of July the challenge from the ships would have been promptly accepted.

And had that challenge been so accepted, what would have been the issue? The Egyptian resources of ammunition were 'enormous.' The bombardment of the 11th of July had drained the British fleet's stock of ammunition to a dangerously low ebb.' The concluding sentence of Commander Goodrich's commentary on the bombardment is full of significance :

With a heavier sea running to render the fire of the fleet less accurate, and to embarrass the operation of replenishing its almost empty magazines and shell-rooms from the ammunition vessels in the outer roadstead, can any doubt be reasonably entertained that the struggle would have been vastly prolonged even if the final result had been unaltered?

Commander Goodrich found convincing evidence that the new high-powered guns are not adapted for bombarding earthworks, because their flat trajectory sends their projectiles along the line of the greatest resistance of the fortification. If an approximately vertical fire is attained by dint of increasing the fighting distance, it is obvious that the value of their high power and flat trajectory is nullified. And equally obvious is it that the longer the range the less close must be the shooting. Commander Goodrich asserts that we have no gun now afloat which can send a projectile through, or seriously damage, a well-packed earthen parapet thirty feet thick at ordinary practicable ranges. The ratio of invulnerability is of course maintainable by increasing the thickness of the parapet proportionately with the penetration of the projectile. It follows that the aggressive action must chiefly concern itself with efforts to dismount the guns of the defending batteries, and to explode their batteries. For the gunners of vessels assigned to the task of reducing fortifications there are but two targets at which it is worth while to direct their fire: the muzzle of any gun actually served, and any visible building known or believed to be a magazine or shellhouse; shot elsewhere directed are thrown away. Incidentally he points out that since the British gunners were greatly aided in their aim by having the black muzzles of the Egyptian guns clearly defined against the light-coloured masonry of the parapet, it would be a wise expedient to have the guns painted of a colour undistinguishable from that of their surroundings.

Hammering away at 'long taw' when the target is comparatively speaking a mere pin's point is a prolonged and precarious operation.

A successful hit must mean either good luck or phenomenally good shooting. The American reporter suggests an expedient for quickening-up results. He argues that ships of war, unless intended for the purpose of either engaging other ships or batteries exclusively, should be prepared for both classes of work by carrying composite batteries:

If [writes he in italics] Admiral Seymour had possessed a vessel carrying both heavy modern high-powered guns and large howitzers or other shell-guns capable of great elevation, and thus somewhat similar to the mortar in application, she would have been of immense value, for she could have run close into the forts, driven the Egyptians away from their batteries with her shell-guns and her machine-guns, and then dismounted the latter with comparative ease at short range with her high-powered ordnance.

In this connection he insists strenuously on a thorough determination of the possibilities of vertical fire. That a vessel undertaking the service would, he describes in the sentence just quoted, run a certain risk of getting mauled in carrying it out is patent. The bombardment of Alexandria conclusively proved, in Commander Goodrich's words, 'that ships engaging forts not superior to them in force gain more in accuracy of fire by anchoring than in safety by keeping under way;' but, although he does not say so specifically, he would probably recognise that a ship engaging in the hazardous close-range enterprise he suggests should diminish her risk as much as possible, by keeping under way, at least until the gun-teams on the shore defences had been driven from their batteries. Yet this is not certain, since another of his conclusions is that the average value of ship-armour has been greatly underrated, the conditions of a test in actual practice differing in the armour's favour in a variety of details from those of a set trial of a section of armour-plating. And, to conclude a very imperfect summary of his closely-reasoned deductions, this is his verdict on the machine-guns which were so largely employed by the British fleet :

If mounted in the tops, and used at short range against low parapets, as at Mex, they may be very useful, but in a general engagement at long range (as in the case of the outside fleet, where the fall of the bullets could not be observed and the aim corrected, owing to the distance of the object aimed at and the thickness of the smoke), they cannot be considered as really formidable.

Commander Goodrich speaks in terms of hearty praise of the exertions for rescuing Alexandria from the wholesale destruction which threatened it after the bombardment, made by the blue-jackets and marines of the fleet. It is with becoming modesty that he records the co-operation of a detachment from the American squadron, which landed and did its valuable and effective work under his own command. But he speaks with emphasis, although with restraint, of the neglect of possible contingencies manifested in allowing Sir Archibald Alison's expeditionary force to remain at Cyprus,