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Elements of Military Art and Science: Or, Course Of Instruction In Strategy, Fortification, Tactics Of Battles, &C.; Embracing The Duties Of Staff, Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery, And Engineers; Adapted To The Use Of Volunteers And Militia; Third Edition; With Critical Notes On The Mexican And Crimean Wars.Halleck, H. W. (Henry Wager)

Philosophy

Elements of Military Art and Science: Or, Course Of Instruction In Strategy, Fortification, Tactics Of Battles, &C.; Embracing The Duties Of Staff, Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery, And Engineers; Adapted To The Use Of Volunteers And Militia; Third Edition; With Critical Notes On The Mexican And Crimean Wars.

Name: Elements of Military Art and Science: Or, Course Of Instruction In Strategy, Fortification, Tactics Of Battles, &C.; Embracing The Duties Of Staff, Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery, And Engineers; Adapted To The Use Of Volunteers And Militia; Third Edition; With Critical Notes On The Mexican And Crimean Wars.
Author: Halleck, H. W. (Henry Wager)

Halleck, H. W. (Henry Wager)

Military art and science

"The best officers and finest soldiers were obliged to sacrifice
themselves in a lamentable manner, to compensate for the negligence and
incapacity of a government, always ready to plunge the nation into war,
without the slightest care of what was necessary to obtain success. The
sieges carried on by the British in Spain were a succession of
butcheries; because the commonest materials, and the means necessary to
their art, were denied the engineers." Colonel J.T. Jones writes in
nearly the same terms of the early sieges in the Peninsula, and with
respect to the siege of Badajos, adds in express terms, that "a body of
sappers and miners, and the necessary fascines and gabions, would have
rendered the reduction of the work certain."[38] Soon after this siege a
body of engineer troops arrived from England, but their number was
insufficient, and Wellington, having learned by sad experience the
importance of engineer troops, ordered a body of two hundred volunteers
to be detached from the line, "and daily instructed in the practice of
sapping, making and laying fascines and gabions, and the construction of
batteries, &c." The siege of Ciudad Rodrigo, which immediately followed
this organization, was conducted with greater skill and success than any
other till nearly the close of the war; and all military writers have
attributed this result to the greater efficiency of the engineer force
engaged in the siege. This arm was now gradually increased, and the last
year of the war the engineer force with the English army in the field
consisted of seventy-seven officers, seven assistant-engineers and
surveyors, four surgeons and assistants, one thousand six hundred and
forty-six sappers, miners, artificers, &c., one thousand three hundred
and forty horses and one hundred and sixty carriages.

[Footnote 38: Colonel Pasley states that only _one and a half yards of
excavation_, per man, was executed _in a whole night_, by the untrained
troops in the Peninsular war; whereas an instructed sapper can easily
accomplish this _in twenty minutes_, and that it has been done by one of
his most skilful sappers, at Chatham, _in seven minutes!_]

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