We find traces of the employment of rockets, both incendiary and explosive, in India in this very year, when some “rocketeers ... threw confusion and dispersion into the masses of the Mahrattas.”[402] Nothing can be more probable: the army of the Mahrattas was an army of cavalry, and horses are terrified by fire in any form. The Indian rocket at this time had a tube of 8” length and 1.5” diameter,[403] and it does not appear to have been a very effective missile. Speaking of our loss during the attack on Seringapatam, 1792, Colonel Dirom says: “(We had) a good many wounded, though in general but slightly, chiefly by rockets.”[404] Within the next few years, however, rockets were much improved, and an eye-witness speaks of the use of “rockets of an uncommon weight” at the siege of Seringapatam, 1799.[405] These were undoubtedly explosive rockets, for Col. Gerrard saw one of them kill three and wound four of our men.[406] Shortly after the taking of Seringapatam the Ordnance Office applied to the Laboratory, Woolwich Arsenal, for the services of some one who understood the manufacture of war rockets. The Laboratory referred the Ordnance to the East India Company, who replied that they knew of no one who possessed such knowledge.[407] This state of things led Colonel Congreve to turn his attention to the subject. It is not correct to say that he brought rockets from India,[408] for he never was there. He knew of course—the whole world knew—that war rockets were employed there: “I knew that rockets were used for military purposes in India, but that their magnitude was inconsiderable and their range not exceeding 1000 yards.”[409] His object was to make large incendiary and explosive rockets with a range of 1000-3500 yards, and he succeeded, perhaps, as well as the materials at his disposal permitted. He never laid claim to the invention of war rockets: “What I have done,” he says, “towards the perfection of this weapon is as much my own as if the original invention of rockets in general were mine.”[410] Oberst-Lieutenant Jähns tells us that, from a certain point of view, the Emperor Caligula’s rockets were on a level with those of Congreve.[411] It may be doubted, however, whether Caligula’s rockets would have produced the same effect as the Congreve rockets at Copenhagen in 1807,[412] or at Walcheren in the same year, when the French Commandant, General Monnet, protested against their use. They did good service at the passage of the Adour in 1813, and at the battle of Leipsig, where Captain Bogue, who commanded the Rocket Brigade, was killed. A French infantry brigade in the village of Paunsdorf, “unable to withstand the well-directed fire (of rockets), fell into confusion, began to retreat,” and ultimately surrendered to the Rocket Brigade.[413] Two years afterwards, at Waterloo, the rockets, under Sergeant Daniel Dunnett, proved very effective.