The artillery officer's training course is more severe than that undergone by any other branch of the service, as, in view of the complicated and responsible nature of his duties, it needs to be. An artillery officer, gaining his commission after the fashion of a British officer who elects to join the Army by way of Sandhurst or Woolwich, goes first to the École Polytechnique, the highest engineering school of France; after completing the course here, the officer of artillery is sent on to the artillery school at Fontainebleau, where a year is spent in further training, and then the youngster is considered competent to take his place as lieutenant in an artillery battery. The percentage of artillery officers gaining their commissions from the ranks is smaller than that of other branches of the service, and it is seldom that such officers reach higher than the rank of captain, for, in order to learn all that is required of the higher ranks of commissioned officer in the artillery, an officer needs to start young, and a course at the École Polytechnique is almost an essential. By the time a man has worked his way through the various grades of non-commissioned officer and is thus eligible for such a course, he is usually too old to take kindly to school work. Altogether, artillery service is not a light business in the French Army--it is not in any army, for that matter. Both gunners and drivers must take themselves seriously, and officers of the artillery must take themselves most seriously of all, with the possible exception of engineer officers. The modern rifle is a complicated weapon when compared with the musket of a hundred years ago; but in comparison with the rifle, the big gun of the Army of to-day has advanced in construction and power to an enormously greater extent. The character of the projectile has changed altogether from the old-fashioned round shot to a missile which is in itself a gun, carrying its own exploding charge and small projectiles within itself. The range of the modern gun is limited only by the necessity to make the gun mobile in the field, and by the range of human sight or power to judge the position of the target. The gunners of to-day, and the officers who command them, must be skilled workmen, possessed of no little mechanical ability in addition to their military qualities. They must be not only soldiers, but artificers, mechanics, engineers, mathematicians--skilled men in every way. The efficiency of the French artillery to-day is largely due to the French turn of mind, which is eminently suited to the solving of those mathematical problems with which the work of those who control the big guns abounds. CHAPTER VIII IN CAMP AND ON THE MARCH