Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Armour Plates" to "Arundel, Earls of"

of this war was a recrudescence of the idea of "dispersion." This will be noticed later; the more material result of the Boer War, and of the generally increasing specialization in the various functions of the artillery arm, has been the reintroduction of heavy ordnance into field armies. The field howitzer reappeared some time before the outbreak of that war, and the British howitzers had illustrated their shell-power in the Sudan campaign of 1898. During the latter part of the 19th century, siege and fortress artillery underwent a development hardly less remarkable than that of field artillery in the same time. Rifled guns, "long" and "short" for direct and curved fire, formed the siege artillery of the Germans in 1870-71, and with the reduction of the old-fashioned fortresses of France began a new era in siegecraft (see FORTIFICATION AND SIEGECRAFT). At the present time howitzers[2] (B.L. rifled) are the principal siege weapons, while heavy direct-fire guns (see ORDNANCE _passim_) still retain a part of the work formerly assigned to the artillery of the attack. For an account of a siege with modern artillery see Macalik and Langer, _Kampf um eine Festung_, which describes an imaginary siege of Koniggratz. On the whole, it may be said that modern artillery has caused a revolution in methods of fortification and siegecraft, which is little less far-reaching than the original change from the trebuchet to the bombard. ORGANIZATION