SIR GILBERT'S VERSION 63

men and several officers and soldiers slept in holes in the rocks."1 From this any one would imagine that the carrying of the guns was an idea suggested by the sailors, and that the "many other people" who agreed with General Dundas in calling the idea " childish stuff" included Moore and the soldiers generally. It will be seen that, on the contrary, it was Major Kochler, a gunner, who originally selected the spot for the guns, being at the time in company with General Dundas; that it was Moore who officially applied to General Dundas to get the help of the sailors with tackle to carry up the guns; that General Dundas, whether he in the first instance did or did not use some such impatient expression as Sir Gilbert, very much at second-hand, records, at least fully accepted Kochler and Moore's proposal, and must have applied for the help of the sailors and the tackle. Sir Gilbert's is a very good description of the ordinary methods for such purposes. Either sailors or garrison gunners are familiar with such a use of tackle; and, though it is much to be regretted that in our day field artillery are not practised, as they ought to be, in carrying out, with the help of infantry man-hauling, such operations, yet methods for the purpose have always been laid down in field artillery drill-books. Moore does justice to the splendid zeal and energy of the sailors, and Dundas, in his official report, is enthusiastic as to " the surprising exertions of science and labour " by which the task was achieved, but the story as told by Sir Gilbert is easily to be explained. Any one who has had the experience of collating the accounts of many different men in a combined action knows the tendency of each man to imagine that his own part is the whole, or at least that it is the only part of any i "Life of Sir Gilbert Elliot," pp. 235, 236.