The Origin and Services of the 3rd (Montreal)

""won it twice within the period referred to, the Medal will then be competed for bythe five members who shall have been successful in winning it in former years.2nd. Every competitor will point and lay his own gun, and the result willbe declared according to the average distance from the centre of the target, of thewhole number of rounds fired by each, and not on what may perhaps be the bestsingle shot.3rd.The Officers will each year determine what number of rounds shall beallowed to each competitor for that year, and also the range to be adopted."The men of the Battery have always given a creditable account of themselvesat the annual competitions held under the auspices of the Dominion ArtilleryAssociation. In 1879, the target practice took place on the Island of Orleans, andthe programme providedthat each man of the whole detatchment of sixteen was tofire three rounds of common and three of shrapnel shell. Corporal AlexanderOgilvie Hastings had the satisfaction, on this occasion, of making the highest scoreever made up to that time in these competitions, 48 out of a possible 52. CorporalKendall was second with 40 points, and Gunner McKinnon third with 37. Inaddition tothe medal and badge presented by the Dominion Artillery Association,Corporal Hastings was presented with a gold medal by Mr. W. T. Walker, ofSt.Louis, Missouri, a former member of the Battery.The following year Hastings, by that time promoted to be a sergeant, againheaded the list with the score of 46, Sergeant John Marsh being second with 42 andGunner J. McG. Mowat third with 41. The team score was 558, the highest onrecord up to that time. The then Minister of Militia, the Hon. A. P. Caron,specially came to Montreal that year to present the Batterymen with their pri/es.Sergeant Hastings represented the Battery on the first Canadian Artillery team tovisit Shoeburyness, in iSSi.June 7th, 1881, two guns of the Battery participated in the inaugurationof themonument erected at Chambly, in honor of De Salaberry, the Canadian Leonidas,the heroic officer who, at the head of some 400 militiamen, in the war of 1812,inflicteda disastrous defeat upon an invading army of 7,000 men, in the valley ofthe Chateauguay.September 26th, 1881, the Montreal Field Battery performed another of thosenoteworthy acts of international courtesy which have characterized its career.The great neighbouring Republic had been bereft of its President, the braveand good General Garfield, by the hand of a cowardly assassin. The whole world,shocked at the unreasoning brutality of the devilish deed, watched sympatheticallyat the bedside of the suffering President and sympathised with the Americanpeople when his gallant fight against the inevitable came to an end. It was oneof those occasions when the natural unity of the Anglo-Saxon race was manifestedto a sceptical world, and, from the Queen-Empress to the lowliest of her subjectsin the world-wide Empire, went out a feeling of sincere fraternal tosympathy thekindred people of the United States.64