Arms and Man

I

SPEAKING in the House of Lords as a former Secretary of War, Lord Haldane last January confessed to a certain remissness on the part of the British nation. ‘We have been behindhand,’ he said, ‘ in the application of science to industry. The position to-day, however, whether it be in explosives, shells, or rifles, is a very much better position than it was a little time ago.'

That is encouraging. The implied assumption that the first application of science should be directed to arms, and that industry naturally means the manufacture of destructive weapons, may, it is true, startle the economist; but it agrees quite naturally with the history of mankind. The discoveries of science have been applied with most vital eagerness to warfare. To the construction of arms mankind has always devoted a superlative energy, often its finest artistic power; and now Lord Haldane tells us that England maintains the tradition.

I suppose the rule that it is not the proper thing to kill other people at discretion grew very slowly; but still, even in early times, it was recognized as painful or unwise to kill members of one’s own family or tribe or race. But with strangers and foreigners it was different, and it has remained different. War is the killing of foreigners as sanctioned by the state. Under the sanction of the state, killing, which otherwise would be murder, becomes war. Under the sanction of the state, a subject is commended for deeds which otherwise would hang him. The more killing he commits, the more he is applauded; and if he refuses to kill under the sanction of the state, in most ancient and modern communities he is himself hanged for committing no murder.

The original instruments of this political and admired slaughter were, no doubt, the teeth, claws, and muscles which primitive people had developed before they became distinctly human, but which are now employed chiefly in private and domestic differences. That was ‘ fighting tooth and nail,’ as we say still in memory of those jolly old days. But, like the apes who fling stones and cocoanuts at the passing traveler with malignant intent, man early discovered the advantage of weapons. Sometimes he struck with thigh-bones, logs, or heavy stones fitted to cleft sticks. Sometimes he pierced his opponents with pointed boughs or flints carefully sharpened to enter a hairy skin. It was an immense advance when he found that a stick strained into a curve by a sinew and suddenly released would throw another stick for several yards, killing the enemy at a safe and comfortable distance. The foundations of human warfare were thus securely laid. To kill by striking or by throwing — with a view to one of these two means science, as applied to the industry of arms, has consistently worked.

When science discovered the superiority of metals over flints, the sword and spear came quickly. Sharper arrows flew, and the clash of bronze and iron sounded upon helmet, breastplate, greaves, and shield. The British long bow killed at 250 yards. At an elevation of 45 degrees, the steel crossbow (which, however, had to be stretched by a windlass or wheelcrank — a lengthy process) threw its foot-long bolt of two and one half ounces over 300 yards with good effect. To withstand such archery the armor of knight and horse became so thick that neither could move with rapidity, and an unhorsed rider lay helpless as a turned turtle. Still more remarkable was the scientific application of the spring in the catapult and ballista. A pole or ‘ arm,’ 50 or 60 feet long, strained back by windlasses against a spring of horsehair or sinew in twisted skeins, was suddenly released by a catch. Springing to the perpendicular, it struck against a horizontal crossbar, and flung the missile with which its head was loaded violently forward. A catapult, called a ‘war wolb’ in Edward Ts time, hurled a weight of 100 pounds for 300 yards through the air. Some must have been even more powerful, for Froissart mentions the unhappy case of a messenger returned at express speed by a catapult over his town walls, but arriving dead. It seems to have been a common practice to throw the dead bodies of men and even of horses into beleaguered cities, in the hope of breeding pestilence, — the bodies being first trussed up into convenient pellets. And the heads of messengers wrere thrown in like manner, the rejected terms being firmly attached to their skulls, and no further answer deemed necessary.¹

Add the battering ram to the sword, the spear, the club, the arrow, and the catapult, and then the list of weapons which for ages dictated the manoeuvres of military tactics is almost complete. By the fourteenth century, science and the adorning arts appeared to have done their utmost for the industries of killing in assault or defense. No one suspected a change, when suddenly it came. One by one all the splendid weapons, except the sword and spear, became ‘survivals,’ to be swept gradually into the scrap-heap or museum. Some have lately thought that even the sword and spear wrould be reduced to merely literary and symbolic use within our time, — as wThen Mr. Asquith exclaims, ‘We will not sheathe the sword,’ or as when a young man describes a girl as ‘the captive of his bow and spear.’

II

The change came when some one (a monk of the church, they say) discovered that saltpetre, charcoal, and sulphur, pounded and pressed together, would expand into gas at the touch of fire and fling things violently about. Thereupon, applied science invented a long tube of narrow boards, clamped them together with iron rings, ladled powder from a bucket down the mouth with a spoon, rammed a ball of iron on top of the powder, set flame to a hole at the back of the tube, and with horrible noise discharged the ball with such violence that at 200 yards it smashed through the thickest armor and laid a knight level with a varlet. A smaller tube of brass, called a hand-gun or hand-cannon, and rested against a man’s shoulder by a wooden stock, was discharged in the same way, and with a similar leveling effect.

Then science set to work upon the firing spark, and evolved the wheel-lock (a rough wheel revolving against iron pyrites) and the matchlock (ignited by a slow match of tow boiled in vinegar). This matchlock was the main arm of Cromwell’s infantry, though he still kept the pike for nearly half his men, and gave firelocks (a carbine and two pistols worked by a wheel) to some of his cavalry, at all events to the officers. Two or three yards of match were wound round the body, and a foot or two held in the left hand, both ends being kept alight in action or hours of danger, so that troops were sometimes betrayed at night by glowing points like ends of lighted cigarettes. Each man carried twenty bullets in his pouch, and one or two in his mouth. After due preparation (which took about three minutes) he could with luck discharge a bullet nearly 400 yards by elevating the barrel. But wind or rain often balked his efforts, and the spark flashed in the pan. Early in the Civil War, the rest which was used to support the barrel disappeared. Cromwell also abolished the heavy cuirass, relic of armor’s glory, and advised his men to hold their fire till within 20 paces. His cannon or heavy culverins threw a 20-pound ball 2100 paces at high elevation, or 400 paces point-blank, about ten times an hour. But the demi-culverins, sakers, minions, and drakes flung a lighter ball about every four minutes. The big culverins were drawn by eight horses, but oxen were often used, as by the Boers.²

The flintlock, a Spanish invention, was the next advance of science. It was introduced by Dutch William into England about 1690, and its name of Brown Bess was perhaps the British soldier’s affectionate corruption of the Dutch word bus or barrel (the same that we find in ‘arquebus’ and ‘blunderbuss’). About the same time, at Bayonne, the spear-point which used to be fixed over the muzzle for the final charge was constructed on a socket so as to leave the muzzle free for firing. Brown Bess and the bayonet — ‘ that wise virgin,’ as Clausewitz called it— remained the chief infantry weapons about one hundred and fifty years, and were used in the wars of Marlborough, Frederick, and Napoleon. The musket (the same word as ‘ mosquito ’) was fairly trustworthy in aimed fire up to 200 yards, and might be fatal at a much greater distance. It could be fired about three times a minute, and with iron ramrods and rigid drill Frederick got seven times a minute out of it. Each of his three (or sometimes six) ranks ran back when it had fired, so as to load again while the other ranks kept the firing up. Skirmishers were also advanced during the last part of the eighteenth century, and a company of grenadiers armed with hand-bombs was added to each battalion.

Apart from the marvel of his strategy, Napoleon’s chief innovations on the actual field were the first design of the army corps (at Marengo), the combination of guns, horse, and foot as separate arms working in cooperation but apart, and the massing of guns into batteries or brigades of batteries. His round shot ranged up to 2000 yards, and was strictly effective at 1200. After preliminary pounding, he brought the guns in thick masses up to a 300 or 500 yards’ range, and fired ‘case’ at ten rounds a minute until a gap was hewn through a weak but vital point of the enemy’s line. He then sent in the cavalry, followed by massed columns of foot, which he deployed into line at the decisive moment, so long as his armies were at their best, though in later years the infantry continued to advance in columns and even, it seems, shoulder to shoulder. It was owing to the short range and the comparatively small numbers engaged (about 70,000 against 74,000 a side till Blucher’s Prussians began to arrive) that Waterloo was fought on a front of only two and three quarters miles, and with a depth of something like one mile, so that the whole field of action was plainly visible, and the leaders, including the greatest soldier of history, could be identified from the opposite side.

What a change just one century of applied science has effected! The last was conspicuously the century of science, and the steps in the application of science to slaughter were marked and increasingly rapid. Ten years before Waterloo, the Reverend Alexander Forsyth, Presbyterian minister in Aberdeen, gave the Christian world a percussion cap. The invention was not adopted for more than thirty years, but it solved the difficulty of the spark. As far as causing an explosion went, men could in future.kill one another in wind and rain quite as well as in fine weather. The rifling or spiral grooving inside the barrel (from the Low-German rifle, or groove) in order to give the bullet or ball a spin, like the spin which, I suppose, keeps the planets steady, was the discovery of an unknown sixteenth-century genius. But, except by hunters, who usually can take their time, it was not much used, owing to the difficulty of forcing a bullet down a muzzle just too narrow to receive it. At first the bullet was pounded down with a wooden mallet. Then a conical bullet, with a cavity or plug at the lower end, and lubricated with tallow and beeswax, was rammed tight and expanded by the explosion so as to take the grooving. The Crimean War was fought with rifles made on this pattern, sighted to 1000 yards, and effective up to 500.

But Prussia (terribly£ efficient ’ Prussia!) had already adopted another sixteenth-century invention, hitherto regarded as too dangerous for practical use. In the disturbances of 1848, and the brief but murderous wars with Denmark (1864) and Austria (1866), the Prussians appeared armed with the ‘needle-gun.’ It loaded at the breech instead of the muzzle, the advantage being partly in speed of fire but chiefly in position; for the soldier could now load lying down, without exposing all his body to the enemy’s aim. In imitation, France adopted the chassepot, which had a longer accurate range, — about 600 yards, — but was easily folded and thrown out of order. Her collapse before the Prussians in 1870 was not, however, due to the rifle’s defects, but to failure in artillery, organization, supply, housekeeping, and generalship. In 1867, England had hurriedly constructed the Snider, and in 1871 followed it up with the Martini, a far superior weapon to needle-gun or chassepot. It had a muzzle velocity of 1350 feet a second, and could be fired unaimed at 25 rounds a minute. For a long generat ion it held its place, and in spite of a kicking and uncertain temper, it died lamented.

America killed it with the ‘repeater’ or magazine rifle, — America, whose ‘hunters’ had also been the first to use the rifle for killing men. The magazine, loaded by ‘clip’ or ‘charger’ with five or more cartridges at a time; smokeless powder, a French invention, chiefly composed of guncotton, or cotton soaked in nitric acid, and free from ‘fouling’; the consequent ‘small bore,’ or calibre of less than .45 inch (in our rifle the bullet is .303 inch, in the German .311 inch),—these were the applications of science which rapidly produced a complete change in‘small arms’ and so in tactics. ‘Lebel,’ ‘Mauser,’ ‘Mannlicher,’ ‘Mark III,’ and ‘3 line,’ — the models now used by the powers at war, — are alike in the advantages of small recoil, light bullet, high velocity, flat trajectory, and rapid fire. We may put the average initial velocity at little less than 2000 feet a second; the rapidity of unaimed fire at two seconds a round, or of aimed fire at four seconds; and the effective range at 1400 yards, with a possible range of twice that distance.

Though the hard casing of nickel and copper wears the rifle’s grooving, about 8000 rounds can be fired without affecting the aim. On the other hand, at short range the high velocity appears to turn the bullet sideways or clean round on contact. It gives almost the effect of a dum-dum or’ explosive ’ bullet, and I have seen wounds in which the sharp point was found to be directed backwards. The large use of copper raises a more practical difficulty, especially for the German mind. It has been estimated that the German armies fire, on a low average, 26,000,000 rounds of rifle bullets a day, and 180,000 shells, or say 150,000, to be safe. Together (adding 30 tons for machine-gun cartridges) this amounts to 441 tons of pure copper and brass (72 per cent copper) a day, which, after making all deductions, brings Germany’s needs for copper up to at least 120,000 tons a year, while on an average she produces only 26,000 tons.³ No wonder she is melting down the copper spikes of her helmets, copper kettles, pans, and brass ornaments; or that she cries out when her enemies seize a copper cargo on its innocent way across the ocean to a neutral port.

Since Napoleon’s time the big gun has undergone changes similar to the rifle’s as regards percussion, rifling, smokeless powder, and high velocity; but the projectiles have become larger as well as far more explosive. The ordinary French and German field guns are about the same size (75 mm. and 77 mm. respectively, or a little under and over 3-inch, an inch being equal to 25.4 millimetres). The shells are 13-pounders, and may be set to explode on percussion or as shrapnel in the air. The British 3.3-inch field gun throws an 18pound shell and is sighted up to 6100 yards. Each gun, with its limber and supply wagons, requires 18 horses, so that a battery of six guns needs 108. Our field guns are now ’quick-firing,’ that is, fitted with apparatus to check recoil, so that the gun can be fired repeatedly without relaying.

To stick to the enemy’s guns, lest our own secrets (so well known to the enemy) should be betrayed, the Germans use guns, howitzers, and mortars of various sizes. A howitzer has a smaller charge and so is lighter than a gun, and a mortar proper is a smooth-bore, muzzle-loading gun, with fixed elevation; but these distinctions seem to be dying out.

Their largest weapon is the almost mythical 16.8-inch gun or howitzer, supposed to throw a 2000-pound shell something between seven and nine miles. Doubts have been expressed as to this monster’s existence, and, according to one high authority, only two at most have been made, and perhaps these have not yet been fired. For they require to be bolted down to a solid cement platform, prepared long beforehand.⁴ To be sure, our spy-maniacs have discovered numerous platforms of the kind ready prepared and scattered up and down our own country under the pretext of house-foundations and factory floors. But spy-maniacs see Germans in the moon at which they bay. We have seen, however, an apparently genuine photograph of an Austrian 12-inch siege howitzer, weighing 28 tons with its carriage, and throwing a shell of over 1000 lbs.⁵ We also hear of a Krupp 11.2-inch ‘mortar’ used on the field, a 10-inch howitzer throwing a 760-pound shell at a range of about six miles, an 8.4-inch, a 4.13-inch (apparently one of the commonest), and various other sizes. Various also are the names by which the British soldier knows their shells, — ‘Jack Johnsons,’ ‘Black Marias,’ ‘Woolly Bears,’ — but probably he does not make careful distinction as to the measurement of an inch in the shell’s base when one bursts near him. For a Belgian priest assured me that he saw a horse carried a long distance (he said, 200 yards!) by the mere explosive force of one, and lodged in a tree. I myself measured the pit that one had made in the middle of a paved road, and found it nearly 20 feet deep. And during the bombardment of Dixmude I was shown a ghastly hole in which a shell had buried, as I was told, the fragments of 27 men and some horses, inextricably mixed. Allowing for all exaggeration, the effect of scientific industry is great.

I am not dealing here with naval arms, but in a description of a naval 12inch gun, Sir Percy Scott has told us that it will penetrate 8-inch armor at 13 miles with a shell of over 900 pounds. The shell traverses five miles in 12 seconds. For an extreme range of 15 miles, it must reach an elevation of 22,500 feet, or about 7000 feet higher than Mont Blanc; and its splash raises 2000 tons of water.⁶ Yet the 12-inch is not by three inches our largest naval gun. Time would fail to tell of machine guns, or rifles in water-jackets, which by the turning of a handle mow down men as a reaper mows a cornfield; or of the trench howitzer, whose huge spherical shell projects like an iron bubble from the muzzle, and is fired in a loose stem; or of the ‘flying mine,’ a cylinder of melinite thrown silently up to 500 yards by compressed air alone; or of the ‘star shell’ that glides liquidly up into the night like a Roman candle, and serves as a searchlight to discover the enemy’s devices; or of the ‘hand grenade,’ an explosive canister fixed on a stick like a rocket, and flung among the enemy just before an assault; or of the corrosive liquid which the Germans play upon our trenches as with a fire-hose.

III

Such are some of the scientific contraptions by which death is now’ secured; and to assist this industry of destruction science has further put a network of railways to use, and sends transport motors rushing with troops and ammunition and supplies and dying men over the more ancient network of highways. Miles from the field, the general gives command by telephone. Through the very air move new instruments of reconnaissance, rangefinding, and assault. At the height of 10,000 feet, and with a speed of nearly 00 miles an hour, the Zeppelin carries men and explosives 600 miles, or remains stationary and sends its wireless observations 150 miles through empty air. The quicker, cheaper, and more trustworthy aeroplane does scouting work; signals ranges by puffs of smoke; bombards from the heavens with violent percussion bombs, incendiary shells fitted with candles of celluloid, phosphorus, and wax; or rains down upon crowded troops or citizens the sharp pointed flechettes — darts of steel which pierce their way through skull, and body, and horse.

Certainly man has every reason to be grateful to science for her assistance in the favorite pursuit by which for the most part he reckons history. Nor is he remiss in taking advantage of her progress. This war is probably the greatest and most destructive, as well as the most scientific, since creation. Mr. Asquith tells us that 6,000,000 men are now trying to kill one another as fast as possible in Europe, and his is a low estimate. There they stand, in long opposing lines. On one front the battle line is said to extend nearly 400 miles; on the other nearly twice as far. In the west, sheer numbers and the accuracy of industrious science almost prevent movement. For nearly five months now ⁷ those men, in their effort to kill and escape death, have lived below the surface, like rabbits or primeval troglodytes. They have floundered in oozing mud, — ‘the fifth element,’ as Napoleon called it. They have stood day and night in trenches, soaked to their middle by cold water, until their limbs swelled purple and threatened gangrene. The concussion of exploding shells has driven their eyes into their heads so that they see no more; shock and horror have struck them speechless. Their reason is overturned; some weep without ceasing; some gibber like ghosts. Limbs are scattered over the countryside. Hot-smelling blood pours from their bodies in unexpected quantity. Caught in the entanglements of barbed wire, — another industry of science, — they hang like crows on a gamekeeper’s gallows until they rot. The air stinks of filth and corpses. Colonel Repington of the Times has called this scientific war ‘the butchery of the unknown by the unseen.’

I have myself been present at the destruction of two singularly beautiful towns — Dixmude and Ypres. Their lovely streets and buildings can never be seen again, for they are now reduced to heaps of stones crumbled by scientific appliances. Other towns and villages once prosperous I have seen after their ruin was complete: churches, halls, and homes all desolate and destroyed. But to me life stands before property, — even the irrevocably lost property of ancient beauty, — and it is of life’s destruction that I think when I contemplate the triumph of this progressive industry. I feel like Gulliver when he corrected the ignorance of the noble horse, his master among the Houyhnhnms. For the horse refused to believe the possibility of human slaughter in war; whereupon Gulliver continued: —

‘ Being no stranger to the art of war, I gave him a description of cannons, culverins, muskets, carabines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments, sea fights; ships sunk with a thousand men, twenty thousand killed on each side; dying groans, limbs flying in the air, smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horses’ feet; flight, pursuit, victory; fields strewed with carcases kept for food to dogs, and wolves, and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning and destroying.

‘And to set forth the valour of my own dear countrymen, I assured him that I had seen them blow up a hundred enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship, and beheld the dead bodies come down in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of the spectators.’

If we multiply the figures and the horror, that description holds good of the present war, and though we grant that passion rather than reason drives mankind, it is hard to name the passion strong enough to drive men into scenes like those enacted upon the German frontiers now. A man wants a deal of passion ‘pour se faire tuer,’ to use Napoleon’s phrase. There is little of mere ferocity in modern war. Rage and hatred hardly exist between the combatants, though they are studiously encouraged between the nations. What urges men to die in such numbers that the Germans are said to send the bodies in bales of four to the burning? Shame, I suppose, chiefly, — a corporate shame so strong that a man would rather die than endure the taunt or thought of shirking when his comrades die. Love of adventure still counts for something; confidence in officers, and the mere impossibility of doing anything different from the rest of the section or battalion, — those count too. In the minds of some also there may be present a conscious or half-realized passion for a splendid cause, however imaginary or unjustified. The Germans, for instance, have been taught from their cradles to believe that the war would be fought for their national existence, and certainly they believe it now. M. Cambon, the French ambassador in London, speaking at the Guildhall last November, told the Allies that they were fighting for our ideals of humanity and freedom. Few of our soldiers give ideals a 1 hought, but they are convinced that they kill and are killed for something that is ‘all right.’ And if it is true that this war, which looks like devilish insanity, is really fought for ideals of humanity and freedom, and if for their sake all these thousands of young and hopeful men are being killed, .all these thousands of women are being driven from their burning or devastated homes, starved, destitute, ravished, made mothers by violent and unknown enemies, compelled to inhabit caves and hedges with their children huddled round them in filthy and indecent barbarism; then it is for us to see that those ideals of humanity and freedom are not encroached upon by any government, even by our own, but that in war-time we maintain them and advance their realization even more vigilantly than during that never-ending conflict on their behalf which is the warfare of peace.