INVENTION AND WAR.
WE have so often been told, and with so little support from experience, that inventions would ultimately make war impossible that it is interesting to have the state- ment furnished with new reasons by a well-known man. The old-fashioned argument was, roughly, that war would become too horrible to be tolerated, and would thus procure its own abolition. Colonel F. N. Maude, who approaches the question armed with information about a new and quite appalling invention which is like a gun, but is not a gun—he writes of it in the new number of the Contemporary Review—is under no delusion about war becoming too awful for mankind to accept it any longer. Every improvement in the range and rapidity of fire, he admits, is counteracted by the reluctance of men to come to close quarters. He thinks, however, that a reduction of the number of wars may come, not through the fear of great losses in life, but through the fear of a paralysing destruction of material. Suppose, for example, there was an implement, which, as we have said, we must not call a gun, but which is in effect a Gargantuan gun, able to throw explosive materials from one European capital to another. What then ? Would that give us pause ? We can hardly bring ourselves to believe in all the qualities of the weapon described by Colonel Maude, who for himself obviously believes in its potential existence; but at least we are open to consider the opinion that if such a thing were ever brought into use it would make war too utterly desolating a business, and too speculative in results, for any nation to feel enough confidence in itself to engage in it unless compelled to do so. We do not believe that this weapon, or any conceivable mechanical invention, could of itself end war; but Colonel Maude apparently does not believe that either.
The argument of human danger may be taken, then, as played out. Man's ingenuity in escaping horrors keeps pace with his ingenuity in providing them. And some horrors undo themselves. Great velocity terrified the world with the notion of death dealt by an invisible means from an invisible enemy; yet with great velocity came the modern nickel-coated bullet which makes a clean, small wound, and even by cauterisation acts to some extent as its own antiseptic. Colonel Maude quotes men who have found visible missiles more unnerving than invisible, and probably most people would agree with them. A volley of arrows fro in a company of old English archers must have been a fearful thing ; more nerve- shaking, one would think, than the largo shells of later days, which could be easily seen in the air, but were not so numerous, and under the menace of which one could lie down with a fair hope of safety. Sir William Russell mentioned in one of his letters from the Crimea that he had counted sixteen shells in the air at one moment. Since then the invisibility of the agencies of death has become almost complete. It is true that modern war makes deep drafts upon courage, because it is a cold-blooded matter to know that you may suddenly fall dead when nothing is in sight but, perhaps, a charming land- scape and sunshine and singing birds. The warrior in old band-to-band conflicts had the compensation of having his blood up. He perhaps developed a fierce personal hatred of the man who stood opposite to him in the enemy's ranks ; he was infuriated by his personal appearance. How often can it have happened in the Boer War that a British soldier went into battle with such feelings, even if he had read a speech by a Jingo orator immediately before P But when all allowance has been made for the exaltation produced by the cut-and-thrust of close-quarter fighting, the old Roman sword, which Colonel Maude mentions, must haye been an awful weapon. Science has surely not improved much on its power to create terror.
In spite of all inventions, the casualties in wars continue to decrease. And let it be remembered that a badly wounded man does not face, as in old days, the certainty of death after agonising, and perhape slow, suffering ; he may be conjured quickly back to life, and in any case be will not suffer a tittle of what a man endured in the cockpit of one of Nelson's ships. Anaesthetics have counterbalanced the awe-inspiring power of most of the lethal engines ; after a certain point pain is under perfect control. The gain is twofold,—the victims of modern war are fewer, and they suffer less. It may be said that the losses at Mukden were greater than in any fight in history. But the battle of Mukden was an affair of a fortnight. As Colonel Maude puts it, at Marston Moor a man's life was only worth four hours' purchase ; at Waterloo three days of eight hours each; and at Mukden a fortnight. At Mukden the Russian losses were thirty thousand killed and a hundred thousand wounded, and the Japanese casualties fifty-two thousand five hundred in all. Colonel Maude does not give any figures, but let us take the Mukden returns and compare them with, say, the battle of Towton Heath. Unless history lies, the Lancastrians lost nearly forty thousand in a battle which lasted a few hours. But if all these arguments did not exist which make a well-maintained fortitude in the face of danger appear likely to last, there would still be the heartening, or at least consoling, reflection for drooping modern men that death is no more than death. "Suppose the worst. Suppose yourself to be the victim," as Matthew Arnold remarked by way of inspiriting his fellow-passengers on the Woodford Branch who were panic-stricken by a series of murders in the district where they lived. Well, the world would still go on, the Underground trains would still be overcrowded, and there would still be the same block of traffic every morning at the Mansion House. One can man oneself with the thought, which is very composing. - It relaxes what Matthew Arnold called "the almost bloodthirsty clinging to life."
The great destroyer of the material of nations to which Colonel Maude refers has been invented by a metallurgist, Mr. Simpson. The application of electricity, it is said, enables it to impart an initial velocity of thirty thousand feet a second. Projectiles of all dimensions can be fired and can be handled under war conditions. No experiments have been possible to show what range is attainable by this velocity, but if the rule holds good that the resistance increases as the square of the velocity, there would be nothing to prevent Mr. Simpson's weapon from throwing shells from London to Paris. This calculation assumes, we suppose, that the pro- jectile would not dissolve in meteoric dust. We can conceive
some force which would draw, or accompany, a missile and take it vast distances at .a more or less uniform speed ; but we are quite sceptical about the value of shots fired at an initial velocity of thirty thousand feet a second. The weapon is said to possess peculiar merits, such as an absence of recoil, smoke, and flash, and cheapness of manu- facture, which may cause it to supersede, and even render foolish, all the conventional implements of war. Modern battleships require enormous structural strength to resist the concussion of heavy guns. But a weapon such as Colonel Maude describes could apparently be fired from any ship capable of carrying its mere weight. "Now, should we become involved in a European war," says Colonel Mande, "the only thing which can be predicted with certainty is that after the first few weeks, or days, every battleship, indeed every warship, will either be at the bottom of the sea or in dock, and for the time being the sea will be free to all, falling ultimately to the Power which can extemporise fighting ships the most rapidly." We feel so sure that this cannot be pre- dicted with certainty that we must OW11 to a lingering hope that Colonel Mande has been too confident in his whole forecast of the possibilities of the Simpson gun. In the American war with Spain much was expected of a gun which fired dynamite; but, although dynamite is the most terrible of explosives, and• theoretically the coast-defences at Santiago de Cuba were as pie-crust before the charges fired from a floating battery, it must be confessed that the result amounted to almost nothing. However, let us admit the possibility that the unexplored forces of Nature will eventually provide such a weapon as Colonel Maude describes. We shall then see whether threats against the material of nations accomplish what has certainly not been accomplished by threats against the human person. M. Bloch prophesied that the modern power of defence would make every great battle end in a stalemate, and that ultimately a war would be ended, if it were ended at all, only by the failure of funds. His prophecy was falsified very quickly by the Russo-Japanese War. We hare yet to see whether the thought of a long-distance bombard- ment of property would be a more effectual restraint on man's aptitude to make war. We doubt it. We suspect that if the worst happened, and a war really took place under the imagined conditions, a nation left in possession of a land of desolate acres and one gun would still be ready to fight a country with a similar amount of desolation and no gun. Nor can we admit the likelihood that "effective desolation" will ever be produced. Inaccuracy of fire increases in direct ratio to the range. If Berlin bombarded London, the British Government (as being essential to the conduct of the affairs of State) might be forced by public opinion to seek safety in an underground Council Chamber—we commend the headline "The Cabinet in the Coal-bole" to our enterprising contemporaries in the daily Press—but we hazard the guess that a good number of less important persons would parade the streets in compara- tive safety. After all, what is "the all-dreaded thunder stroke" but heaven's bombardment of earth at a thousand, or maybe ten thousand, miles' range P
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