MODERN WAR.

Taranaki Daily News, 10 November 1916, Page 6

MODERN WAR.

AN AFFAIR OF APPLIED SCIENCE. BRITISH INTELLECTUAL TRIUMPHS In our praiseworthy desire to stimulate ourselves to the fiercest activity we have sometimes been inclined to attribute to tile enemy more genius than lie possesses. The world has rung with the marvellous applications cf science to warfare made by the German, but the work of the Briton in the same field of technical invention is probably superior in quality to that of the Teuton. Indeed, if we put together all the modern warlike inventions of the Anglo-Celtic races and compare them with the war machinery of the Central Empires, we shall probably find that the Germanic races occupy second or third place in the intellectual field of warfare. A complete comparison is impossible at the time of writing, foi, if it were attempted, too much would be revealed to the enemy. We must, therefore, our survey to matters of published facts, and of these we can only give a small selection.

The mass of detail would fill many volumes. For modern war is entirely an affair of applied science. The so'ldie. is in nimself no more powerful than the primitive savage of the Stone Age. His terrible strength is. due to the fact that behind him are the coalfields, iion-mines. steam-engines, factories, chemical works, power lathes, electrical shops, and a vast host of highly trained workers, researchers, mathematicians, and other men of science. SCIENCE IS THE CHILD OF WAR. The first tool man ever made was a chipped flint for killing his fellow-man and conquering a larger hunting ground with a more abundant food supply. For some hundred thousand years of human history we can trace the very gradual development of the human mind onlv by the stone weapons of slaughter unearthed from the deep dust. From the beginning man has put all he knew into his instruments of war, and the more his knowledge increased, the more terrible became his conflicts.