MODERN WAR.

Taranaki Daily News, 17 November 1916, Page 6

MODERN WAR.

AN AFFAIR OF APPLIED SCIENCE. BRITISH INTELLECTUAL TRIUMPH In our praiseworthy desire to ty';iralate ourselves to the fiercest activity \*'e have sometimes 1)0011 inclined to attribute to the enemy more genius than he possesses. The world has rung with the marvellous applications of .science to warfare macle by the uerman, 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 Angint'eltic 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 ths time of writing, for if it. were attempted too much would be revealed to the enemy. We must, therefore, restrict our survey to matters Df published facts, and of these we can only give a small selection. Tlie mass of detail would fill many volumes. For modern war 19 entirely an affair of applied science. The soldier is in himself no more powerful than the primitive savage of the Stone Age. His terrible strength is due to the fart that behind him are the coalfields, ironmines, steam-engines, factories, chemical works, power lathes, electrical shops, and a vast host of highly-train-ed. workers, researchers, mathematicians and other .men of science.

SCIENCE IS THE CHILD OF WAS. The first tool man ever made las a chipped flint for killing his fellow-man and conquering a larger hunting ground with a more abundant food supply. For some hundred thousand yeti.r, of human history we can trace the very gradual development of the human mind only by the stone weapons «of slaughter unearthed from the deep lust. From the beginning man lias put all he knew into his instruments of war, and the more his knowledge increased the more terrible became his conflicts.

War remains the most intense display of a nation's scientific activities, with the general result thai thi people which in time of peace have applied science most thoroughly tc the needs of its life will prove the most powerful on the field of battle. This is, in fact,

what the (Germans continually proclaimed throughout the war, but they are incontestably supreme in scientific activity. We liave flattered their selfconceit ii. the matter by our peculiar habit of taking some enemy or rival as a standard in some achievement, and whipping ourselves up to surpass him in the points in which he seems better than us. Our turn for sclf-castigation is not wholly to be condemned. It preserves us from overweening pride, keeps us alert ind enterprising and bent oij bettering the.progress we have accomplished. On the other band, we must not allow ourselves to be misled by the ideal ot German efficiency in all things, which is only the fabric of a vision that we began to construct towards the close of the Victorian era in order to escape from the errors of midVictorian self-complacency.

MORE INVENTIONS THAN THE GERMANS our special field of war we (have continually shown more inventiveness than the Germans. In . the days of peace we were mainly a nation uf welltrained mechanics and designers of machinery, and instead of building up -an' army, of millions of men, wo defended ourselves chiefly by our mechanical skill and our talent ior devising new machinery. When 'Germany directly threatened our life we did not create new army corps, each of which needed 'ffl.COO men, but we built „"low grey hull with no sign of life visible on it, that floated about the sea like the dismantled wreck of some tramp steamer. Into this sombre raft of steel went everything that modern science, modern invention and modern industry could devise for the dreadful .purpose of human slaughter. Only a thousand men, .most of them trained in intricate scientific work or highly-skilled industrial labor, manned the floating raft of steel and looked after it? steam-engir.es, electrical dynamos, compressed air engines and hydraulic plants. Scarcely anything was done by hand-power; electricity, hydraulic powci, compressed air, and an enormous force of the energy born of oil, moved the vast and exquisite masses of metal.

• EXPERTS AND SPECIALISTS. We continued to call the men sailors, but they >vere really engineers and engineers' mates, and many of them were as highly trained as a scientific specialist in a university. Among them were experts in refrigerating processes, who kept the ammunition cool, and experts in X- v work, not only for surgical purposes on the day of battle, but for studying the quality of cordite by which the guns were fired. Other men wers as keenly practised in the jse of elaborate optical instruments as any astronomer, and the general knowledge of practical mathematics, among the officers was such as could not have been found in any average group of graduates from Oxford, (

MOST DREADFUL WAR iIACKIXS IN THE WORLD. , Ail this 'knowledge and skill vrTc employed on a war machine, the ni'.st dreadful and complete in the world. Ten large guns and some twelve or six- j teen quick-firers, with tubes 'for firing automobile mines from the bowels of the floating machine, constituted its striking power. But the thing ctuld move a3 fast as an ordinary train, ard if the thousand men in it caught -10,000 hostile soldiers meai the shore with their ordinary field artillery of one hundred ans seventy small guns, the land force woyld be. outranged and scattered by the great guns on the floating steel platform that wc call a, battleship. Tfct gunners of the Queen Elizabeth liavs been known to sink an enemy troopship at a range of fifteen miles by firing over a mountain into a sea they could not discern. When, in the year lfll-2, the Germs?, snv that wc wsre determined to maintain our superiority in battleship?, t!iey modified for the time being thsir plsr.s. They could see that in a duel between "Britain ar.d Germany alone we should win. ffhey had an army 'capable of being expanded to eight or nine millions of soldiers, while our chief defence consisted of about 120,000 sailors, living in floating steel gun platforms known r.s Dreadnought battleships and Dread nought battle-cruisers. We. had other warships assistant .tc our great 'iw itMafcflto't it. was .these a».n

| chines that daunted the Germans, and made them see that their army of millions was powerless against us. With our Dreadnoughts we could have cut Germany 'bff from the sea and forced 'her to trade through neutral ports at great expense and increasing difficulties. We should 'have had less trouble with hostile submarines then, because they were hot at the time in such a highlydeveloped state. » GERMAN BRAINS BEATEN BY BRITISH.

Instead of accepting the silent, bloodless . defeat we inflicted 011 them, by showing more inventiveness, enterprise and mechanical skill, the Germans prepared to conquer a large part of our friends' and Allies' territory in Europe, as a preliminary to engaging us at sea with all the industrial resources of Belgium, France, Austria and lPolish Russia, In other words, they admitted that they "could not at the time surpass us in the application of science to warfare, but they aimed at making up, by vaster material resources, larger supplies of trained labor, and a moie tremendous production of naval war material, for their lack of inventiveness. German brains had been beaten by British brains, so the German made war on the rest of Europe with the ultimate view of bringing al! the mineral resources, steel-making, plants and machine tools of Europe against the British Isles. We need not, then, abase ourselves any longer before the idol of German scientifiv efficiency. The German organises but he does not invent, and even his modern power of organisation is based op an adaption of the American trust 6ystem in industrial matters. It i 3 easier to organise than it is to invent, and an inventive race like ours, surrounded by the wealth and power it has won, is apt to await the pressure of circumstances before using the genius it possesses. By the middle of the nineteenth century we 'had manifested a wealth of inventive force that :ould not in every case be turned to profit. We have founded steam-power civilisation, discovered the electric telegraph, the principle of the dynamo; we had laid the foundations of the science of chemistry, gained some idea of the ultimata mystery of the material universe, discovered the ether and the electricai foundation of matter, established geology, and ascertained the main outlines of the evolution of living forms. The impetus to thisavnparalleled explosion of national/-genius was given by our struggle for existen'cie .Jfeinst Napoleon. The great French captain had roused us from our ,eisurely graces and dilettante researches of the eighteenth century,- and compelled us to use the entire force of our mind to preserve our independence, maintain our food supply and increase our wealth as a weapon of war.- Wt fought Napoleon with our neiv steam engine, as-well as with our direct new instrument) of victory, Major Shrapnel's shell, which did ajmost as much as Wellington to win Waterloo. Again, we 'have been roused, after a Continental peace of a hundred years, to display the quality of mind inheriteS from our forefathers. We must admit that we have inherited a much larger wealth of science than our ancestors possessed. But, on the other hand '.ve share our science as fully with Germany as we do with France. The leading nations have equal opportunities in winning and developing that knowledge which is power, and vc have not in reserve so mighty and tremendous an instrument as James Watt, of Glasgow, gave Britain in the days o. her last great struggle for life. We have only the same prime movers that Germany lias, and our new steam engine, the turbine, invented by Sir Charles Parsons, is used in Germany as well as in Britain. Moreover, th.s Germans are able in oqe way to match our lutcst invention in steam powei by means of th£ new German prime mover, the Diesel oil engine. It owes its origin to the inventiveness of an Austrian engineer and the enterprise of the Gcrm.'.n firm of Krupp. In some technical industries, ouch as the manufacture of steel castings, optical, glass and coal-tar products, in which we onco excelled, the Germans far surpassed us. In the old a;.ys, jvhen the resources ot the world were undeveloped, we were the kings of ecai and iron, and with our engine, Bessemer process and Armstrong gun, iron steamers and ironclads, we dominated the earth. Wo were the first of all nations to create an industrial State, and until our American kinsmen and. the Germans copied us and tuilt up great scientific industries we were beyond attack. Simply by our inventiveness anil enterprise we held the greater pari, of mankind in economic dependence upon one small island lying oil' the coast 0 Europe. 1 Trafalgar and Waterloo were only small military districts k tin; generally .peaceful process by which tlie power of Britain was maintained ~n:l extended. Even our possession of coalfields and iron ore was but an incident in expansion of our influence. Other aiiuions had coal and iron, ur.d had been using them for thousands of years. But, trst of all men, the Ar.glo-C'.'it ffiude a machine that couli do the work of of men. He tms machine to his toc.i, loo,".;, niii.s, vehicles and ships, go thai the comparatively small population of .parts of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland acquired a productive power greater than that o'.' the rest of mankind put together. In other words, it was our inventors that made us great. Nelson and Wellington kept the foe from o!ir shores, but it was not their victories that enabled us to overshadow the world for a hundred yearc. No fleet ■could provide us with the food we needed in order to erpatid our numbers, so as to people the larger part United States, Canada, Australia-, -'•e'.v Zealand and part of South Africa, it was James Witt and the en. who followed him who gave us oil;: industrial supremacy, and, by binding th» r.gri'.iiltural nations to us by ov:r e;:trao:cl.narv commercial power, relieved the comparable expansion of th«- Ar.^oCeltic races. • V\ r e are good fighter?., all o. u" lish and "Welsh, Scottish and IriA But there were kings before Agamemnon, and there were first-c-ks;. Sgh-tinr races before the amalgamation e: Angles, Celts and Norse settlers of tl.e Britis.i Isles took to interfering with their neighbors of Western Euroj*. (To be continued).