The mechanical swarm: disposability and the evolution of the drone in modern conflict

“ The drones are no more use, for the queen will not fly out again, and these idle bees will never do any work in the hive. So the worker-bees begin to kill them, falling upon them, and stinging them to death, and as the drones have no stings they cannot defend themselves, and in a few days there is not a drone, nor even a drone-egg, left in the hive. This massacre seems very sad to us, since the poor drones have never done any harm beyond being hopelessly idle. ”

“ But the compass has again settled down to good behaviour, and we are able to get a true course before we climb back to the sheltering whiteness.
A flight inside the clouds is far from pleasant. We are hemmed in by a drifting formlessness that looks like thin steam, but, unlike steam, imparts a sensation of coldness and clamminess. The eye cannot penetrate farther than about a yard beyond the wing tips. Nothing is to be seen but the aeroplane, nothing is to be heard but the droning hum of the engine, which seems louder than ever amid the isolation. ”

“ Three far-away specks grow larger and larger. As they draw near, we are able to recognise them as our buses, by the position of their struts and the distinctive drone of their engines.
Four machines crossed the lines on the expedition; where is the fourth? The crew of the other three do not know. They last saw the missing craft ten miles behind the Boche trenches, where it turned west after sending up a Very's light to signal the necessity of an immediate return. There were no Huns in sight, so the cause must have been engine trouble. ”

“ We shall soon regard the heroic tale of how men once exposed their defenceless bodies to machine-gun fire and shells, and depended for the élan of their assault upon the weight of human limbs and the endurance of human muscles as almost legendary.
“Most people think of a Tank as a rather ludicrous but effective engine of war. They look upon it as a409 mechanical novelty, and are content to assume that the Tank of to-day is not much of an improvement upon the earliest Tanks of the Somme battle, and that it is a war implement of indifferent importance. ”

“ But it is equally untrue to tell of modern warfare waged with picric acid and electric wires in the same spirit. The romance and glamour of warfare in the past are grinning lies when transferred to latter-day warfare, where long-drawn fronts of flesh and blood are opposed to machines of precision and the triumphs of the chemical laboratory. The anachronism becomes nothing less than the deliberate falsification of history. Dynamite and machine-guns, not the writer, have turned the "Field of Honor" into a "Human Slaughter-House," where regiments are wiped out by pressing an electric button. ”

“ How the experts have, day in, day out, been inventing and constructing new marvels of mechanism. The mechanical side of war has been raised to a high standard of genius and a fine art. Two hundred and forty bullets and more to the minute! What a marvel of mechanism one of those machine-guns is. You set it buzzing, and it spurts out bullets thicker than rain can fall. And the automaton licks its lips hungrily and sweeps from right to left. It is pointed on the middle of the body, and sprays the whole firing-line with one sweep. It is as though Death had scrapped his scythe for old iron ”

“ Two days in the train getting to Calais—and Lord! the straw and filthiness in their wounds! And we've been told our next War'd be carried out on an absolutely Aseptic Basis, and here we are back in 1900!"
"Not quite," said Saxham. "Wounds like these were never made by Boer shrapnel. Human bodies shattered beyond imagination by High Explosive, rank among the triumphs of Modern Science. After the Stone Age and the Iron Age, the Golden Age and the Age of Shoddy has come the Age of Militant Chemistry. Martianism, in a word." ”

“ Its huge wheels narrowly missed a dead fighter slewed across the way. Its tail went up.
Naturally, the queen ships wouldn't be dependent on the nerve-center of the hive that had spawned them; for each of them carried within itself the full-grown robot brain, the nucleus of a new hive....
Shooting began again raggedly, the gunners caught unawares. Perhaps the great machine was hit—but to stop it would take more than one or two hits.
It reached and passed the end of the runway, its wheels barely clearing the ground as the paved strip ended. ”

“ Somewhere it will all be to do over again." Dworn glanced toward the empty west, whither the queen flier had disappeared—where, perhaps, by now it would have crash-landed two or three hundred miles away, to spew forth its cargo of pygmy workers and (if the inhabitants or the area where it descended didn't discover and scotch it in time) to construct more workers, fighters, a hive no less formidable than the one that had perished today.
Dworn said, brow thoughtfully furrowed: "But maybe there's a good reason, even for the drones. Maybe they serve a purpose...." ”

“ The slightest sign of weakness in a machine led to its instant condemnation and destruction, for if it should develop in mid-air into a serious fault it might cost the life of the aviator and even a serious disaster to the army which he was serving. As the war went on the period of service of a machine became even briefer, for with the growing demand for faster and more quickly controllable machines everything was sacrificed to lightness and speed. ”

“ Now the swiftest and fairest steam-engine in the world is not for ever young; it grows obsolete and ends, after a short life, on the scrap-heap. That is to say, where usefulness enters, this spirit of mystery, of eternal youth, is put to flight. And there is yet another element of classical beauty which is equally at variance with your modern conception of it: the element of authority. Beholding the Praxitelean Eros, the veriest ruffian feels compelled to reverence the creator and his work. ”

“ Every time that they reached the Russian lines horrible mêlées, in which even the wounded fought to the death, took place. No quarter was given. Pairs of corpses were found clinging to each other, the teeth of the men being buried in their adversaries' throats and their fingers in their eyes as they had expired. In the last attack the 9th Japanese Division was sent forward in two columns, each composing a brigade, and when the first gave way under the avalanche of iron, the general commanding the second fired upon and exterminated it. ”

“ In darkness a company begins its labor in unison. Guided by clever engineers, the picks advance through the blackness; the shovelers smartly after. The Russian searchlight swings menacingly to play upon the little group. A shell hurtles in. A dozen men fall, some never to rise again. Up with the first aid, down with the stretchers, to the rear with the victims. Advance another squad—on goes the hundred. So for two months—and then through the finished trenches the rest of the army walked impudently in the broad sun, laughing at those useless bullets singing so saucily overhead. ”

“ When our comrades came up, we found that all the Chinese able to flee had fled; fourteen of them, however, and eight or nine men of ours, were lying pressed against and on top of one another in a narrow space. All, dead and wounded alike, were carried out; the place was blocked up at once, and the countermine that had taken so much time and work on our part was filled in. When the dead [Pg 195] and wounded were examined two legionaries and two engineers were found dead, four legionaries and an Annamite tirailleur wounded, ten Chinese killed outright, four just alive. ”

“ For him eighteen years of a sheltered, tutored existence, four years of college, twelve months in a logging camp, three months of inconceivable happiness—and the war.
The Great War—which in five years was to bestow upon his country, at the price of many lives and out-poured treasure, such priceless victories as a scramble for oil and a squabble over debts!
CHAPTER XVIII
When men walk often in the shadow of death they rise superior to its dread aspect, or they become indifferent to it, or they succumb to its ghastly presence and welcome it as a relief from unendurable suspense. ”

“ COOPERATION BETWEEN ARTILLERY, INFANTRY, MACHINE-GUN COMPANIES, AND TRENCH MORTAR BATTERIES.—The defense of any line depends largely on the cordial cooperation of all officers responsible for the different means of defense. Every opportunity is to be taken by officers of artillery, infantry, machine-gun companies, and trench mortar batteries of becoming personally acquainted with each other and gaining a knowledge of each other's methods. ”

“ Should the enemy attack and occupy any portion of our trenches he will be immediately counter attacked and driven out by the nearest body of troops. All ranks must clearly understand that counter attacks made at once and without hesitation will usually be sucessful, even if made by small numbers, but that a counter attack, once the enemy has been given time to establish himself, is a very difficult and costly operation. ”

“ The desert land below the cliffs crawled with them, a mixed multitude of constantly increasing numbers, girding themselves for war.
Ferocious predatory machines—spiders, wheel-bugs, scorpions—formidable in their armor and bristling with guns, lay alongside the more pacific slugs and caterpillars and snails which in ordinary times were their natural prey, and were freely fuelled and provisioned out of the stores which normally their possessors would have fought to the death to safeguard against the despoilers.... ”

“ And he had learned in one bitter lesson that unhappiness and economic inequality go hand in hand.
And so Roger dreamed his dream. For many years it was such a mad seeming dream that he was ashamed to speak of it, even to Ernest. And yet it was simple enough in its first outlines.
This was, Roger told himself, a machine age. The more perfect became man's use of machinery, the more leisure could he have and the more wealth. Ultimately man's efforts must concentrate on the effort to find power with which to drive the world's machinery. Coal was disappearing, water power was coming into its own. ”

“ In fact, now he remembered that, when they had entered the spider-vehicle, the girl had pushed a button that apparently started the engine. Spiders, then, died and came to life again every day—a startling notion.
But the beetles—Among the thoughts that tumbled disjointedly through Dworn's head in this awful moment was a clear vision of the night, five years ago, when his [Pg 33] machine-existence had begun: when, in the horde's encampment by the sea a thousand miles from here, the beetle's last seam had been welded, and its engine set going with the appropriate ritual of birth.... ”

“ The apparatus will be one of specifically great power, but only a few individuals will be required to operate it. This evolution will bring more and more into prominence a machine or mechanism with the fewest individuals as an element of warfare, and the absolutely unavoidable consequence of this will be the abandonment of large, clumsy, slowly moving, and unmanageable units. Greatest possible speed and maximum rate of energy-delivery by the war apparatus will be the main object. ”

“ They are too antagonistic to coalesce."
"But there is abundant beauty and grandeur in modern American life," said the millionaire, "quite apart, I mean, from that of the natural scenery. A fine steam-engine, for instance—I call that a beautiful thing, perfectly adapted to its end. Is its beauty really so antagonistic to that of your civilization?"
"I know that some excellent persons have been writing lately about the beauty of a swift-gliding motor-car and things of that kind. They are right, in one sense of the word. For there is a beauty to mechanical fitness which no art can enhance. ”

“ It is possible that should this war run into the indefinite future we may see aircraft (p. 132) built on ponderous lines and heavily armoured, and performing in the air some of the functions that the British "tanks" have discharged on the battlefields. But at the end of three years of war, and at the moment when aërial hostilities seemed to be engaging more fully than even before the inventive genius of the nations, and the dash and skill of the fighting flyers, the tendency is all toward the light and swift machine. ”

“ Engine-trouble or loss of stability over enemy territory means almost infallible capture or death for the pilot of a bombing aeroplane. Yet in cases of disablement, rather than come down on the ground and suffer themselves or their machine to be taken prisoner, it is their gallant tradition to try to struggle out to sea. Here they stand about as much chance of life as a pheasant winged above a lake, but the machine sinks before German hands can touch it. ”

“ But the force of this new principle does not wholly reside in its destructiveness. Its advent introduces into warfare an element which never existed before—a fighting-machine without men as a means of attack and defense. The continuous development in this direction must ultimately make war a mere contest of machines without men and without loss of life—a condition which would have been impossible without this new departure, and which, in my opinion, must be reached as preliminary to permanent peace. ”

“ But the art I have evolved does not contemplate merely the change of direction of a moving vessel; it affords means of absolutely controlling, in every respect, all the innumerable translatory movements, as well as the operations of all the internal organs, no matter how many, of an individualized automaton. Criticisms to the effect that the control of the automaton could be interfered with were made by people who do not even dream of the wonderful results which can be accomplished by use of electrical vibrations. The world moves slowly, and new truths are difficult to see. ”

“ For seconds at a time, the walking machine poised motionless, one or more of its clawed limbs groping for footholds. As it clambered painfully upward, it was hopelessly exposed to attack if it should be sighted from the air.
Dworn, the beetle told himself savagely, you are not only a ghost, you are an insane ghost. Only a madman would have undertaken such a journey.
The cabin heeled wildly as the machine grappled a ledge and, its engine panting at full throttle, levered itself upward a few more feet. ”

“ Yet in the present stage of development such a desideratum is difficult of realisation. The airman must start from the ground or return to it every time he wants to overhaul his engine or replenish his reservoirs. That is his touch with solid realities: otherwise one might suppose him flying for days, never setting foot to earth, the modern Guardian Angel, hovering eternally in the heavens.
The aeroplane has completely revolutionised warfare, inasmuch as it has deprived strategy of its chief weapon—surprise. As the eyes of the army the aeroplane played its most important rôle. ”

“ So that the mastery of the sky would ensure the victory for any army.
The development of the aeroplane is full of the most startling possibilities. Already it has far outflown the vision of its inventors, for, a very short time ago it seems, one of the Voisin frères declared to me that the aeroplane would never be other than a rich man's hobby, of little use in war-time other than the dropping of a few explosives. My informant has since trodden the path of so many brave pilots, but had he lived he would have admitted to-day that the possibilities of the aeroplane seem limitless. ”

“ However that may be, what may be termed the mathematising of aeronautics has rendered the type itself evanescent; your pilot of to-day knows his craft, once he is trained, much in the manner that a driver of a motor-lorry knows his vehicle; design has been systematised, capabilities have been tabulated; camber, dihedral angle, aspect ratio, engine power, and plane surface, are business items of drawing office and machine shop; there is room for enterprise, for genius, and for skill; once and again there is room for daring, as in the first Atlantic flight. ”

“ In the dark our troops would creep forward, rush that trench, and dawn would find them dozing in their newly won quarters. The war had become a battle of entrenchments.
CHAPTER III. The Flying Men.
For ages man walked the earth.
To-day he is the only living creature that can travel in the air by other than its own substance.
'Till the Great War the aeroplane was a scientific curiosity. The Battle of the Nations blooded it; and its wonderful utility in speeding the end of the war has proved its right to be recognised as a distinct factor in human movement. ”