Engine of war

“ When the aviators have an attack in contemplation they fly low and snap their fingers at the puff balls of death as the shrapnel from their appearance when bursting may well be called. Naturally, efforts were made early in the war to lessen the danger by armouring the body of the machine sufficiently to protect the aviator and his engine—for if the aviator escaped a shot which found the engine, his plight would be almost as bad as if the missile had struck him. ”

“ There we imitate and practise to make swifter motions than any you have, either out of your muskets or any engine that you have; and to make them and multiply them more easily and with small force, by wheels and other means, and to make them stronger and more violent than yours are, exceeding your greatest cannons and basilisks. We represent also ordnance and instruments of war and engines of all kinds; and likewise new mixtures and compositions of gunpowder, wild–fires burning in water and un quenchable, also fire–works of all variety, both for pleasure and use. ”

“ Above all, as the military forces of a modern nation are but the wheels of the car of war, dependent for their driving power on the engine—the nation’s industrial resources—it follows that a breakdown in the engine or in the transmission—the means of transport and communication—will inevitably render the military forces immobile and powerless. ”

“ Indeed, by bombing manufacturing cities over a belt of a hundred miles along the Rhine it has done more to break down the morale of the German people than any other factor. Truly this new engine of man has developed, under the intense necessity of war, farther in this short space of time than any other mechanical device—not excepting the automobile—which man has ever invented or fostered. ”

“ Armed with such a tremendous engine of destruction as a navigable air-ship must necessarily be, when used in conjunction with the explosives already at our disposal, we could make war impossible to our enemies by bringing into the field a force with which no army or fleet could contend without the certainty of destruction. ”

“ That the machine has worked smoothly nobody for one minute will assert—but it certainly has run sufficiently smoothly to show that, with some alteration which experience alone could suggest to be desirable, our military engine may very easily be made as perfect as those of the Continental Powers are popularly supposed to be. ”

“ Yet the ball to which the general alluded was the discharging of a fiendish war machine toward an unsuspecting and harmless city alive with sleeping people, and the emotion of the inventor was due to the fact that he had devised and completed the most atrocious engine of death ever conceived by the mind of man—the Relay Gun. ”

“ The hero of the story has invented an air ship which carries terrible explosives to be dropped from a great height into the midst of the enemy. This engine does its work at the decisive moment, and then follows the grab game of negotiations, in which might rules, and Germany joins the Anglo-Saxon alliance against the rest of the world. Finally, the air-ship engine of destruction has rendered war henceforth forever impossible. ”

“ But even now from the seat of war comes the news of engines that fail and machines that drop into the realm of the enemy. The old proverb of having two strings to one’s bow should apply to aëronautics.
The desideratum, indeed, is the duplication of such a vital part as the motor. Considerations of weight have been the hindrance to engine duplication. ”

“ What is wanted, and what will be built in time, is a large, armoured, high-speed craft, having more than one engine, carrying a crew, and being able to bear the load of a powerful gun. In war, had a Commander a squadron of such machines, he would use them for attacking an enemy’s supply stores and ammunition parks, for blowing up railway lines, and for harassing troops when they were on the march ”

“ Description of the operation and advantages of a certain newly invented engine of war, whereby twenty-four bullets can be discharged from one piece at a time.
No. 75. Notes by the inventor touching the engines of war, with the expense of making a few at a time. It would require above 100 engines to be employed at once. Desires a yearly pension in consideration of his invention.
No. 76. A note of the effects already performed by the engine of war; of which there are 200 engines and 3000 bullets already delivered into the Tower for service.—Cal. ”

“ Tanks, armoured cars, and in fact all modern inventions for war relying upon the magneto—the heart of the petrol engine—will be rendered useless, and fighting will once more resume its former status—a contest of manpower."
"Then you don't believe in the theory that war will be so terrible, so scientifically brutal, that nations will be afraid to wage battle?"
"No, I don't," replied Uncle Brian. "It will only be an additional inducement for small nations to defy their greater neighbours. ”

“ He admits, indeed, fully that machine guns, tanks, aeroplanes, and motor transport "have given a greater driving power to war," and that the country which possesses most of such things has an advantage over its opponents. But he insists that their only "real function" is to assist the infantry to get to grips with their opponents, and that of themselves "they cannot possibly obtain a decision." To imagine that tanks and aeroplanes can ever take the place of infantry and cavalry is to do these marvellous tools themselves a disservice by expecting of them more than they can perform. ”

“ But the strongest element in it was the faith in our weapon—the machine necessary to supplement the other machines of war, in order to break the stalemate produced by the great German weapon, the machine-gun—our mobile offensive answer to the immobile defensive man-killer. ”

“ And these flying war machines, you know, were only one sort of the endless war contrivances that had been invented and had fallen into abeyance during the long peace. There were all sorts of these things that people were routing out and furbishing up; infernal things, silly things; things that had never been tried; big engines, terrible explosives, great guns. You know the silly way of these ingenious sort of men who make these things; they turn 'em out as beavers build dams, and with no more sense of the rivers they're going to divert and the lands they're going to flood! ”

“ Accepting that the main factor in future warfare will be the replacing of man-power by machine-power, the logical deduction is that the ideal army to aim at is one man, not a conscripted nation, not even a super-scientist, but one man who can press a button or pull a plug and so put into operation war-machines evolved by the best brains of the nation during peacetime. ”

“ This war has given us no new principles; but different mechanical appliances—and in particular the rapid improvement and multiplication of aeroplanes, the use of immense numbers of machine guns and Lewis guns, the employment of vast quantities of barbed wire as effective obstacles, the enormous expansion of artillery, and the provision of great masses of motor transport—have introduced new problems of considerable complexity concerning the effective co-operation of the different arms and services. ”

“ All the world appeared to have put on cartridge belts and gone to war. As far as the eye could reach, away off yonder to where sky line and earth line met behind the dust screen, cavalry, artillery, infantry, supply trains, munition trains, and all imaginable branches of the portable machinery of an army were in sight and in motion. Their masses hid the earth with a shifting pattern as though a vast blue-grey carpet were magically weaving itself. Overhead, singly, in pairs and in formations, like flights of wild fowl, the scout planes, the observation planes and the battle planes went winging. ”

“ We do not see the guns that bombard us; the attacking lines of the enemy infantry are men like ourselves; but these tanks are machines, their caterpillars run on as endless as the war, they are annihilation, they roll without feeling into the craters, and climb up again without stopping, a fleet of roaring, smoke-belching armour-clads, invulnerable steel beasts squashing the dead and the wounded—we shrivel up in our thin skin before them, against their colossal weight our arms are sticks of straw, and our hand-grenades matches. ”

“ Of course, the army must be equipped in the modern way and fought in the modern way with all the resources of science, with aeroplanes, bombs, motor transport, and heavy artillery. But without the full devotion of the individual, without the coöperation of his esprit, the army would be a dead machine, especially in this nerve-rending endurance contest of the trenches. Here is the Latin idea, which is absolutely opposed to the German machine theory of war.
The German staff has done marvels with its machine. ”

“ By day the victor's aeroplanes will sweep down upon the apparatus of all sorts in the adversary's rear, and will drop explosives and incendiary matter upon them, so that no apparatus or camp or shelter will any longer be safe. At night his high floating search-lights will go to and fro and discover and check every desperate attempt to relieve or feed the exhausted marksmen of the fighting line. The phase of tension will pass, that weakening opposition will give, and the war from a state of mutual pressure and petty combat will develop into the collapse of the defensive lines. ”

“ Then, every engine that ingenuity can invent, is drawn into the conflict; and rockets, revolvers, shells, and all other infernal devices, are resorted to, in order to get the better of an enemy who is not provided with such available means of destruction. ”

“ Just as the Germans threw in new divisions of infantry and new batteries of artillery to check the Allies' offensive, so they sent aloft hundreds of new machines to contest for the mastery of the air, an important phase of modern war. ”

“ New weapons and devices are brought forth in every new conflict, and they greatly change the conditions of warfare. The great European struggle utilized the airplane, poison gas, incendiary bombs, gas shells, hand grenades, liquid flame, tanks, wireless telegraphy, wireless telephony, dirigible balloons, submarines, seaplanes, and artillery with a range of over fifty miles—none of these things figured in any previous war. ”

“ At present, when we try to imagine war upon a foreign army waged on one side by air alone, we encounter a dozen mechanical difficulties even in our attempted picture of the first stages: the enormous paraphernalia of bases, the ground-staff, fuel, weather conditions, difficulties of landing, and finally, what is perhaps the fundamental difficulty. ”

“ The desire to evolve that power which should render opposition useless had long led men from one warlike invention to another. Every one who had constructed a new kind of gun, a new kind of armour, or a new explosive, thought that he had solved the problem, or was on his way to do so. The inventor of the instantaneous motor had done it. ”

“ I am naturally disposed to doubt—then probably the air warfare which will dominate it will be a warfare conducted with machines far below the quality of the best contemporary knowledge, and by men below the highest attainable standard. It may be, therefore, a clumsy war, as needlessly destructive as the great war; and the lumbering big aeroplane, with its tons of explosive, in search for targets of military significance, will incidentally smash up all sorts of precious things. But the less clumsy air-warfare is the less it will do that. ”

“ The others agreed that it was about the best description that could be given of these massive fighting machines, equipped with guns and men, that could travel with their own power practically anywhere, across shell holes, over trenches, through barbed wire—the most human piece of war mechanism that had yet made its appearance on the battlefield. ”

“ Clearly the time has not yet arrived when the flying machine will be serviceable in war. Yet we are not without those theorisers who, at the present moment, would seriously propose schemes for conveying dynamite and other explosives by air ship, or dropping them over hostile forces or fortresses, or even fleets at sea. ”

“ Many types have been devised, including turreted automobile, mounting one or two rapid fire guns which can be turned in any direction. The armored motors have high-powered engines, and the chassis chosen for these new instruments of war are of the heaviest types. ”

“ The fuzzy one is a radio machine. Sends sound waves to jam up the enemy's robot guns and radio waves to jam their torpedoes. The others are gas—shoot big gas rockets; corrosive mostly, to kill off artillery and tanks. ”

“ But when he saw the enemy pressing upon the men in the rear, he stationed his engines of war upon the bank, and ordered the engineers to shoot from them as far forward as possilile all sorts of projectiles which are usually shot from military engines. ”

“ Western civilization has been militarized as it was mechanized. Every tool is a potential weapon. The truck becomes a tank, the airplane a bomber. War making, like other aspects of western civilization, was mechanized. Formerly war had pitted man against man. Mechanized war pitted machines and their attendants against other machines and their human attachments. The same mechanical forces that built cities, factories and ships converted these agencies of production into instruments of destruction. ”

“ In the next war, he tells us: “Fast-moving tanks, equipped with tons of liquid gas ... will cross the frontier and obliterate every living thing in the fields and farms, the villages, and cities of the enemy’s country. Whilst life is being swept away around the frontier, fleets of aeroplanes will attack the enemy’s great industrial and governing centres. All these attacks will be made, at first, not against the enemy’s army ... but against the civil population, in order to compel it to accept the will of the attacker.” ”