King Weather Rules the War 



In spite of all improvements in military 

 art, the elements are absolutely supreme 



Lying down on the job. He 

 believes "too much is enough" 



LAST October a fleet 

 of thirteen Zeppe- 

 lins left Germany 

 for an air raid over 

 England. These huge 

 and relatively slow craft 

 are at the mercy of the 

 winds to a much greater 

 degree than the small, 

 swift airplanes, and their 

 sailings are nearly al- 

 ways timed by the mete- 

 orological conditions 

 present and prospective. 

 Germany has able 

 weather forecasters, but they are ham- 

 pered in their work by the fact that the 

 war has cut off their reports from western 

 Europe and the Atlantic — the regions 

 from which come storms and weather 

 changes. Apparently there was a serious 

 miscalculation in connection with the 

 raid of Oct. 19 20, for when the airships 

 turned homeward they had to face strong 

 northeast winds, while dense fogs below 

 blotted out the landmarks. At least four 

 of them drifted far out of their route and 

 were brought down in France; one, the 

 L-49, intact. A fifth is believed to have 

 foundered in the Mediterranean. The 

 crew of the L-49 suffered severely with 

 the cold, the thermometer falling to 36 

 degrees below zero when they were at the 

 greatest altitude. One man's hand was 

 so badly frozen that it had to be ampu- 

 tated. So much for weather. 



In the air, on land and on sea, the 

 weather is playing a capital role in the 

 present world conflict. Always a prom- 

 inent factor in warfare and often a decisive 

 one, it has assumed greater importance 

 than ever before, on account of the addi- 

 tion of aircraft to the world's armaments; 

 the use of asphyxiating gases, borne by 

 the winds; the effects of extreme heat 

 and cold upon the operation of internal- 

 combustion motors; the relation of rain- 

 fall and the freezing of the soil to the con- 

 struction and maintenance of a vast 

 system of trenches; and, indeed, in a host 

 of ways that entered hardly, if at all, into 



the calculations of military experts a few 

 short years ago. 



"Mud Is the Greatest Enemy of the 

 British Army" 



Beginning with its predominant in- 

 fluence upon the crops, and hence upon 

 the food supply of the warring na- 

 tions, one could fill pages with an enu- 

 meration of the effects exercised by the 

 weather upon the progress of the struggle. 

 The newspaper reports from the battle 

 zones abound with such episodes as the 

 hampering of operations by heavy rain, 

 the obstacles or advantages offered by 

 fog, the miseries inflicted upon troops by 

 heat and cold, the freezing and thawing 

 of rivers and marshes, the ice blockades of 

 northern harbors, the obstruction of 

 mountain roads with snow, and the at- 

 mospheric vicissitudes experienced by 

 aviators. 



Veterans of the American Civil War, 

 who thought they knew something about 

 mud, must now take lessons on the sub- 

 ject from the men who are fighting in 

 western ?]urope. "Mud," says Lieut. 

 G. B. Mackie, "is the greatest enemy the 

 British army has had to face in Franco, 

 and the only .one it feared." The mud of 

 northern France and Flanders will spatter 

 the pages of every history of the war. In 

 the vivid world pictures of Henri Bar- 

 busse, mud is the thing that makes the 

 most durable impression. Nobody who 

 has read "Le Feu" can ever forget one 



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