LAND & WATER 
December 7, 1916 
of water difficulty, of vermin, destroyed half your effectives 
through an epidemic. To day, with a sufficient measure 
of instruments and science, an army doubles its efficiency 
in this respect. 
Examples might be multiphed indefinitely. There is 
one typical example which is more easily followed in detail 
than any other, and it is that of the field piece. 
Example of the Field Piece 
Within the memory of men now living, a field piece of 
average calibre was a plain tube of metal that any small 
provincial shop could cast. It was mounted upon two 
cart wheels with axles and bearings that any wheelwright 
could make. The mi.ssile which it shot to a distance of 
no more than 8ao or a thousand yards was a round metal 
ball fitting loosely into the tube and propelled by a charge 
of common black powder, which could be made pretty 
well anywhere. The powder was exploded by a 
match applied to a touch-hole, which you or I or 
any one could drill in a few minutes througii the body of 
the piece. You raised or lowered the tube for more distant 
or nearer ranges with a simple screw or even with wedges, 
and you traversed it, to the right or to the left, by 
grasping and moving to left or right a rough hand-spike 
stuck into the trail. 
Such were the guns with which, for instance, the British 
fought in India, the French in Algiers. Such was the 
artillery used during the popular insurrections of '48. 
I do not know how much a field gun of average calibre, 
say, a 12 pounder, cost in those days. If I make a rough 
guess of, say, £100, I do not think I should be exaggerating 
the cost. It may have been much less. 
All civilised men. unless they were quite cut off from 
meted or from fuel, could make such an instrument and 
munition it and use it for an indetinitely long period. 
The ingredijnts of gun power were almost uni- 
versally distributed, and the general widespread culture 
of our civilisation from the Pacific to Asia permitted of the 
construction of such an instrument by the simple and 
equally widespread mechanical processes everywhere avail- 
able, and by artisan labour of a common type. Turkey 
or Mexico could produce guns for putting up a fight, just 
as France or England could. The instrument, when it was 
produced, was of the same efficiency whether a small 
peasant State had put it into the field or a highly de- 
veloped industrial civilisation. The margin of error in 
range was enormous ; the effect, by our standards, ex- 
tremely limited. 
To-day a field piece is a highly complicated and ex- 
tremely expensive piece of mechanism. The preparation of 
the metal is an art in itself. The construction of essential 
parts is as dehcate as that of scientific instruments. 
Its accuracy is such that it can maintain, at ranges far 
exceeding its forerunners, a fire delivered just over the 
heads of its own troops and bursting only a few yards in 
front of them, covering their advance and yet not in- 
juring themselves. 
It is both elevated and traversed upon as finely 
graduated a scale as the eye can use, and either operation 
is of the most delicate precision. 
In the place of the rough touch-hole simply drilled 
through metal, you have a breech block depending for its 
action upon exactly correlated screw threads. Instead 
of a plain tube you have riffing grooved upon a curve of 
highly complicated formula, and exactly fitted by a pro- 
jectile which must be gauged with the same minuteness 
as, say, the piston rings of an engine. Its fuse is worthless 
and only a peril unless it has been constructed like a fine 
watch. The propellant explosive is a chemical compound 
the manufacture of which demands the exact co-ordination 
of many preliminary processes : Even high chemical 
knowledge and specially-trained workmen can only pro- 
duce within quite special surroundings, the preparation of 
which is not even possible save in a few places. And 
that propellant explosive must be of an exactly even 
production, every charge to within a tiny fraction of 
error possessing an exactly known propellant power. 
^ Take but one test point, the absorption of the recoil. 
Not 25 years ago a field piece upon its discharge shot back 
a considerable distance and was checked by a rough 
brake of rope. The piece could only be- laid again by a 
separate operation jdter each discharge. To-day, the 
fi'^ld niece is capable of continuous fire, because it absorbs 
its own recoil by the action of buffers, and these are as 
complicated and delicate a piece of work as anything in 
the whole gun, and any inaccuracy in them would be 
fatal to the gun's action. 
I have purposely taken the example of the field piece 
because it is a continuous example wherein we can follow 
the increase of complexity without a break. If we con- 
sider the hundred other developments of armament in 
the same brief period of time, the conclusion is even more 
striking. 
Within living memory there was no such thing at all 
as the torpedo. The modern torpedo is an immensely 
comphcated piece of automatic machinery, demanding 
the co-operation of a hundred processes each dependent 
upon the most highly skilled labour of a type quite un- 
available to simple social conditions. The aeroplane, the 
dirigible, the various forms of trench weapons — even the 
grenade — are as novel as they are specialised, and this 
vast revolution has affected not only certain special and 
necessary instruments without which modern war could 
not be conducted, but the whole field of effort. 
Now, having that formula of the high differentiation 
of modern munitionment and equipment clearly in our 
minds, and appreciating how universally it increases the 
gulf betweett the highly industrialised and the simple agri- 
cultural society, let us consider two modifications which 
still further extend that gulf under the conditions of the 
present great war. 
The New Factor of Numbers 
The first modification proceeds from the factor of num- 
bers. 
These instruments, quite unobtainable save under the 
special circumstances of highly-developed industrial 
centres, have to be produced for armies not measured by 
thousands but by milUons. At Waterloo, even after the 
arrival of the Prussian contingent in flank, the total 
number of men armed and combatant in the field, was far 
less than a quarter of a million, and their fate was decided 
in eight hours. The Marne — to consider only an action 
of movement — took a week to decide and involved the 
actual combatant action of two million armed men. 
Not only, therefore, is the problem of munitionment 
during this great campaign a problem of getting very 
expensive and very complicated machinery produced, 
but also the problem of getting it produced for forces hitherto 
undreamt of. 
The second modification proceeds from the nature of 
the present operations. The advent of trench warfare 
has proved by experience what not one of the combatai'ts 
foresaw when the war broke out : That a decision is 
only to be arrived at after a great space of time and at 
a gigantic current expense in projectiles, wasting guns, 
wasting lost and destroyed air-craft, and the rest of it. It 
is a rate of production, not five or tenfold, but a hundred- 
fold and two hundredfold, the rate allowed for in 
calculations made before the war. 
When we ha\e surveyed the whole field in the light of 
these considerations, we understand with what an advan- 
tage that party fights which can best produce in this novel 
fashion. We understand that such production is possible 
only to certain special societies, and that the general 
level of productive capacity which sufficed tor all civilised 
men in the old wars, has been replaced by a hierarchy of 
opportunity such that one combatant highly indu.striahsed 
may be o\'erwhelmingly the military superior of another 
only slightly less industrialised, and that upon this differ- 
ence the fate of the combatants will turn. 
Where, then, does man-power come in to such a calcu- 
lation ? 
That is a point which must be very carefully examined. 
Errors upon it still disturb public opinion, and among 
other mistakes leadtoalack of proportion in thedistribu- 
tion of effort. 
There are three factors present in the production of 
modern equipment and munitionment (including trans- 
port) which must be each separately considered if we are 
to gauge the chances of the beUigerents for the future. 
The first of these factors is the raw material available 
for the factories which supply each belligerent, notably 
coal and iron. 
The second factor is the general labour available for 
the winning of these raw materials from the soil, for their 
