In other words, an army moved by petrol can obtain a greater effect from its weapons in a given time with less loss to itself than one which relies on muscular energy as its motive force. Whilst securing its crew dynamically a tank enables it to fight statically, it is in every respect the “landship” it was first called.

These are our premises and from them we may deduce the following all-important fact: That in all wars, and especially modern wars—wars in which weapons change rapidly—no army of fifty years before any date selected would stand a “dog’s chance” against the army existing at this date, not even if it were composed entirely of Winkelrieds and Marshal Neys. Consider the following examples:

(i) Napoleon was an infinitely greater general than Lord Raglan; yet Lord Raglan would, in 1855, have beaten any army Napoleon, in 1805, could have led against him, because Lord Raglan’s men were armed with the Minie rifle.

(ii) Eleven years after Inkerman, Moltke would have beaten Lord Raglan’s army hollow, not because he was a greater soldier than Lord Raglan, but because his men were armed with the needle gun.

From this we may deduce the fact, which has already been stated, namely, that weapons form 99 per cent. of victory, consequently the General Staff of every army should be composed of mechanical clairvoyants, seers of new conditions, new fields of war to exploit, and new tools to assist in this exploitation. Had Napoleon, in 1805, offered a prize of £1,000,000 for a weapon 100 per cent. more efficient than the “Brown Bess,” it is almost a certainty that, by 1815, he would have got it; for the want of a little foresight and for the want of the understanding that progress in weapons of war is a similar problem to progress of tools in manufacture, he might have saved his Empire and ended his days as supreme tyrant of Europe.

The whole history of the evolution of machine tools is that of the elimination of the workman and the replacement of muscular energy by steam, electricity, or some other form of power. “Fewer men, more machines, higher output” has during the last hundred years been the motto of every progressive workshop. Likewise we believe that from now onwards in every progressive army will a similar motto be adopted. Further than this, we believe that those nations which have proved their ability in the past as leaders of science and mechanical engineering will in the future be those which will produce the most efficient armies, for these armies will be based on the foundations of the commercial sciences.

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. Such an army need not even occupy the theatre of operations in which the war is to be fought; he may be ensconced thousands of miles away, perhaps in Kamtchatka, fighting a battle on the Western Front. Is this impossible? Not at all; even in the late war we can picture to ourselves a one-armed cripple sitting in Muravieff-Amourski and electrically discharging gas against the Hindenburg Line directly his indicator announces a favourable wind.

So far the chemist, but is man going to be controlled by gas, are human destinies to be limited by a “whiff of phosgene”?

“Certainly not,” answers the soldier mechanic. “It is true that the future may produce many unknown gases which, as long as they remain unknown to the opposing side, are unlikely to be rendered innocuous by means of a respirator; I, however, will scrap the respirator and place my men in gas-proof tanks, and whenever my indicator denotes impure air, the crews will batten down their hatches, their engines will be run off accumulators, and they themselves will live on oxygen or compressed air. I will apply to land-warfare naval methods undreamt of before, I will produce a land machine which will, so to speak, submerge itself when the gas cloud approaches, just as a submarine submerges in the sea when a destroyer draws near.”

There is an answer to every weapon, and that side which has most thoroughly thought these answers out during days of peace is the one which is most likely to produce a steel-shod Achilles for days of war.

Without journeying so far as Amourski let us imagine that war was to break out again three years hence and that we were equipped with a tank 200 per cent. superior to our at present best type—a machine travelling at fifteen miles an hour in place of five, and that the Germans sitting behind their Hindenburg Line were still backing personnel against matériel, numbers of men against perfection of weapons.

An army is an organisation, comparable, like all other organisations, very closely with the human body. It possesses a body and a brain; its fighting troops are the former, its headquarters staffs the latter. In the past the usual process of tactics has been to wage a body warfare: one body is moved up against the other body and like two boxers they pummel each other until one is knocked out. But suppose that boxer “A” could by some simple operation paralyse the brain of boxer “B,” what use would all boxer “B’s” muscular strength be to him, even if it rivalled that of Samson and Goliath combined? No use at all, as David proved!

Now apply this process to the battle of 1923. The tank fleets, under cover of dense clouds of smoke, or at night-time, move forward, not against the body of the enemy’s army but against his brains; their objectives are not the enemy’s infantry or the enemy’s guns, not positions or tactical localities, but the billets of the German headquarters staffs—the Army, Corps, and Divisional headquarters. These they capture, destroy or disperse; what then is the body going to do, for its brain is paralysed? Who is going to control it, feed it with reserves, ammunition, and supplies? Who is going to manœuvre it to give it foot play? Either it will stand still and be knocked out, or, much more likely, it will be seized by panic and become paralysed to action.

What is the answer to this type of brain warfare? The answer is the tank; the brains will get into metal skulls or boxes, the bodies will get into the same, and land fleet will manœuvre against land fleet.

The growth of these tactics may be slow, but eventually they will become imperative. It may be urged that the field gun is master of the tank in the open, just as a land battery is master of a ship at sea. This is only true as long as the gunner can see his target, and no known means at present exist whereby sight can penetrate a dense cloud of smoke. It may also be urged that a heavy machine gun will enable the infantry to protect themselves against tanks. But to be mobile the weight of the machine gun is limited to the carrying power of two men—about 80 lb., and there is no known reason why a tank should not be armoured to withstand the bullets of such a weapon. If a heavier machine gun is made it will be forced to take to a mounting, and for choice to a mechanical one; it will in fact become a tank or a tank destroyer.

The necessity of armour in war has always been recognised, and its general disuse only dates from the sixteenth century onwards. When armour could not be used other means of protection, all makeshifts, were sought after—earth-works, entrenchments, use of ground, manœuvre, and covering fire, and as regards the last-named substitute it is interesting to go back a little into history, for, even from a cursory study, we may better understand the present and foresee the future.

In the days of our Henry VIII a body of arquebusiers had to stand twenty-five ranks deep in order to obtain continuity of fire; that is to say, that once the first rank had fired and doubled to the rear it would only be ready loaded again when the twenty-fifth rank was about to discharge its pieces. By the days of Gustavus Adolphus, the art of musketry and the musket had so far improved as to permit of these twenty-five ranks being reduced to eight. As improvement went apace we find Frederick the Great reducing them to three, and Wellington in the Peninsula to two. Even in the early period of the revolutionary wars it was found necessary for light infantry to reduce the human target they offered to the enemy’s fire by making use of extensions. In 1866 extensions became more feasible on account of the Prussians being armed with a breach-loading rifle; in 1870 they became more general; in 1899 they have grown to between ten and fifteen paces, which may be taken as the maximum for a man, armed with the magazine rifle, to deliver one round per yard of front each minute. In 1904 trenches are made use of on an extensive scale, for as extensions cannot be increased if fire effect is to be maintained, some other form of protection must be sought, and men, not being able to carry armour, must carry spades instead and so still further immobilise themselves. In 1914, after a brief hurry-scurry of open warfare, all sides take to earth and the spade reigns supreme.

Then comes the reintroduction of armour with the tank, and what do we see? Not only mobility and direct protection, but the reinstitution of the firing line, not now morcelated at fifteen paces interval between the men composing it, but at 150 to 300 paces between the tanks, the mechanical skirmishing fortresses of which it is built up. A tank with a crew of 6 men can deliver fire at the rate of 300 rounds a minute, or equivalent to 30 riflemen at a South African War extension, and being armoured they suffer practically no loss and can consequently challenge not only 30 riflemen but 300, any number, in fact, who are sent against them. The logical conclusion to be drawn from this is that extensions are useless, trenches at best but static makeshifts, the infantryman must don armour and, as he has not the strength to carry it, he must get into a tank. If this is common sense, let us attempt to visualise what a tank war of the future may entail.

In the mechanical wars of the future we must first of all recognise the fact that the earth is a solid sea as easily traversable in all directions by a tractor as a sheet of ice is by a skater; the battles in these wars will therefore more and more approximate to naval actions. As trenches, as we know them, and the ordinary field obstacles now constructed will be useless, it may become necessary during peacetime to turn the great strategical centres—manufactories, railways, stores, seats of government, etc., into defended land-ports or protected power, fuel, and control stations. The fortifications of these will probably consist of immense dry moats and extensive minefields which will constitute a direct protection against tank attacks. Water obstacles will be useless, for the tank of a few years hence will undoubtedly be of an amphibious nature. To protect these centres from the air, barracks, storehouses, mobilisation stores, tankodromes and aerodromes will all have to be constructed well beneath the surface of the ground—in fact, the future fortress will approximate closely to a gigantic dugout surrounded by a field of land mines electrically manipulated.

Near the frontier these defended ports will probably be equipped with and linked up by lethal gas works—gas-producing and storage plants, lodged below the surface, which on war being declared can instantaneously be set operating electrically by one man stationed hundreds of miles away if needs be. When this type of warfare is instituted, mobilisation will not consist in equipping with weapons a small section of the community, but in providing such of the civil population as cannot be rapidly evacuated from the area it is proposed to inundate, or placed in gastight shelters safely underground, with anti-gas appliances. Under these circumstances the defence of frontiers will be organised according to prevailing winds, and signs of war will be looked for not amongst military but civil movements.

As the gas-storage tanks are opened and the gas-producing plants set operating, fleets of fast-moving tanks, equipped with tons of liquid gas, against which the enemy will probably have no means of protection,39 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, which will be mobilising underground, but against the civil population in order to compel it to accept the will of the attacker.

If the enemy will not accept peace terms forthwith, then wars in the air and on the earth will take place between machines to gain superiority. Tank will meet tank, and, commanded from the air, fleets of these machines will manœuvre between the defended ports seeking each other out and exterminating each other in orthodox naval fashion. Whilst these small forces of men, representing perhaps 0·5 per cent. or 1 per cent. of the entire population of the country, strong through machinery, are at death-grips with their enemy, their respective nations will be producing weapons for them; so, in the future, as military fighting man-power dwindles must we expect to see military manufacturing man-power increase.

Are we safe in this little island of ours against the future? If at times, during the “alchemical” period of warfare, we have been threatened and invaded, we may be certain that during the scientific period we shall be less secure than we have been in the past.

From the present-day tank to one which can plunge into the Channel at Calais at 4 in the morning, land at Dover at six o’clock, and be outside Buckingham Palace for an early lunch will not probably require as many as the fifty-two years which have separated the Merrimac from the Tiger or the Queen Elizabeth. If this is too remote a period for the present generation to grow anxious about, there is no reason why four or five years hence ships should not be constructed as tank-carriers, these machines being conveyed across the ocean and launched into the sea near the coast carrying sufficient fuel to move them 300 or 400 miles inland. From ships as carriers it is but one step to aeroplanes as suppliers and lifters, and another to aeroplanes as tanks themselves.

If the evolution of war, in the past, has been slow, do not let us flatter ourselves that it is likely to remain so in the future. From the gliders of the Wright Brothers the aeroplane rapidly evolved, and from a 40 H.P. engine of ten or twelve years back to-day the Porte “Super-Baby” triplane carries five engines of 400 H.P. each and the Tarrant triplane has a span of 131 feet and to drive it six Napier “Lion” engines are used, developing no less than 3,000 horse-power. The tank is still in its infancy, but it will grow and one day in mechanical perfection and efficiency catch up with the super-Dreadnought and the Handley Page, and what then? A close co-operation between the great mechanical weapons, the seaship, the airship, and the landship—or, if preferred, of boat, aeroplane, and tank—will take place. These weapons will approximate and unify, evolving one arm and not three arms, which will require one defence force and not three. This, even to-day, is becoming more and more apparent, and the sooner the brains of the future Defence Force are developed the better for this nation, for to-day we are thinking, like mediæval magicians, in separate terms of air, water, and earth, and some of us in those of gabions, lances, and blunderbusses.

If great wars can be restricted or abolished by word of mouth or written agreement, the above gropings into the future, even if possible, may never materialise; but even if this be so, many small wars lie in front of us, for Europe politically, since 1914, has practically gone back 400 years, the frontiers of the smaller nations approximating closely to those of the later Middle Ages. The more nations there are in the world the more wars there will be in the making, and as half the smaller nations of central and eastern Europe consider war a national sport there is little likelihood of agreements being kept or peace being maintained; in fact, all agreements which cannot be compelled by brute force are likely to be treated as “scraps of paper.”

To enforce peace, power and the means of applying it will be needed by the greater nations who by law will never quarrel; here the mechanic steps forward and presents the nations concerned with the tank and the aeroplane as a means towards this end. He is perfectly right; the general introduction of mechanical weapons must bring with it the end of small wars if not also of civil disturbances.

Take the case of the defence of India. What has always been the great difficulty in our frontier expeditions? Not our enemy or his weapons, but the country which enables the Afghan to evade our columns and impede our advance. It is the resistance offered by natural obstacles which we have to overcome and not those imposed upon us by weapons which generally are vastly inferior to those with which our men are equipped.

Take the case of a punitive expedition starting from Peshawer and proceeding to Kabul. The force will consist of three bodies of troops—a small fighting advanced guard, a large main body protecting the transport, and strong flank guards protecting the main body. On account of the tactics which have to be adopted the advance is excessively slow. The main body proceeding along the roads, which almost inevitably coincide with the bottoms of the valleys, has to be kept out of rifle shot, consequently the flank guards have usually to “crown the heights” on each side of the road, which necessitates much climbing and loss of time. If the advance were over an open veldt land, as in South Africa, in place of in a hilly country, movement would be simplified, but still will the flank guards have to be thrown out because the main body, consisting of men and animals, is pervious to bullets. This perviousness to bullets is the basis of the whole trouble, and unless bullet-proof armour can be carried, when it does not matter whether the rifle is fired at a range of two yards or two miles, the only means of denying effect to the rifle is to keep it out of range of its target.

Though up to a short time ago the carrying of armour was not a feasible proposition, now it is, and there are few more difficulties in advancing up or down the Khyber with a well-constructed tank than across the open. Armour, by rendering flesh impervious to bullets, does away with the necessity of flank guards and long straggling supply columns, and our punitive expedition equipped with tanks can reach Kabul in a few days, and not only reach it but abandon its communications, as they will require no protection. If tank supply columns, which are self-protecting, are considered too slow, once the force has reached Kabul its supply and the evacuation of its sick (there will be but few wounded) can be carried out by aeroplane. The whole operation becomes too simple to be classed as an operation of war. Once impress upon the Afghan the hopelessness of facing a mechanical punitive force and he will give up rendering such forces necessary.

In our many small wars of the past we have frequently been faced with desert warfare, a warfare even more difficult than hill and mountain fighting. Here again the chief difficulty is a natural one—want of water, and not an artificial one—superiority of the enemy’s weapons. In 1885 Sir Henry Stewart started from Korti on the Nile to relieve General Gordon: his difficulties were supply difficulties, and it took him twenty-one days to reach Gubat, a distance of 180 miles. A tank moving at an average pace of ten miles an hour could have accomplished the journey in two days, and being supplied by aeroplane could have reached Khartum a few days later. One tank would have won Maiwand, Isandhlwana, and El Teb; one tank can meet any quantity of Tower muskets, or Mauser rifles for aught that; one tank, costing say £10,000, can not only win a small war normally costing £2,000,000, but render such wars in the future highly improbable if not impossible. The moral, therefore, is—get the tank.

From small wars to internal Imperial Defence is but one step. Render rebellion hopeless and it will not take place. In India we lock up in an unremunerative army 75,000 British troops and 150,000 Indian. Both these forces can be done away with and order maintained, and maintained with certainty, by a mechanical police force of 20,000 to 25,000 men.

What now is the great lesson to be learnt from the above examples? That war will be eliminated by weapons, not by words or treaties or leagues of nations; by weapons—leagues of tanks, aeroplanes, and submarines—which will render opposition hopeless or retribution so terrible that nations will think not once or twice but many times before going to war. If the civilian population of a country know that should they demand war they may be killed in a few minutes by the tens of thousands, they will not only cease to demand it but see beforehand that they are well prepared by superiority of weapons to terrify their neighbours out of declaring war against them.

Weapons we, therefore, see are, if not a means of ending war and ridding the world of this dementia, a means of maintaining peace on a far firmer footing than hitherto it has been maintained by muscular power. To limit the evolution of weapons is therefore to limit the periods of peace. An Army cannot stand still, it must develop with the civilisation of which it forms part or become barbaric. To equip our Army to-day with bows and arrows would not reduce the frequency of war, it would actually increase it, for according to his tools, so is man himself, and as an Army is built up of men, if these men are armed with bows and arrows they will in nature closely approximate to the age which produced these weapons, the age which burnt Joan of Arc. Equally so will the Army of to-day, if in equipment it be not allowed to keep pace with scientific progress, develop into a band of brigands, for in 2019 the rifle and gun of to-day, and the civilisation which produced them, will be as uncouth as the arquebus, the carronade, and the manners of the sixteenth century.

If a millennium is ever to be ushered in upon earth it will be accomplished through the development of brain-power and not through it becoming atrophied. If war is to be rendered impossible the process will be a slow evolutionary one, the desire of war gradually slowing down, and its motive force energising some other ideal. To restrict war by maintaining soldiers as ill-armed barbarians is to prevent it working out its destined course. Human nature, in spite of Benjamin Kidd, does not change in a generation, and the tendencies which beget war will out until human nature has outgrown them. The world has a soul, and like that of a man it must pass through years of love, hate, striving and ambition before attaining those of wisdom and decay.

There may yet be many wars ahead of us, but one thing would appear to be certain, and this is that small wars will disappear and great ones become less frequent, science rendering them too terrible to be entered upon lightly.

To-day we stand upon the threshold of a new epoch in the history of the world—war based on petrol, the natural sequent of an industry based on steam. That we have attained the final step on the evolutionary ladder of war is most unlikely, for mechanical and chemical weapons may disappear and be replaced by others still more terrible. Electricity has scarcely yet been touched upon and it is not impossible that mechanical warfare will be replaced by one of a wireless nature, and that not only the elements, but man’s flesh and bones, will be controlled by the “fluid” which to-day we do not even understand. This method of imposing the will of one man on another may in its turn be replaced by a purely psychological warfare, wherein weapons are not even used or battlefields sought or loss of life or limb aimed at; but, in place, the corruption of the human reason, the dimming of the human intellect, and the disintegration of the moral and spiritual life of one nation by the influence of the will of another is accomplished.

Be all these as they may, one fact stands out supreme in all types and conditions of war, and this is, that the strongest and most efficient brain wins, which applies equally to all nations as it does to all individuals.

Animal superiority over animal is based on muscle, human superiority over human is based on brain. The nation with the supreme brain will eventually rule the world, and so long as war continues the Army with the best brains (which also means the best weapons) will accomplish victory with the least loss. Our Army from to-day must step forward; “to advance is to conquer,” and this applies in greater force to brain-power than to muscle-power, for brains control muscles. To stand still is to retrogress; to glance backwards is to lose time, and if we pause now we are lost in the future. Do not, therefore, let us mark time on our own graves, do not let us hark back to 1914 with its rifles and its ammunition boots, its sabres and its horseshoes, and all its muscular barbarism; let us plan and let us think, thus shall we penetrate the veil of the future, thus shall we learn how to equip our Army with a brain and with a body which united, if war be ever again forced upon us, will compel victory at the smallest possible cost. Surely this is an ideal worthy of a great nation and of a great Army, the object of which is to prevent war and to maintain peace, to prevent war by science and not by nescience, by progress and not by retrogression.