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Press, Volume LIV, Issue 16406, 28 December 1918, Page 8

Mr "Winst-on Churchill, the Minister o? M'unition?, -was no doubt, Sas glad as anyone when hostilities ceased with the German surrender, but the cabled report of his statement the other day on the -work of his Department seemed, nevertheless, to bo faintly tinged with regret that it had not had an opportunity of showing what it could really do. The Department, he said, had reached "the top of its form" just at the time -when the armistice was signed, and h.id a vast series of terrifying novelties in readiness for next year's campaign. Fortunately for, tho world and humanity, there will be, bo far as one can see, no campaign next year, but ail the same one would like to know what these "terrifying novelties" were, even though our best wish for the Newyear is that neither in our lifetime nor during tho .lives of our children will Great Britain ever have occasion to employ them.

It was a grim business, that of tho Ministry of Munitions, perpetually concerned as it was with the production of the largest possible quantity of tho means of causing death. But it had its lighter side, which is described in an article in the Department's Journal dealing with the suggestions which came to it daily from hare-brained inventors. AVo referred some time ago to a few of the weird proposals put before the Department, such as the artificial freezing of the clouds, so as to enable anti-air-craft guns to be mounted on them. It is pathetically significant of tho terror caused by the Huns' air raids among the more nervous of tho population that so many of the ideas put forward should' deal with anti-aircraft methods. One was that aeroplanes should bo fitted up with hugo scissors or scythes or strings of bombs, with which to destroy raiders. Another proposal was to employ heat .rays to. set Zeppelins on firo, or ok<> tric waves to paralyse their magnetos. Raids usually took placo on moonlight nights—what more simple, therefore, argued one genius than to blot out the moon with a big black balloon, or, as another believed, to obscure its light by a ""black searchlight beam," as though darkness could bo projected tho same as light!

Other inventors showed equally little acquaintance with the elementary laws of science. One of the most popular suggestions, we are told, was "to attach a searchlight to an antiaircraft gun, get the light on the object (an enemy aeroplane), and shoot along the beam." Unfortunately, as the writer pointed out, the path of a shell is quite different from that of a ray of light. Raiding planes were guided to a certain extent by-' the light reflected even on a dark night from the water of a river, and there was some reason to suppose that the polished lines of a railway track served the same purpose. To obviate this, one individual suggested that blacking should be dribbled on to the lines by the last carriage or truck of the last train each night.

Inventive minds were prolific, of course, in ideas for new ways of killing or capturing the enemy, or rendering them harmless. The Munitions Department received the following suggestions among others: — A balloon carrying magnets hung 'to strings to attract the rifles out of men's hands. A shell to contain fleas or other vermin inoculated with disease. ' A shell with a man inside it to steer it at the target. The squirting of cement over soldiers, so as to petrify them. The sending of snakes into enemy trenches by pneumatic propulsion. The throwing of live-wire cables carrying a high voltage among advancing bodies of infantry by means of rockets. Germany should be attacked in one case by making a "tube" all the way, and in another by employing trained cormorants to fly to Essen and pick out the mortar from Krupp's chimneys.

Advancing bodies of the enemy could be destroyed according to one inventor, by clipping them between the jaws if huge callipers, or by entangling them in a series of nets, or by mowing them down by a machine like a lawn-mower but the size of a "tank." Terrifying is certainly the word with which he describes some of these novelties. The only idea not directly connected war which was placed Before the Department seems to have been the powder with which the inventor declared he could turn water into motor spirit.

He refused, however, to give any particulars of its composition, nor, apparently, any demonstration of its powers, though wealth "beyond the dreams of avarice" lies within his grasp if he could make good his claim.

There have been the usual complaints this year that modern toys are only "made to sell" —that they are gimerack things which in many cases barely survive over Boxing Day, and old people have, as usual, mourned for the toys of their youth which often lasted to be used by the second generation. There is some ground for the complaints, and also for the belief that even modern toys would last a good deal longer thart they do were it not that tho modern child has a great many more of them than his grandfather or grandmother had, and is consequently less careful of them. But the toy "built to last" is coming in again, at least in Sydney, where, under tho auspices of the Red Cross, the toy industry, is providing work, and plenty of it, for a number of partially incapacitated soldiers. At one time German toys were sold all over the world, and as a Sydney paper remarks, it is one of the ironies of life that the Hun has taught the Australian soldier to m:.ke better toys than tho Hun ever did.

Some of these, soldier-made toys are the e'ever invention of their makers, and tho Noah's Ark produced by these "diggers" contain "quite a lot of Australian animals which ought ,to have been in tho Ark but woren't until Arks were made in Australia." All these toys, we arc assured, will last a lifetime, so carefully and faithfully are they constructed and finished. This means that in the matter of cheapness they cannot compete against the imported toys. But despite their cost, the'demand this season has been greater than tho soldiers' factory could cope with. There seems to be an idea in this for some New Zealand soldiers' frietid with a capacity for organising. Somo of our returned men are making excellent baskets, and there ought to be a market for the toys they could produce if they were put in the way of it.