COLONIAL GOOSE

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 502, 8 May 1909, Page 3

COLONIAL GOOSE

AND THE BIRDS OF BERLIN. MOBE WATS IN WAE. (By Grno.) • "Last, loneliest, loveliest . . Was it not Kipling who said that, or something like it, about Auokland? Ineffective Kipling 1 How he understated things 1 Greater glory than ever Kipling imaged in verse has come (quite unexpectedly) to Auokland, No longer is Berlin tie haute eoole of war thought. . No longer is the Genius of War to be pictured as wearing spectacles and a tight frock-coat, and being a very silent, profound fellow indeed, cold-blooded as a fish, with the industry of a Eednvivus bug, and the computing power of a Ward. Ho lives in Auckland—a plain, ordinary citizen, recently lifted into the lime-light, by the patient heroes who work the linotype. Ai ex-member of the Permanent Force, too, one is inclined to' think after reading his "severe criticism" of the New Zealand forts. A little knowledge is a dangerous tiling, even for a Permanent Artilleryman. As one whose business takes me, about onoo a year, into one or other of the forts, and who, in common, with the prisoners, could sell the plans of most of them if there were any market, ■ I have often wondered at the glibness with which a P.A. man cah_ traverse interference of light, double refraction, polarisation, and many other matters which engaged Newton, Foucault, and Huyghena for a fifo-time. In these little interviews I nave always been keen to catch the P.A. man, but have\ generally found him_ as baffling as Boer flank, evading my question in his majestdo progress from one thicket of technicalities to another. Only when he launches into trigomomotry do I feel reasonably sure that I have mm. When he starts out on sines, cosines, and co-tangents, it is '- a _ fine manoeuvre to halt him, and ask him if he knows what a co-tangent is. He never can tell you. I . . i ■ . : Culrassed Ships and Forts. 11l his dissertation on bombardments, wherein tho blue mesmeric hands of death are woven round Auckland and other ports, he draws an affecting picture —a shelling at a range of fifteen miles. Now, it is > a very difficult matter to Bay how iai any piece of. ordnance can throw its shot, because its range .varies inversely with respcct to its age, and by no means, regularly. When the Powerful's bow-chasor" (9.2 in.) was tried, before being > shipped and fitted, it threw its shot over, twenty miles, and, one conceives that a twelve-inch guii of the latest make has a much greater reach. But that is nothing. The,range of a gun on terra firina, and its range when mounted-on a ship, are' two vastly different things, because range depends on elevation, and the comparatively :fragilo hulls of. ships cannot stand' more' than the most moderate elevations. If Togo could have destroyed the Bussian. ships .(huddled in Port Arthur) by bombardment,; all the bloodshed and expense incurred by the vast armies covering the siege, to 6ay nothing of the ghastly siege itself, could have been avoided. But to do so his twolve-inch'naval guns would have required an elevation of 17 •degrees. No battleship in the'world could stand that. And so, by a simple consideration jn pure statics, the. bloody path to the ,top of .203 Metre Hill was. ordained-. One wonders what Togo would have thought of the' Auokland-nightmare bombardment at a range.of fifteen miles. ■. , A cuirassed : cruiser (also pictured by the Auckland alarmist) sent out to New Zealand waters would be a waste of good material, because the first duty of a nation's armoured vessels is to find the armoured vessels of the enemy, and fight them. To send thom out on a mission of bombardment (as the author of He Final War" and other writers of tho comio opera school of warfare are fond of picturing) would bo frittering dway their strength. ■ Even if they came, they would have' a . bad time. 5 What does not seem to be understood, regarding bombardments is .'that a : ship does not compete' with forts on equal terms.' /'ln a prolonged duel, ships— .even usually get the worst of it.. No vessel is Krupp-plated all over, and even a small gun, not necossarily modern ;in' type, would .perforate lidr. unprotected ends with such a fancy pattern of holes that, very soon, she would bo down by tho head, or down bjr the That tilt would lift her bslt amidships out of tho water, and a yery little. shooting then would speedily compass the end. As to tho matter of exhausting ammunition, that has already been dealt with in an interview which appeared in The Do minion:this .vroek,. and, to further engago tho Auckland "export" on that subject, would be like breaking: tho butterfly on the wheal." . platform, protection; and supply of an inferior, fort usually surpasses tho plat-, form, 1 protection,-and supply.of a superior ship, so'also is the fire effect of the'ono by no means oomparable to tho fire effect of tho' ot ™r. A shell from a ship striking' the 1 .earthen parapet of a fort blows up clay and stones, and seeming desolation, but, as the shower subsides, one may, if he watches attontatavely, see the green gun once more lilted up above the green parapet for 'a second or two on its hydraulic mountings. It hres, and is gone again into the pit, and may nse and sink all day immune from evory,thmg oxcept a chanco lucky shot. But, on . h° hig hull seaward, it will hit and hit, and ! ut ; • The eight shots fired out of the sixmch gun at Mahanga Bay on Good Friday would havo cnppled the Powerful, for.a land shot striking thin, plates is something ]iko tho terrible missile of Freischutr, in German legend—it is "winged by the Fiend." ' The Death Came: Some of Its Exponants. If over a system of universal training comes—not only for colonials, but for Englishmen generally—the diligent student of j war will-find not only that he has apyramid 'of .facts to learn, but a legion of so-called "lessons" to % unlearn. It is very difficult to say much, awjut this, because, in -tlieso days of flaming, and truculent democracy,' the "man in the street" is master of the accumulated wisdom of the ages, and the more com'plox the subject is, the more swiftly and confidently he rushes at it. It will startle him, though I know it will not convince him, ; to be told that there is scarcely a work originally written in tho English language which .is sound on tbo operations of war. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, ■ for instance" contains an aiticlo on war (most likely ten by a general) which is not only unreliable on questions of theory, , but is' extensively wrong on simple matters of fact. • -Whoa Leo ltd tho Confederate "Army of Northern Virginia", against the "Army of tho Potomac" he was no doubt' accustomed to think of General Longstreet as his right-wing corps commander. How little ho knew about his own army to bp sure! But, if his spirit ever descends from Walhalla to'the public lib-raries,-what opportunities ho must have of repairing his neglected education. . He will find in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that Longstreet was "tho' Confederate cavalry commander." !Ho could never have noticed that during his sojourn on .earth. Nor Lonestreet I i A Revolutionary Theorem. To pass by the hosts'of-misstatements in popular educators such as Conan Doyle, Bennett Burleigh, "Deeds that Won the. Empire," and so forth, one arrives-at a simple question on ivarfare which everyone is quite Bure he can answer correctly: Which has benefited most by the introduction of modem .weapons—the attack or tho defence?" Everyone will say tho defence. Yet the contrary (as has been conclusively shown hy the German general staff) is the case. In the old days the defence was ablo to make a stand in the open field, whereas, nowadays. it cannot stand at all until it'has dug itself into cover. Thereby it has lost tho va'uahle asset of mobility and, when it is manoeuvred or stormed out of ono position, :it cannot form up in lino of battle until it has run sufficiently far to . entrench again. And, as tho years go by, tho difficulty and cost of storming entrenched positions is diminishing. Tho improved howitzer is slowly, but surely, shoaring away tho crop of glory which trenches won at Plevna, and it is not inoonceivablo that improved fuses (no longer attached to shrapnel with "fino" cones of dispersion), will bo used for high explosive shell. Ab the anglo of oponing of these is 180 degrees, tho tronches of tho future will bo but poor sholtor, Arid, as for field artillery in the attack/ what a glorious time it will have! For tho available numbor. of .emplacements for artillory in bat-Uo increase, not directly in proportion to tho range, but in UKiportion te the a&uore of

it. These considerations do not square with the lessons learned in Africa. They are not intended to do so. f When We All Get Government Muskets. —Enough said and yet so little! As an atom in society tho writer is looking torward with not _ unpleasant feelings to the day when he will bo "called up" for training. Only he hopes that his officer will not assail him with the so-called "lessons of tho Boer war." It will, of course, be necessary to Bay "Yes, sir!" and obey, but it will bo hard. As Mr. James Allen, M.P., has already pointed out, it will not bo so easy to ■ find educated officers in the Dominion as Sir Joseph Ward seems to imagine. . In criticism, however, let there ba justice, and' (where it may be) charity. That all New Zealand officers are . inept and blinded by the glare of veldt and kopje, or that they can no longer discern tho forest by reason of too-intent a gaze at the trees,' is not part of the writer's contention. Many of them are excellont officers of wide' outlook and desirable personality, and will make splendid instructors in the times to come. What is wanted, however, is more of them and a general, readjustment of . citizen's ideas of war. Somehow we have got the imago upside down, and we will yet have to view it properly even if we have to stand on our heads to do so. To sit down and consider such questions as tho relative chances of attack and defence (as mentioned above) shows that thoro are two sides to military questions of which the public eye Bees only one.