THE JAVANESE ARMY BULLET.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 12955, 26 August 1905, Page 5 (Supplement)

THE JAVANESE ARMY BULLET.

In the French .journal L'lllu'stration an interesting article appears, entitled ■ Japan's Humanitarian Bullet." This is the Arisaka rifle bullet, slender, long, and light, built for speed, and with an outside covering of polished steel or German silver. It is less than a quarter of an inch in diameter. Its purpose's to avoid lasting injury while disabling for a time, but in long campaign, as in the present conflict, soldiers are frequently able to return to the fighting line after a comparatively short absence owing to wound's. Sometimes it causes very bad wounds, however: —" Yet this bullet, moving on exit from the barrel with a velocity of 600 to 700 metres (about 656 to 765 yards), stops again pretty easily in the tissues when it either comes from too far or has l'ieochetted on the ground, or, lastly, has encountered, on its way amid human tissues, a sinew, an aponeurosis, or an osseous crest that, deflecting it from its trajectory, on which it is pretty unstable, has made it wobble or turn over and over. "It acts then in the manner of a 1 bulky and irregular projectile suddenly stopped in its course by the resistance offered it by the anatomical elements, which hold it prisoner and endure very well, without reacting, the presence of this rather brutal guest. "A singular and apparently paradoxical fact, this iron-clad bullet . . . often splinters on contact with less hard bodies, like a- tendon-edge or aa osseous crest." Inflammation or suppuration following the wound from this bullet seldom occurs. There is a small trance wound and a small clean exit hole. The bones, too, are pierced without being shattered. It goes , easily through the lungs, and its wounds heaj. with remarkable facility. The writer gives an awful picture of what sometimes ha'ppens in spite of these bullets: " When the. bullet, moving at full speed, shot from 150. or 200 metres, hits the skull then everything bursts. , There occur those hydrodynamic effects that are not very well understood as yet. The skin yields, fragments of bone as large as one's hand are thrown for 10 metres, and pieces of brain as big as your fist fly through the air. In other cases if the projectile really passes to the centre of the cerebral mass tho hydrodynamic action spreads over the whole interior surface of the cranium, which shivers into a thousand pieces."