INVENTION AND WAR.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9114, 13 June 1908, Page 4

INVENTION AND WAR.

A recent cablegram stated that a wonderful gun called the Simpson gun had been invented, and was able to throw a shell from London to Paris. In the London "Spectator," Captain Fletcher Vane makes some interesting comments on an article which appear3d in the "Contemporary," dealing with the gun and written by Colonel Maude. Captain Vane holds that improvement in weapons has little or no effect on the casualty lists, "because the great truth is that man, as we know him, can stand a certain amount of nervestrain and no more, and it matters very litle to him whether this is caused by bows and arrows or cordite shells." The earliar weapons weye,. in fact, the more destructive, because they were silent. The noise of modern artillery causes a "jumpiness" of the nerves, and ihe breaking-point of nerve-tension is now-a-days arrived at earlier, and with leys physical loss than in olden tim?s. But the difference between ancient and modern losses is not great. Captain Vane thinks that the pioportion of killed and wounded to uninjurad men is much the same from Foictiers to Magersfontein. Captain Vane goes on to point out that while modern weapons are really no more effective than the arrows and b ittle-axes of long ago, they are very much more expensive. The impoverishment of a country by the huge expenditure on a war causes the death of many women unJ chil !ren in the crowded centres of industry, who never heard a shot fired, and probably never knew ,vhy a shot should be fired. It will no proposed at the Hague Conference that ai-as be limit:..!, instead of armiei: