THE WARFARE OF THE FUTURE.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIX, Issue XIX, 30 October 1897, Page 581

THE WARFARE OF THE FUTURE.

r |IHE next great contest, says a writer in Leslie’s ‘ Weekly,’ will show how far human ingenuity has revolutionised the methods and added to the machinery of modern warfare. The result cannot fail to be amazing. Not even the thought of the blood that must be shed—and all authorities seem to agree that the carnage in the next great war will l>e enormous — can obliterate the picturesque features of a struggle between men—and even horses—weighted down perhaps by bullet-proof coats, and equipped with military bicycles, dirigible balloons, ‘ fog-dispensers, carrion flies, trained dogs, and pet pigeons. By the time that war shall have been begun the so-called bullet-proof cloths will have been sufficiently tested, and they will either furnish an essential portion of the equipment of at least one of the contending armies, or have lieen relegated to the museums.

Balloons were used in the last great war between Frenchmen and Germans ; captive balloons are conceded to have uses as yet undemonstrated but entirely practicable. The wounded could be hoisted out of harm’s way in a hospital built on a rectangular platform, each corner of which should be supported by a captive balloon, which might as easily carry the fresh meat and other stores into a higher, purer atmosphere and convey camp baggage. But it is to the dirigible balloon that all eyes will be turned. The secret of steering air-ships at will is said to be in the possession to-day of both France and Germany. That alone may be the key to success. From a dirigible balloon explosives powerful enough to annihilate ships and army corps might lie dropped with impunity. The new explosives themselves will constitute, perhaps, the most powerful weapons in use. Not those high explosives with which we are already familiar, in print at least, but other and newer and more deadly, such, for example, as that gas, one capsule of which would dissolve and blur instantaneously the life of every breathing thing in the vicinity. That capsule might itself l>e made light enough to float on the wind and dissolve in the sun, or to l>e discharged from the muzzle of a great piece of field artillery, especially designed for the purpose, which would project the strange missile gently

through the air until it burst over the enemy’s camp. The feasibility of such a gentle projection of a delicate missile was demonstrated in the pneumatic torpedogun, which utilizes compressed air to hurl high explosives. There has been a suggestion that blunderbusses could be contrived to throw deadly vapours into a hostile community—hence the term ‘ fog-dispenser' applied to one of the new weapons whose merits are yet to lie tested. Turpin has set the genius of France to work at new machines of war. The French Minister of War received proposals, not long since, from the professor of one of the principal colleges in Paris that large blowflies lie bred and kept in cages, being fed upon blood placed lietween the artificial skin of lay figures dressed up in the German uniform. When war was declared these flies, he explained, could lie rendered venomous by feeding them on the sap of tropical plants and taken to the front in their cages, from which they would be released, to make short work of the enemy. Another patriot

suggested that dogs should lie trained to bite lay figures wearing the German uniform, and that each soldier should lie accompanied by a dog in time of war. The most venomous, however, of all recent appliances for the destruction, in action, of

human life seems to lie the one descril*d in a dispatch from Paris : * A French officer has submitted to the War Minister a rifle that will project a stream of vitriol for a distance of seventy metres. He proposes that the weapon lie used only against

savages, to prevent their making frenzied rushes.’

The military bicycle will have its first practical trial in the next great war. Already the European caricaturists are amusing themselves by depicting on paper combats lietween forces mounted on military bicycles and armoured in Dowe coats.