THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1904. THE WAR

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 8, 25 February 1904, Page 17

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1904. THE WAR

§]N'E of the characters in ' Eben Ilolden ' gnes the Yankee credit for the gift of a marvellously persuasive tongue. ' Give him a chance,' says he, ' t ' talk it over with his enemy an' he'll lick" 'im without a fight. An' when his enemy is another Yankee— why, they both git licked ' When Jap and Russ met to ' talk it over ' it was as when Yankee meets Yankee. Both are seemingly well verged in all the de\ious arts of fighting, with iha thrust and lunge and parry and ripost of tihe tongue, the diplomatic battles that so often precede the ruder shocks of the war of lead and iron Each failed to score upon the other in the long>-drawn joust of diplomatic exchanges. And now they are hard at work endeavoring to convince each other with the physical force argument that is the last resort of brutes as well as of kings To the silken tongue succeed the mailed fist and the elaborate budgets of butcher's tools that are the modern counterpart of the sling and club and knobkerry of more barbarous times And the world stands around the arena of strife and with keen and businesslike eye notes how, under the new conditions of longrange, rapid-fire guns, high explosives, and Krupp and Harveyed steel, battles by land and sea are .fought and won. • The South African campaign was still young when a discovery— already in part anticipated in the FrancoGerman struggle— was made which has, no doubt, led t-o the exclusion of war correspondents from the theatre of hostilities in the Distant East. The war ' specials '

served, by deputy, in the red front of battle as eyes for the eager and expectant world beyond the zone of danger. But, through their published cable-news— despite the censor's merciless erasures— they sometimes served, in effect, though innocently and unintentionally, as if they were hostile intelligence officers or spies upon the movements of the side with whom their perilous duties lay. It is a wise military precaution that now keeps war coriespoiadentij at a distance from the piace where the band plays ajid powder burns— at least during important movements— and leaves them to the inglorious game of firing| to the newspapers of the western world long-rang© guesses from Tokyo or Shanghai. The news from the front comes, therefore, for the present at least, in small and tantalising doses. The lessons of this great campaign are not to be fully learned till the details are gathered togtether and collated and the accounts are cast up at the end— which may be very distant. Thus far, on sea the expected has come to pass. On land, events seem to point to the fulfilment of Bloch's Apocalypse of war, and to give a fresh emphasis to the lessons learned in South Africa at the cost of such a monstrous fee : that the campaign of the future will be chiefly one of sieges and entrenched positions ; that the advantagp will always rest with the defensive ; and that frontal attacks, without immense superiority in numbers, will be impossible.

The swift and dramatic success of Japan over Russia in naval war has given the world— even more than in the days of her great victory off the Yalu— an earnest of the fighting qualities of a (nation that only thirty years before began the unexampled renaissance which, brought it at a bound among the front-rank Powers of the world. Vast sums had been spent by Russia upon shore batteries in and around Port Arthur. But, despite elaborate methods of measuring the distance of objects in motion upon the water in Jront of their muzzles, the firing of Port Arthur's great guns seems to have been a waste of powder and shell. They did not even prevent the Japanese torpedoers from steaming in through the narrow and fortified neck of the harbor, disabling warships at anchor, and returning in triumphant safety to their fleet. The French fleet found no foe in 187.0. But the comparative uselessness of shore batteries against ships of war was demonstrated full many a time since then—as, for instance, in the bombardment of Alexandria, in the Chilian struggle, and in Cuba and at Manila during the Spanish-American war.

Several instruments of death have attained a greatly intensified destructive power in the Russo-Japanese struggle. We refer chiefly to the torpedo and the shrapnel shell. In blood-letting inventions the world moves with the speed of the Scotch Express. It is only forty years, yet it seems a long cry back to the time when, in the American Civil War, the torpedo was a crude bombshell tied to the end of a stick. It had .an unpleasant trick of hoisting friend as well as enemy. Sometimes the friend went up first. By 1877 the torpedo had been so improved that it sank or damaged six Turkish land seven Russian vessels of war of various sorts and, sizes The French, in the Tonkin war of 1885, performed, with two ordinary steam cutters, a feat which furnishes an almost exact parallel with the deadly work done by the two Japanese torpedoers in Port Arthur. They sank a Chinese frigate of 3500 tons and sent its crew to feed the sharks of the harbor of Shein. In the Chilian war the ' Blanco Encalada ' was sent to the bottom after an engagement of only seven minutes. But the torpedo of the Russo-Japanese war, with its two hundred pounds of high explosive, is a much more formidable dealer of destruction and death. The earlier form of this sinker of ships is to that at present in use in the Par East pretty much what the old twelve, inch smooth-bore mortar, with its maximum range of 2500 yards, is to the modern twelve and a half inch Canet gun, which sends a shell weighing 986 pounds and charged with 275 pounds of high explosives, shrieking

through the air to a distance of thirteen and one-eight miles. In the first naval battle of the Russo-Japanese war, the shrapnel fire of the Mikado's ships caused such havoc as to turn the warships of the Czar into a living hell. In the Franco-German war of 1876, a shrapnel shell burst into 37 pieces* and ripped the life out of the men in the immediate neighborhood of the place wheic it scattered itself. Each shrapnel shell employed in Hie Far East breaks into 340 or luoie whizzing fragment, and, though fired at a distance of three thousand to four thousand yards, becomes a focus of death for a distance of 880 by 440 yards. The old bowl of ,1870 turned the scale at 82 pounds and was rent, by the smoky black powder of the day into 42 flying pieces of twisted and contorted iron. Its modern counterpart is filled with a heavy dose of the emphatic explosive known as peroxylene, which rives it into 1204 death-deaJing splinters moving at in nense velocity, and leaving behind a pale cloud of poisonous fumes that for periods of fifteen minutes or so prevented the Russians using the guns about which the shells burst. The flight of bullets and splinters in a tattle of to day has been aptly likened to the action of a sieve from which drops of water are driven. ' Imagine,' says a foremost living authority who^e workis beforej us, ' such a sieve revolving at great speed, and some idea will be gained of the manner in which the fragments of shells would be dispersed.' A naval war under modern conditions is swift, deadly, and decisive. On land, the improvements m modern weapons have completely upset the old conviction of the superiority of attack. The positions are now reversed. Both in equipment and in the system of fortification, the changes have operated in favor of the defence, and the situation at Port Arthur bears out, so far, the opinion of the military specialists who maintain that we are returning to the epoch of long sieges, like those of Belgrade, Mantua, and Plevna. But the lesson of Plevna, and of the still more recent sieges of Ladysmith, Mafeking, and Kimberley, go to show that starvation or exhaustion of munitions of war, offers the Japanese the only reasonable hope they can entertain of the reduction of the great fortified enclosure of Port Artliur.