The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 09 / Tangential Views

by Ambrose Bierce

Right sensibly General Miles once tried to call a halt in the progress of military extravagance by condemning our enormous expenditures for “disappearing guns.” The delicate and complicated mechanism for pointing and lowering the gun will break down when it is in action and deteriorate like a fish on the beach when it is not. During the long decades of peace it will need expert attention, exercise enough to wear it out, and constant renewal of its parts. The only merit of these absurd Jack-in-the-box guns is their bankrupting cost. If we can fool less wealthy nations into adopting them we shall have whatever advantage accrues to the longest purse in a contest of purses. So far, all other nations, rich and poor alike, have shown a thrifty indisposition to engage in the peaceful strife.

We are told with, on the whole, sufficient reiteration, that this is an age and this a country of “marvelous invention,” of “scientific machinery,” and the rest of it. We accept the statement without question, as the people of every former age have without question believed it of themselves. God forbid that anyone should close his ears to the cackle of his generation when it has laid its daily egg! Nevertheless, there are things that mechanical ingenuity can not profitably produce. One of them is the disappearing gun, another the combination stop-watch and tack hammer.

Americans must learn, preferably in time of peace, that no people has a monopoly of ingenuity and military aptitude. Great wars of the future, like great wars of the past, will be conducted with an intelligence and knowledge common to both belligerents, and with such appliances as both possess. The art of attack and the art of defense will balance each other as now, any advance in the first being always promptly met with a corresponding advance in the second. Genius is of no country; it is not peculiar to the United States.

It is not to be doubted that if it should be discovered that silver is a better gun metal than any now in use, and some ingenious scoundrel should invent a diamond-pointed shell of superior penetrating power, these “weapons of precision and efficiency” would be adopted by all the military powers. Their use would at least produce a gratifying mortality among civilians who pay military appropriations; so something would be gained. The purpose of modern artillery appears to be slaughter of the taxpayer behind the gun.

If fifty years ago the leading nations of Europe and America had united in making invention of offensive and defensive devices a capital crime, they would during all this intervening time have been on relatively the same military footing that they now are, and would have been spared an expenditure of a mountain of money. In the mad competition for primacy in war power not one of them has gained any permanent advantage; the entire benefit of the “improvements” has gone to the clever persons who have thought them out and been permitted to patent them. Until these are forbidden by law to eat cake in the sweat of the taxpayer’s face we must continue to clutch our purse and tremble at their power. We are willing to admire their ingenuity, cheer their patriotism and envy their lack of heart, but it would be better to take them from their arms of precision to those of the public hangman.

The military inventor is said now to have thought out a missile that will make a hole in any practicable armor plate as easily as you can put a hot knife through a pat of butter. From all that can be learned by way of the fan-light over the door of official secrecy it appears to be a pointed steel bolt greased with graphite. Its performances are said to be eminently satisfactory to the man behind the patent, who is confident that it will serve the purpose of its being by penetrating the United States Treasury. Well, here at least is “an improvement in weapons of destruction,” to which the non-militant taxpayer can accord a hearty welcome. If it is really irresistible to armor, armor to resist it will go out of use and ships again “fight in their shirtsleeves.” It will sadden us to renounce the familiar 550-dollars-a-ton steel plating endeared to us by a thousand tender recollections of the assessment rate, but time heals all earthly sorrow, and eventually we shall renew our joy in the blue of the skies, the fragrance of the flowers, the dew-spangled meadows, the fluting and warbling and trilling of the politicians. In the meantime, while awaiting our perfect consolation, we may derive a minor comfort from the high price of graphite.

When in personal collision, or imminent expectation of it, with a gentleman cherishing the view that one is needless, one’s attention does not wander from the business in hand to dwell upon the lilies and languors of peace. One is interested in the proceedings, and if he survive them experiences in the retrospection a pleasure that was not discernible in the returning brave from the land where the Mauser and the Kraag-Jorgensen conversed amicably without visible human agency across a space of two statute miles. Crouching in the grass, under an afflicting Spanish fire from somewhere, our soldiers at San Juan Hill felt it a great hardship to be “decimated” in so inglorious a skirmish. They did not know, poor fellows, that they were fighting a typical modern battle. When, the situation having become intolerable, their two divisions had charged and carried the trenches of the two or three hundred Spaniards opposed to them, they had leisure to amend their conception of war as a picturesque and glorious game.

In the elder day, before the invention of the Whitehead torpedo and the high-power gun, the wooden war vessels of the period used to ram each other, lie alongside, grapple, jam their guns into each other’s ports, and send swarms of half-naked boarders on each other’s deck, where they fought breast to breast and foot to foot like heroes. Dr. Johnson described a sea voyage as “close confinement with a chance of being drowned.” The sailor-militant has always experienced that double disadvantage with the added chance of being smashed and burned. But formerly the rigors of his lot were ameliorated by a sight of his enemy and by some small opportunity of distinction in the neighborhood of that gentleman’s throat. To-day he is denied the pleasure of meeting him—never even so much as sees him unless fortunate enough to make him take to his boats. As opportunity for personal adventure and distinction a modern sea-fight is considerably inferior to a day in the penitentiary. Like a land-fight, it has enough of danger to keep the men awake, but for variety and excitement it is inferior to a combat between an isosceles triangle and the fourth dimension.

When the patriot’s heart is duly fired by his newspaper and his politician he will probably enlist henceforth, as he has done heretofore, and be as ready to assist in covering the enemy’s half of the landscape with a rain of bullets, falling where it shall please Heaven, as his bellicose ancestor was to meet the foeman in the flesh and engage him in personal combat; but it will be a stupid business, despite all that the special correspondent can do for its celebration by verbal fireworks. Tales of the “firing line” emanating from the chimney corner of the future will urge the young male afield with a weaker suasion. By the way, I do not remember to have heard the term “firing line” during our civil war. We had the thing, of course, but it did not last long enough (except in siege operations, when it was called something else) to get a name. Troops on the “firing line” either held their fire until the enemy signified a desire for it by coming to get it, or they themselves advanced and served him with it where he stood.

I should not like to say that this is an age of human cowardice; I say only that the men of all civilized nations are taking a deal of pains to invent offensive weapons that will wield themselves and defenses that can take the place of the human breast. A modern battle is a quarrel of skulkers trying to have all the killing done a long way from their persons. They will attack at a distance; they will defend if inaccessible. As much of the fighting as possible is done by machinery, preferably automatic. When we shall so have perfected our arms of precision and other destructive weapons that they will need no human agency to start and keep them going, war will be foremost among the arts of peace.