There is no doubt whatever that shells and bombs were considered highly immoral by the side which did not employ them. To those accustomed only to fire solid shot there must have been something very terrifying in the hurling of shells fitted with explosives which when they burst slew those round about and set fire to dwellings and ships.
When the Bomb Ketch, a ship firing bombs and shells, was introduced into our navy in the seventeenth century, the French were particularly angered by the “inhumanity” of the English in firing “inflammable fire balls and shells.” Again in the eighteenth century we find the Marechal de Conflans issuing an order against the use of hollow shot or incendiary shell because they “were not generally used by polite nations, and the French ought to fight according to the laws of honour.”
At the battle of the Nile in 1798 the French flagship L’Orient took fire and blew up, and when the French sailors reproached the English for using incendiary missiles the latter repudiated the charge, and mentioned that they had found such unlawful weapons in one of the prizes they had taken; thus the hollowness of the French regard for humane warfare was neatly demonstrated.
Whilst Great Britain did not scruple to fire lyddite shells at the Boers, their wives, and their children at Paardeberg, she prided herself on her abstention from the use of explosive or expanding bullets, and much abuse was heaped on the Boers for their employment of such. It may, however, be doubted whether a bullet which kills you right off at once, or at any rate which disables you permanently for a long time, is not preferable to one which is of so mild a nature that you can be shot over and over again, alternating your appearances on the battlefield with visits to the hospital.
A lecture on “Explosive Bullets and their Application to Military Purposes” was delivered before the Royal United Service Institution in 1868 by Major G. V. Fosbery, the first officer to use these projectiles in the field, systematically and to any large extent, against some of the mountain tribes of the North-West frontier of India. The lecturer tells us that the natives considered them unfair on two grounds—firstly, because they exploded in an objectionable way; secondly, because there was nothing they could collect of them afterwards, as in the case of ordinary bullets. But more civilised people complained of the use of “rifle shell” on the ground of their Satanic nature, and to these Major Fosbery replies as follows:
“The arguments which condemn a warlike instrument simply on the grounds of its destructiveness to life, provided that it neither adds keen agony to wounds nor new terrors to death itself, are, if logically pursued, simply retrogressive, and even if not recommending by implication a return to the bow and arrow, at all events point to the old times of protracted wars and deaths from fatigue and disease far exceeding in number those caused by the weapons of an enemy. We can therefore afford to set these on one side, or rather we are bound to neglect them altogether and seriously consider any invention which under the conditions above laid down promises us a more certainly destructive fire than that attainable cæteris paribus by the arms at present included in our war material.”
In spite of opinions such as these the humanitarians have won the day, and explosive bullets are now tabooed by Great Britain. The great Duke of Wellington used to say that he should not like to see the bullet reduced in size, because it broke the bone, and the object of war was either to kill your man or else put him in hospital and keep him there. With the Mauser and the Lee-Enfield neither of these results is attained.
The prototypes of the modern submarine torpedo, although they were employed on the surface of the water and not below, were the “machine,” the “infernal,” the “catamaran,” the “powder-vessel,” &c.
“Machines” may be best described as fire-ships specially arranged so as to explode very destructively when alongside one of the enemy’s vessels. They are first found in the British Navy in the seventeenth century, but were soon discontinued, not we are afraid on humanitarian grounds, but because Bushnell and Fulton pointed the way to the more convenient explosive device known as the “torpedo.”
In the year 1650 Prince Rupert made an attempt to blow up the English Vice-admiral in the Leopard by a species of “infernal.” He sent a couple of negroes and one of his seamen in Portuguese dress alongside the Leopard in a shore boat. They carried with them what purported to be a barrel of oil, but the barrel really held an infernal machine to be fired by a pistol attachment, the trigger of which could be pulled by a string passing through the bung. The story goes that one of the crew of the boat, finding the lower deck ports closed, “uttered an exclamation” in English. This betrayed them, but Blake refused to take vengeance on them, though the trick was one he would himself have scorned to play on his adversary.