The Two Maps of Europe, and Some Other Aspects of the Great War

by Hilaire Belloc

But there is much more than this high scale of expenditure in the things necessary to the maintenance of the man himself. You are also equipping him with special furniture far more expensive than that which he uses in ordinary life.

You give to the minesman a rifle which is a carefully constructed and expensive machine, much more valuable than all the tools that would ever be in the possession of any but a small minority of skilled artisans. He has belt, pouches, pack covering to match. He must expend in the use of that weapon ammunition costing something quite out of proportion to any expenditure involved by the use of his implements in his civilian trade.

The cavalryman you equip with a horse, which he could not think of affording as his own property, and which is superior in quality to the horse he may be working with for a master in most trades, let alone the fact that the proportion of men thus equipped with horses is much larger than the proportion of men who in civilian life have to deal with those animals. To the driver of a gun you are apportioning two horses necessarily sound and strong; to the non-commissioned officers throughout the field artillery, to a great number of officers throughout the service, you are furnishing horses which, in a civilian occupation, they could never afford, and you are, of course, also providing the keep of those horses.

Many branches of the service you are equipping with instruments of very high expense indeed. A field gun does not cost less, I believe, than £600. And to every thousand men you actually put into the field you may reckon at least four of these instruments. Every time one of them fires a shot it fires away fifteen shillings. Apart from the wear and tear of the field piece itself, a modern quick-firing piece, firing moderately, will get rid of a ten pound note in ammunition in a minute, and each piece is allowed from the base onwards 1000 rounds.

Further, an army is equipped with heavy artillery, the pieces of which cost anything from many hundreds to many thousands of pounds, according to their calibre (a 9.2, with its mounting, comes to near £12,000); and it is also equipped with a mass of auxiliary material—vehicles, mechanical and other, telephones, field kitchens, aircraft, and the rest—none of which expense attaches to the same body of men in their civilian life.

The scale of the business is further emphasised by the fact that once war is engaged the nation as a whole is suddenly called upon to produce material not only more expensive upon the average, man for man, than the same men would have used and consumed in the same time in civilian life, but things different from those things which the nation was organized to produce for use and consumption during peace. That change in effect is costly. And yet another element of cost is the novel use of existing instruments.

Diagram II. Many branches of the service are equipped with instruments of very high expense indeed. A field gun, for instance, does not cost less than £600. Every time one of them fires a shot it fires away fifteen shillings. A modern quick-firing piece, firing moderately, will get rid of a ten pound note in ammunition in a minute. Each piece is allowed from the base onwards 1000 rounds and the extent of this quantity is illustrated in the diagram—40 rows of shells, 25 in a row.

It is more expensive to use an instrument for some purpose for which it was never designed, than to use it for some purpose for which it was designed. That is a universal truth from the hammering in of a nail with a boot heel to the commandeering of a liner for the transport of troops. And in time of war the whole nation begins at once to use instruments right and left for military purposes, which instruments had been originally designed for civilian purposes.

All up and down France and England, for instance, at this moment, every workshop which can by hook or by crook turn out ammunition is turning it out, and very often is turning it out with instruments—lathes, cutting tools, etc.—that were originally designed not for making ammunition at all, but for making the parts of bicycles, of pumps, of motors, of turbines, etc.