In the days of our Henry VIII a body of arquebusiers had to stand twenty-five ranks deep in order to obtain continuity of fire; that is to say, that once the first rank had fired and doubled to the rear it would only be ready loaded again when the twenty-fifth rank was about to discharge its pieces. By the days of Gustavus Adolphus, the art of musketry and the musket had so far improved as to permit of these twenty-five ranks being reduced to eight. As improvement went apace we find Frederick the Great reducing them to three, and Wellington in the Peninsula to two. Even in the early period of the revolutionary wars it was found necessary for light infantry to reduce the human target they offered to the enemy’s fire by making use of extensions. In 1866 extensions became more feasible on account of the Prussians being armed with a breach-loading rifle; in 1870 they became more general; in 1899 they have grown to between ten and fifteen paces, which may be taken as the maximum for a man, armed with the magazine rifle, to deliver one round per yard of front each minute. In 1904 trenches are made use of on an extensive scale, for as extensions cannot be increased if fire effect is to be maintained, some other form of protection must be sought, and men, not being able to carry armour, must carry spades instead and so still further immobilise themselves. In 1914, after a brief hurry-scurry of open warfare, all sides take to earth and the spade reigns supreme.
Then comes the reintroduction of armour with the tank, and what do we see? Not only mobility and direct protection, but the reinstitution of the firing line, not now morcelated at fifteen paces interval between the men composing it, but at 150 to 300 paces between the tanks, the mechanical skirmishing fortresses of which it is built up. A tank with a crew of 6 men can deliver fire at the rate of 300 rounds a minute, or equivalent to 30 riflemen at a South African War extension, and being armoured they suffer practically no loss and can consequently challenge not only 30 riflemen but 300, any number, in fact, who are sent against them. The logical conclusion to be drawn from this is that extensions are useless, trenches at best but static makeshifts, the infantryman must don armour and, as he has not the strength to carry it, he must get into a tank. If this is common sense, let us attempt to visualise what a tank war of the future may entail.
In the mechanical wars of the future we must first of all recognise the fact that the earth is a solid sea as easily traversable in all directions by a tractor as a sheet of ice is by a skater; the battles in these wars will therefore more and more approximate to naval actions. As trenches, as we know them, and the ordinary field obstacles now constructed will be useless, it may become necessary during peacetime to turn the great strategical centres—manufactories, railways, stores, seats of government, etc., into defended land-ports or protected power, fuel, and control stations. The fortifications of these will probably consist of immense dry moats and extensive minefields which will constitute a direct protection against tank attacks. Water obstacles will be useless, for the tank of a few years hence will undoubtedly be of an amphibious nature. To protect these centres from the air, barracks, storehouses, mobilisation stores, tankodromes and aerodromes will all have to be constructed well beneath the surface of the ground—in fact, the future fortress will approximate closely to a gigantic dugout surrounded by a field of land mines electrically manipulated.
Near the frontier these defended ports will probably be equipped with and linked up by lethal gas works—gas-producing and storage plants, lodged below the surface, which on war being declared can instantaneously be set operating electrically by one man stationed hundreds of miles away if needs be. When this type of warfare is instituted, mobilisation will not consist in equipping with weapons a small section of the community, but in providing such of the civil population as cannot be rapidly evacuated from the area it is proposed to inundate, or placed in gastight shelters safely underground, with anti-gas appliances. Under these circumstances the defence of frontiers will be organised according to prevailing winds, and signs of war will be looked for not amongst military but civil movements.
As the gas-storage tanks are opened and the gas-producing plants set operating, fleets of fast-moving tanks, equipped with tons of liquid gas, against which the enemy will probably have no means of protection,[39] will cross the frontier and obliterate every living thing in the fields and farms, the villages and cities of the enemy’s country. Whilst life is being swept away around the frontier fleets of aeroplanes will attack the enemy’s great industrial and governing centres. All these attacks will be made, at first, not against the enemy’s army, which will be mobilising underground, but against the civil population in order to compel it to accept the will of the attacker.
If the enemy will not accept peace terms forthwith, then wars in the air and on the earth will take place between machines to gain superiority. Tank will meet tank, and, commanded from the air, fleets of these machines will manœuvre between the defended ports seeking each other out and exterminating each other in orthodox naval fashion. Whilst these small forces of men, representing perhaps 0·5 per cent. or 1 per cent. of the entire population of the country, strong through machinery, are at death-grips with their enemy, their respective nations will be producing weapons for them; so, in the future, as military fighting man-power dwindles must we expect to see military manufacturing man-power increase.
Are we safe in this little island of ours against the future? If at times, during the “alchemical” period of warfare, we have been threatened and invaded, we may be certain that during the scientific period we shall be less secure than we have been in the past.
From the present-day tank to one which can plunge into the Channel at Calais at 4 in the morning, land at Dover at six o’clock, and be outside Buckingham Palace for an early lunch will not probably require as many as the fifty-two years which have separated the Merrimac from the Tiger or the Queen Elizabeth. If this is too remote a period for the present generation to grow anxious about, there is no reason why four or five years hence ships should not be constructed as tank-carriers, these machines being conveyed across the ocean and launched into the sea near the coast carrying sufficient fuel to move them 300 or 400 miles inland. From ships as carriers it is but one step to aeroplanes as suppliers and lifters, and another to aeroplanes as tanks themselves.
If the evolution of war, in the past, has been slow, do not let us flatter ourselves that it is likely to remain so in the future. From the gliders of the Wright Brothers the aeroplane rapidly evolved, and from a 40 H.P. engine of ten or twelve years back to-day the Porte “Super-Baby” triplane carries five engines of 400 H.P. each and the Tarrant triplane has a span of 131 feet and to drive it six Napier “Lion” engines are used, developing no less than 3,000 horse-power. The tank is still in its infancy, but it will grow and one day in mechanical perfection and efficiency catch up with the super-Dreadnought and the Handley Page, and what then? A close co-operation between the great mechanical weapons, the seaship, the airship, and the landship—or, if preferred, of boat, aeroplane, and tank—will take place. These weapons will approximate and unify, evolving one arm and not three arms, which will require one defence force and not three. This, even to-day, is becoming more and more apparent, and the sooner the brains of the future Defence Force are developed the better for this nation, for to-day we are thinking, like mediæval magicians, in separate terms of air, water, and earth, and some of us in those of gabions, lances, and blunderbusses.
If great wars can be restricted or abolished by word of mouth or written agreement, the above gropings into the future, even if possible, may never materialise; but even if this be so, many small wars lie in front of us, for Europe politically, since 1914, has practically gone back 400 years, the frontiers of the smaller nations approximating closely to those of the later Middle Ages. The more nations there are in the world the more wars there will be in the making, and as half the smaller nations of central and eastern Europe consider war a national sport there is little likelihood of agreements being kept or peace being maintained; in fact, all agreements which cannot be compelled by brute force are likely to be treated as “scraps of paper.”