I cannot but think that the native hunter, having seen the tremendous force with which the Mangrove seed buries itself in the mud, has applied the same principle to a weapon which shall bury itself in the body of an elephant.
WAR AND HUNTING.
CHAPTER VIII.
CONCEALMENT.—DISGUISE.—THE TRENCH.—POWER OF GRAVITY.—MISCELLANEA.
Concealment needed in Modern Warfare.—Concealment by Covering.—Masking Guns.—Birnam Wood.—The Reduvius.—The Cuckoo-spit and the Spider-crab.—Concealment by Disguise.—Stratagem of the Barea.—Complete Deception.—Larva of Geometra.—The Leaf-insect.—The Luppet-moth.—The Ptarmigan and the Ermine.—Principle of the Trench.—The Hunter’s “Skärm.”—The Wax-moth or Galleria-moth, and its Tunnel.—Fate of a Collection.—The Termites and the Travelling Ants of South America.—The Power of Gravity.—The Battering-ram and its Force.—Miscellanea.—War by Suffocation.—The Stink-pot.—The Chili-plant.—The Sulphur-room.—The Bombardier-beetle.—The Bullet-making Machine and the Silkworm.
Concealment.
WE will first take Concealment by means of Covering.
If History repeats herself, so does Warfare. I have already shown the repetition of History in the Fortress—I shall now show it in the Field.
In former days, when arms of precision were not invented, concealment was not needed. No soldier ever was visited with a dream so wild as that of taking definite aim at the enemy, and reserving the fire until the aim was certain. I have in my collection several of the French and English muskets used about the time of Waterloo, and, though a fair rifle-shot, would not engage to hit a haystack with either of them at a distance of a hundred yards. With the Snider or Martini-Henry in the hands of a skilful adversary, he would be a bold man who would offer himself for a target at a thousand yards. Indeed, if the first shot happened to miss, the marksman would be tolerably sure to notice the failure, and to correct his aim with fatal certainty.
In those days, therefore, concealment was rather ridiculed than praised, the power of the new arm not being as yet appreciated. I well recollect, in the earliest days of the Volunteer movement, hearing a Volunteer captain declare, amid the cheers of his company, that “he had never sneaked behind a tree in all his life, and was not going to begin now.”
In the present day, the power of the missile has been developed with such astounding rapidity, that to be exposed to the fire of rifles or cannon is almost certain death. Indeed, the only safety of the defence lay in the fact that the smoke soon rendered very accurate shooting impossible at long ranges, and that at short ranges, if a man got a bullet through his body, it mattered little to him whether the missile were a spherical musket-ball or a conical rifle-bullet.
