times they merely cause a stifling or a weeping sufficient to prevent the men from fighting but without fatal results. Armored and artillery-armed automobile cars have been much used in battle, capable of driving over ditches and through walls and fences, and impervious to all but the heaviest artillery fire. Trench warfare has been developed as never before. Instead of a mere ditch and embankment running along the front of the army, there is now an elaborate network of ditches covering a vast extent of country, with tunnels and dormitories, dining rooms and kitchens many feet below the surface of the ground. Many of these excavations are lined with concrete walls and are floored with planking, and supplied with water, heating and lighting systems. HIGH POWER RIFLES The old-fashioned musket went to the scrap heap long ago. The modern soldier is armed with a repeating rifle capable of killing a man at a distance of three miles. Indeed, the pistol of today has a longer effective range than the musket of a century ago. Machine guns of various types, some of them capable of discharging scores of bullets in a minute, are largely used; some of them so compact as to be used by a single man after the manner of an ordinary rifle. THE HOSPITAL SERVICE Happily, the ways and means of saving life have not lagged behind those of destroying it. The Japanese set an example to the world of sanitary and hospital efficiency in their war with Russia, which other nations have been prompt to emulate. The Red Cross and other organizations have developed a service for the wounded that is comparable with the fighting efficiency of the army. In our Civil War more men died in hospitals from wounds than on the field of battle. Today the deaths in hospitals are insignificant in number. THE CHANGE OF UNIFORM The present war emphasizes more strongly than ever one of the ways in which we have learned the art of war from the lower orders of the animal creation. That is not in simple destructiveness, in what we call brute force. We have had no need to emulate the fury of the tiger or the shark. Human nature supplied it without effort or study. But in the most subtle adjuncts to actual slaughter, and in those which most implicate some of the most delicate and complex scientific processes, we have learned much from quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, fishes and insects. 18 T EMPLACEMENT FOR MACHINE GUNS ness is both offensive and defensive, and is due entirely to its color, which is a greenish-yellowish gray, which blends so perfectly with the prevailing color-tone of the landscape as to render the troops invisible, or at least indistinguishable, even at so short a distance as half a mile or less. The same end was aimed at by the American, British and other armies some years ago in the adoption of "khaki" colored cloths, but it was not attained as perfectly as by the Germans, because that color was selected empirically, or perhaps SIMPLE GUN PIT HASTY INTRENCHMENTS FOR FIELD ARTILLERY HASTY GUN PIT PROTECTED AT FRONT SIDES we should say traditionally, seeing what its unpleasant origin was, while that of the German uniforms is the result of painstaking scientific study and experiment. LEARNING FROM ANIMALS In this, man is, of course, merely imitating the natural gifts of the humbler members of creation. Naturalists have long been familiar with the varied and important uses of color in the scheme of animate creation, and have realized that of those uses the cryptic is by far the most common and probably the most important in the struggle for existence. Cryptic coloration is employed both in attack and in defense, and is commonly associated with other qualities, such as speed, agility and strength. Those animals which are most perfectly con cealed by their coloring generally show, when discovered, great speed in flight, as the rabbit; or great strength and fury in defense or attack, as the tiger. Pro-cryptic coloring, for concealment for purposes of safety and defense, widely prevails among small animals and insects, and is far more common than the anti-cryptic coloring which facilitates aggression and attack; since creatures which are preyed upon are more numerous than those which prey upon them. THE PURPOSE OF DISGUISE In the vast majority of cases all these colorings have for their object precisely the same object as the assumption of "khaki" by our soldiers has: The dual object, of concealing the wearer from the enemy and of enabling the wearer to get close to the prey before being perceived. |