From The New German Artillery, The Spectator, 12 December 1914:
We shall have to wait a long time, we surmise, till the merits or demerits of the various new weapons are proved.Perhaps before judgment is delivered other new weapons will be introduced. The data are still very imperfect. We cannot say yet, for instance, whether the old-fashioned grenade will enjoy a revival in future wars owing to the fact that the out- flanking of one huge conscript array by another similar army is in many circumstances impossible. and that therefore the trenches of the two armies approach within a few yards of one another on a parallel front. At this moment, at all events, the rival armies in Flanders can easily throw hand-grenades across the narrow gap which separates them. The noiseless but dangerous little steel arrows known as flechettes, which are dropped from aeroplanes, are a French invention, and the French still seem to have a monopoly of their use. As to the rumours about shells which contain liquid air, or poisonous gases, and which have an enormous area of destruction, we prefer to remain sceptical at present. But what a fearful spectacle is presented by that which is already certain! Death comes from the air, and from beneath the ground, and from under the sea. The only thing beyond dispute is that human endurance surmounts everything, and that he was a short-sighted prophet who said that war would become too terrible to continue. The man in the trenches does not perhaps argue it out philosophically with himself, but he knows by an heroic and steadying instinct that the worst that can happen to him is death; and that death, whatever it may be, and however it may come, is no more than death.
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