Page:Pyrotechnics the history and art of firework making (1922).djvu/257

 CHAPTER X

MILITARY PYROTECHNY IN THE GREAT WAR

The outbreak of the great war, whatever may have been the case as regards other branches, found the Service badly equipped pyrotechnically. The great and almost frantic interest taken in military pyrotechny during the first half of the nineteenth century had died away. Gradually the pyrotechnic stores included in the official schedule had been reduced until in 1914 a few rockets—mostly signal—lights for signalling and illumination, Very pistol cartridges for signalling purposes, with single stars of various colours, and incendiary and light stars for shells constituted the entire list.

The cause of this neglect of the art of pyrotechny for warlike purposes was not difficult to understand. Rifled barrels, breech-loading, and quick-firing ordnance had entirely destroyed interest in the rocket as a projectile. The telephone and telegraph had almost entirely superseded older methods of signalling, and so with most of the pyrotechnic contrivances which, less than a century before, had been thought to be indispensable.

As events proved, this abandonment of old ideas was premature. Although every thinking man in the country realised that war was some day inevitable, no one, or at least very few, realised the nature of the struggle. The development of land war into what were practically siege operations on a gigantic scale; the nature of sea warfare with the new factors, the submarine, seaplane and wireless; the extent and ferocity of aerial warfare—all were unforeseen. Yet each of these called for new inventions, new methods of destruction,