The Merchants of Death

CHAPTER II MERCHANTS IN SWADDLING CLOTHES

These in their dark Nativity the Deep

Shall yield us, pregnant with infernal flame,

Which into hollow Engines long and round

Thick-rammed, at th’ other bore with touch of fire

Dilated and infuriate shall send forth

From far with thundring noise among our foes

Such implements of mischief as shall dash

To pieces, and o’erwhelm whatever stands

Adverse. . . .

Yet haply of thy Race

In future days, if Malice should abound,

Some one intent on mischief, or inspired

With dev’lish machination might devise

Like instrument to plague the Sons of men

For sin, on war and mutual slaughter bent.

—Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VI.

Would that I had not given myself so much trouble for the love of science.—Roger Bacon.

IT all began in the “Middle Ages” with the importation of gunpowder into Europe. Kings had just learned how to employ crossbows against rebellious nobles. With small companies of accurate bowmen they were able to chase the armored knights off the field of battle and into the shelter of baronial castles. But arrows were feeble missiles to batter in thick walls. So, funny little pipelike objects appeared. They made a terrifying noise and their own artillerymen were afraid of them, for they often back-fired. About the only mark they could hit was the broadside of a medieval château. But against these hitherto impregnable battlements they were effective. They brought a new era—an era of kings imposing obedience on robber barons and merchants plying a profitable trade in primitive cannon.

It was inevitable that the manufacturers of armor and swords should enter this business. Just as, a few years ago, livery-stable proprietors set up as garage keepers and coachmen suddenly became chauffeurs, so did the armorers of the Middle Ages adjust their tools to the making of guns and mortars. All through the Black Forest, down in Bohemia at Prague, up the Rhine at Solingen which is now the center of cutlery manufacture, forges that had previously turned out doublets, corselets, helmets and jousting lances now produced guns. In Italy, at Brescia, Turin, Florence, Pistoia, and Milan, new arms were born from the fertile minds and agile fingers of expert craftsmen. In Spain, in Toledo and Seville, Moorish artisans shaped their famous swords—for not until the twentieth century was the sword relegated to parades and museums—and tried their skill at new weapons. But the most active center of gun-making was in Belgium.

The country thereabouts had all the elements of nature necessary for this industry. There was plenty of iron and coal and the rivers and roads offered excellent transportation facilities. On both sides Germany and France wasted their resources in long and costly wars, while Liége, comparatively tranquil, waxed prosperous. The Liégeois were endowed with high inventive and commercial talents and they were admirably fitted to exploit their strategic position. Black Forest forgemen might make guns for their own rulers, but Liége sold to all the western world.

But as decades went by, the sale of arms to other countries from Liége developed so fast that Charles the Bold of Burgundy issued an edict forbidding the Liégeois to manufacture arms. The burghers defied Charles and he proceeded to enforce the measure by besieging the city. His banners and bombarding cannon were successful; Liége was captured and burned and those of its inhabitants who did not escape were slaughtered. But the arms industry has a tenacious quality undreamed of in the plans of dukes, and hardly was Charles in his grave, than the plucky Liégeois were back again at their forges.

Other lords besides Charles the Bold sought to curb these unscrupulous merchants. The Germans, having a vague feudal claim to the Low Countries, reminded the guilds of Liége that they were part of the duchy of Westphalia and for this reason could not legally sell arms and ammunition to the enemies of the Germans. But, like the true prototype of Vickers and Schneider which they were, they ignored this edict. Later when all this territory was conquered by France they were forced to obey similar orders from French republicans and from Napoleon I. But despite this, their industry flourished. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Liége was producing about 100,000 pieces a year and was well known as one of the arms centers of Europe.

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From the very first the arms industry had to struggle against more potent adversaries than chance rulers like Charles the Bold or the German dukes. Generals did not die in bed in olden times; they wielded their swords gallantly in the mêlée of battle and took their chance amid the masses of pikemen and cavalry. The ruling military caste of early modern times scorned these cowardly devices for killing at a distance, and guns, save for besieging purposes, were held in low esteem. Indeed the European upper classes were very similar to the Japanese Samurai in their resistance to change. When Dutch traders came to Japan in the sixteenth century they found plenty of gunpowder but strong objections to using it in combat. According to the doctrines of the Bushido (Way of the Warrior) it was dishonorable to meet one’s enemy save face to face and with cold steel. The European Bushido kept the arms industry backward for centuries.

Only in the chase was the new method of killing held proper. So fond did the nobles become of their first crude fowling pieces that they forbade any person not of noble birth to hunt with them. The arms makers of Liége and other cities found much profit in this early sporting goods industry—and more than profit, for as they brought in innovations and proved their worth in the field or covert, the nobles perceived the value of new inventions and, however grudgingly, accepted them in their ordnance departments.

There were other obstacles to rapid evolution. Science was crude and slow in those heavy footed centuries and so it took hundreds of years to better the new instruments of war. It is indeed a far cry from the crude Liége “bombardes” to the finished product of Vickers and Schneider; and from the unwieldy arquebuse to the slim Winchester. In the case of artillery the first cannon were of ridiculously small caliber; the little pieces consisted of bands of iron held together by strips of leather. Naturally large charges of gunpowder were dangerous. Likewise small arms were really large arms, for musketeers had to rest their cumbrous arquebuses on forked rods to aim them and an assistant had to stand by with a fuse to fire them.

The problem of igniting the powder charge presented the chief difficulty to small arms inventors and merchants. From the time when Columbus discovered America up to the Napoleonic wars, progress in perfecting the lock, the trigger and the firing breech was extremely slow. Decades rolled by before the arquebuse with its portable fuse evolved into the crude matchlock in which the fuse was attached to the breech. Then a century more to develop the wheel-lock, a spring contrivance, not much better, but requiring the use of a trigger. In the seventeenth century some unknown worker hit upon the use of flint struck by steel, and so the flintlock musket, the weapon of the soldiers of Marlborough, Frederick the Great and Washington, was invented. These flintlocks missed fire often, and when it rained the slugs of powder and ball, loosely packed in paper and rammed down the muzzle, were generally useless. And the barrels, unrifled and short in length, were incapable of accurate aim; only in masses of infantry were they at all effective. Early modern times were indeed the infancy of the arms industry.

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In a purely commercial sense, the arms makers were awakened by the French Revolution. The execution of Louis XVI brought all Europe together in league for the extinction of the French peril. England swept the seas of French commerce; Germany was both ally and host to the embittered French émigrés; the Emperor of Austria, mourning his lost relative Marie Antoinette, mobilized his legions at various points—on the Rhine, in Italy, and most important of all in Flanders. Thus the arms merchants of Liége were prevented from plying their usual trade. The British blockade kept American arms shipments from arriving in French ports, and it looked as if the revolutionary government of France would have to depend on their own poorly organized arsenals. However there was one possible channel for importations.

Would the arms makers of Germany and Austria stifle their patriotism and sell to the French enemy, and if so would the neutral Swiss cantons let the stuff go through? That was the problem, and the desperate Committee of Public Safety sent Citizen Tel and Citizen Chose to Geneva, to Basle, to Zurich and even to Germany and Austria, to sound out the armorers. Soon reports like the following came in to the Committee from their agents: “The landgrave of Hesse, avid for money, is ready to serve whoever will pay him the best.” Cupidity triumphed and it was the old story of the Liégeois and the Duke of Alva.

As for the neutral cantons, they were handled satisfactorily. The sellers packed their goods in the most innocent and disarming of crates so that they looked like anything but shipments of arms, and the carriers had orders to take them by certain sure and devious routes. One shipment from Germany totalled 40,000 muskets, and soon caravans of copper, that necessary metal in making shells, came all the way from Austria itself. The Swiss government assured the Emperor that they were permitting no such breach of neutrality, but the two streams flowed on—the agents equipped with fat letters of credit into Central Europe, and, in the other direction, the masked wagon loads of arms. It was a curious parade, but as will be seen in a later and more important war, it was not to be the only one of such a nature to pass through Switzerland.

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In 1797 Robert Fulton was in Paris. He had not yet drawn the plans for his famous steamboat, but he had invented another water craft to exploit which he formed a company. It was the first submarine, and when the Fulton Nautilus Company submitted proposals to the French government, there was much excitement in French naval circles. Old line admirals, like chivalrous knights in armor, considered the invention cowardly and unworthy of French martial honor. However, members of the Directory and scientists employed by Napoleon, who soon after seized the power from the Directory, were inclined to favor it.

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Fulton’s ship was hardly out of sight of Land’s End when another inventor knocked on the door of English conservatism. Up in Scotland a Scotch minister named Alexander Forsyth liked fowling but found his flintlock gun a most unsatisfactory affair. On his hunting expeditions across the moors, he was enraged when the powder and ball often failed to explode just after he had drawn a good bead on a fat pheasant. He had a turn for tinkering with mechanical contrivances and he began to experiment with methods of ignition. The result was a form of the percussion cap, inserted in a pan on the breech of the gun. It was crude, but it was at least successful in withstanding the damp mists of the Scottish highlands.

Forsyth saw commercial possibilities in it and went to London to get a patent. There he met Lord Moira, head of the government ordnance works. Moira was enthusiastic about the invention, encouraged Forsyth to perfect it, and gave him a room in the Tower of London as a workshop. Preaching in the neighborhood chapel on Sundays and bent over his bench in the Tower during the week, the clergyman worked out some excellent improvements on the cap. But, alas, Moira resigned and his successor, Lord Chatham, a believer in the status quo in arms, saw nothing but idle foolishness in Forsyth’s work. He dismissed him and ordered him to take his “rubbish” out of the Tower.

Thus in the case of this Scotch clergyman the various obstacles which faced arms merchants and inventors were all present. They had to demonstrate the effectiveness of their products in such inglorious ways as hunting before they could attract the notice of ordnance ministers. Then they had to overcome the stand-pattism of the military, just as resistant to change on the score of tradition and honor in arms as a Japanese shogun. And lastly, patriotism often restrained them from the full exploitation of their merchandise.

But by this time the industrial revolution was in full swing, capitalism was invoking new standards. Fulton and Forsyth, after all, were more inventors than arms merchants. Would the large companies which were now growing powerful still adhere to the old code of national honor? Was patriotism strong enough to resist a new code of business?