War was essentially a series of
explosive reactions resulting in the liberation of nitrogen. Nothing
like it has been seen in any previous wars. The first battles were
fought with cellulose, mostly in the form of clubs. The next were fought
with silica, mostly in the form of flint arrowheads and spear-points.
Then came the metals, bronze to begin with and later iron. The
nitrogenous era in warfare began when Friar Roger Bacon or Friar
Schwartz--whichever it was--ground together in his mortar saltpeter,
charcoal and sulfur. The Chinese, to be sure, had invented gunpowder
long before, but they--poor innocents--did not know of anything worse to
do with it than to make it into fire-crackers. With the introduction of
"villainous saltpeter" war ceased to be the vocation of the nobleman and
since the nobleman had no other vocation he began to become extinct. A
bullet fired from a mile away is no respecter of persons. It is just as
likely to kill a knight as a peasant, and a brave man as a coward. You
cannot fence with a cannon ball nor overawe it with a plumed hat. The
only thing you can do is to hide and shoot back. Now you cannot hide if
you send up a column of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night--the
most conspicuous of signals--every time you shoot. So the next step was
the invention of a smokeless powder. In this the oxygen necessary for
the combustion is already in such close combination with its fuel, the
carbon and hydrogen, that no black particles of carbon can get away
unburnt. In the old-fashioned gunpowder the oxygen necessary for the
combustion of the carbon and sulfur was in a separate package, in the
molecule of potassium nitrate, and however finely the mixture was
ground, some of the atoms, in the excitement of the explosion, failed to
find their proper partners at the moment of dispersal. The new gunpowder
besides being smokeless is ashless. There is no black sticky mass of
potassium salts left to foul the gun barrel.

The gunpowder period of warfare was actively initiated at the battle of
Cressy, in which, as a contemporary historian says, "The English guns
made noise like thunder and caused much loss in men and horses."
Smokeless powder as invented by Paul Vieille was adopted by the French
Government in 1887. This, then, might be called the beginning of the
guncotton or nitrocellulose period--or, perhaps in deference to the
caveman's club, the second cellulose period of human warfare. Better,
doubtle