By the Editor of “The Autocar”

We have been told, and rightly, many times within the last few weeks that the present war is unique, not merely on account of the vastness of the contending armies, but also on account of the power of the weapons employed. In fact, the war has very properly been described as an engineer’s war, and such, indeed, it is, as the engineer is wholly responsible for the tremendous development in every warlike instrument which has taken place since 1870. He is responsible, too, not merely for the development, but for the invention of wholly new methods of offence and defence. But his influence does not end here, and it is not merely in the firing line that one sees the influence of the engineer: even as this war is the first occasion on which modern weapons, explosives and projectiles have been tested on the grand scale, so, too, is it even more emphatically the first occasion on which motor transport has been thoroughly tested at all. While the recent Balkan war provided a practical test of many of the weapons used in the great war to-day, motor transport played only a very small part in it; and it is very extraordinary that an innovation of this kind should be truly tested for the first time upon such a stupendous scale. It is the motor car, the motor van and the motor lorry which have rendered the rapid movements of the present war possible; it is not yet realised to the full how great have been the services of motor transport in the supply of ammunition and food to the troops, and in the rapid conveyance of the wounded to the hospitals. No one is better qualified than Mr. Horace Wyatt to deal with this new and important branch of modern warfare. In his capacity formerly as Editor and now as Consulting Editor of Motor Traction he has studied the question from its inception: from its small beginnings in British army manoeuvres many years ago right up to the present time he has followed the subject with the closest attention. Not only so: he has personally investigated the work performed by motor transport in the grandes manoeuvres on the Continent. I have had the good fortune to work closely with him for many years, and it puts me in a position to say that his knowledge of the subject is unique both in detail and in general, so that readers of the present volume may rest assured that facts and facts alone are dealt with in its pages.

H. W. Staner,
Editor of The Autocar.

Coventry,
October, 1914.

MOTOR TRANSPORTS IN WAR