New Britain herald., 1916-09-28
A STORY THAT "CAME TRUE"
''Willie," the New Terror, Might Just as Well Have Come Out of Fiction.
(NeW York Tim eS.)

(NeW York Tim eS. )
 Polonius has become a war corre- spondent, and describes the new mon ster adversely. By the mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed. It is backed like @ weasel. Or like whale Very like a whale. So we hear that "Willie,' the new terror, is like an ichthyo- saurus; no, like a toad; mo- like a cat erpillar. It leans against a, brick wall, and the wall falls: then it "rises" as if it had legs and walks over the ruins; "tramples around the machine gun emplacement, having a grand time;" crushes the guns under it's ribs;'' "plows about" ''sits down on heaps of ruins;" breaks down trees as
 If they were matches, and goes lover the barricades like an elephant" It's gait is described as a waddle. It is constantly spoken of as ''walking'' as if it had legs. It takes ditches like a kangaroo" It cannot in any respect resemble any armored car that ever existed or the soldiers, used to strange shapes, would not laugh uproariouslv at the sight of it when they see it 'lolloping over the roads"
 Overhead come the British airmen, Hike a flock of birds, flying low over the mists'' Only few years ago such a battlefield would have seemed a Jules Verne dream. The most gifted imagination fails when it undertakes to penetrate a quarter of a century into the future. By all odds the most real novel of the future ever written was H. G. Wellss War of the Worlds" It depicted a descent of the Mart1ans on our planet. The idea was that if there are intelligences on N @I,o 14 l~
 advance of ours, because life began on that planet so long before it did on ours. So MT. Wells sought to imag- i,Ie what a civilization ages ahead of ours would devise in the way of mili- tary science: and to make the differ ence clearer he divested the Martians of muscles and almost of bodies; they had outgrown these and become little else than immense brains
 But this daring speculation about the future has been practically real ized in the twenty years since the novel was written. Tn those two decades mankind has come up with MT. Wells's Martians Tn vain the earthmen assailed the Martians with
 bullets. The Martians sent out against them a great black gas which fell upon their armies and asphyXiated them. That was a wild imagining but the Germans used that black gas | carly in the war; the Allies promptly | followed suit and it is a comm on- place now. He imagined a ''heat ray'' which destroyed men, fell upon their magazines and blew them up. Liquid | fire Is in use in this war. Lastly, 1 the Martians moved about in armored cars raised on stilts high in the air yr1 L1~s l helpless armies trod them down while l they fired in vain, trampled on them
 threw down buildings. The very deeds of 'Willie," described in the dis ] patches, were anticipated almost in 1 the very words; the Martian 'Willie ' | too, made ruins of brick walls, rose 1 and walked over the ruins trampled d l around, having a grand time, crushed 1 guns, plowed about, sat down on l heaps of ruins, broke down trees like matches, and all the rest of it.
 The little brain of man, so abjectly helpless in Mr. Wells's fiction, has beaten his Martians in twenty years;
 for his Martians had no subma- 1 rines of war and commerce. The
 Martian had something like a peri
 scope, but only for use when ''Willie'
 was abroad. It is evidently of no
 use for any imagination to try to pre- figure the world even hundred years l hence; MT. Wells thought he was 1 making 8 not inadequate guess at 1 what brains would come to in ages, and he only guessed what they actu- 1 ally have come to in twenty years. 1 The mind of man seems adequate to l any task except guessing at it's own 1 possibilities.