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| hypothetical camouflage schemes © Roy R. Behrens |
The new war art of camouflage is not limited to land, by any means. One of our boys transported to Europe has described a fine example of this art, in the case of the American destroyers, hunters of U-boats, who came out to meet the transport fleet as it neared the French coast.
The smudge of the destroyers could be seen 20 minutes before they themselves were visible, and when their hulls finally appeared they bore the appearance of a two-stack freighter heavily loaded and low in the water. As a matter of fact the destroyer has four funnels instead of two, but the two not seen at a distance are cleverly camouflaged to give the appearance of a freighter instead of a war vessel. As the boats came nearer the boys thought they were French, owing to their gay and bizarre coloring, or decoration. Their sides were painted in zigzag lines of white and blue, while the rigging and “concealed” smoke stacks were trickily and cockily camouflaged in wavy lines, or “snaky ribbons” of green, white and blue. The general effect of the American destroyers on the sea, when transacting business, as soon as they can be closely observed, is suggested by the nickname that the American soldiers immediately gave them of “deep-sea barber shops.” The U-boat is the “canned Hun.”
“Protective coloring” has become a new art under war stress. Biologists have associated this art, when employed by nature itself, with strict and crude imitation of environment. There are insects, as described in Prof. Vernon Kellogg’s Darwinism Today [NYC: Henry Holt, 1907], which carry protective coloration to such an extreme of verisimilitude, of punctilious exactness of imitation, that Prof. Kellogg says that they overdo the natural selection business and make it a little ridiculous. That is, they protect themselves beyond all reason, even to the minute imitation of invisible detail. This is regarded by biologists as one of the serious evidences against Darwinism, or natural selection.
But war camouflage has entirely departed from crude imitation. The notion that protective coloration of warships must necessarily be a dull sea-gray disappeared long ago, along with the notion that a hidden battery must be colored in harmony with the foliage of the environment. New principles are employed, as in the case of the spiral green, white and blue lines on the stacks of torpedo boats, the zigzag lines of blue and white on the hull, and the same scheme of wavy zigzag, or spiral painted lines and splashes of color in varicolored combinations on cannon behind the front.
Yet the truth is that the new camouflage follows the principles first adopted by the artists of the Barbizon school and soon carried to extremes by radical painters, the principles that later, about 85 years ago, developed into the new landscape method of impressionism. Camouflage and impressionism are twin-sisters. Nature is in fact colored not on simple, dull principles, but its coloration is greatly mixed, weirdly so, and with no regard to conventional ideas of consistency or harmony. Once in a while, as in this exceptionally brilliant month in Kansas, the true principle of mixed coloration appears to the plain, common eye in viewing the stunning prairie landscape. But to the now initiated artist these colors are present, even when hidden.
RELATED LINKS
Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? / Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage / Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage / Optical science meets visual art / Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness / Under the big top at Sims' circus
