RED CROSS SYMBOL.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 58, Issue 89, 25 January 1938, Page 6

RED CROSS SYMBOL.

IMMUNITY DISAPPEARS. TREND OF MODERN WARFARE. LONDON, January 9. “The Red Cross is subject to deliberate bombing in modern warfare. It is no longer a symbol of neutrality,, and may as well disappear.” This drastic pronouncement is made by the “Lancet” organ of the medical profession, which says: “It is too evident that nearly all of us are English, German or Japanese, Communists or property-owners, before we are doctors and scientists.

“The horrors of warfare were slightly softened by conventions giving rights to the wounded, to prisoners and to civilians, which was all very well when war was more of a game,, but it increasingly difficult nowadays.

“When war-makers intend to win at any cost, they are more inclined to torture or kill prisoners when it suits them and to bomb hospitals as a matter of routine.

The wearer of the Red Cross, the article adds, “has certain privileges in return for which he agrees not to bear arms and to serve the enemy in his Red Cross capacity if he is taken prisoner.

“Therefore the idealist may regard the Red Cross man as the representative of sanity in the midst of madness. Military authorities, however, regard the Medical corps as auxiliaries essential to success.

“The doctor nowadays is no more neutral than a munitions-maker or an artilleryman. Accordingly, he will be bombed and compelled to remove or to camouflage the Red Cross which is no longer a protection, as has been done in Abyssinia and Spain.

“Doubtless the Red Cross is convenient as the sign ,of a dressingstation for friends, but it is no longer a symbol of service recognising no difference between men of differing beliefs and races”