THE NEXT WAR

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 291, 8 September 1928, Page 24

THE NEXT WAR

TERRORS FROM THE AIR'

Little imagination is required to picture the next war, and strangely differ--1 ent it will be. from the last. There is no need to think back ten years or teen years. To create our scene all we require is to combine what we know of the results of a trivial accident in Hamburg with what we'saw at Hendon. It will be remembered that a few weeks ago at Hamburg an old cylinder containing .phosgene (one of the most deadly gases used in the last war) leaked in a crowded quarter of the town. The cylin- ’ dor was only one of many, just ns Hendon was but a display, not a battle. So we must enlarge our vignette and imagine the massed aerial squadrons, and behind them the industrial power of a great nation. . Picture the hot and breathless night, multitudes cheering and waving flags. And then the distant hum, droning through the air louder and yet more loud, the flashing beams of searchlights, the rattle of machine-guns, the scream of anti-aircraft shells and the popping of bursting shrapnel thousands of feet up where the screen of fighting ’planes shows clearly in the glare. Then the swoop of the great bombing squadrons and the thud of giant cylinders of gas as they rain down and burst. Hendon and Hamburg a thopsand-fold, and death cuts swathes through (he packed masses. Each puff of wind carries the deadly thing, along with the heated air, streets are made desolate and the voices of women and children arc stilled. Then the fading hum of the ret.reatifig squadrons seeking fresh supplies, another city to attack, and silence. If war were to break out to-morrow any one of the Great Powers could carry out such a programme, and with each advance in invention and in application aeroplanes become larger and faster, increase their radius of action, and grow more numerous, declares Captain W. 11. Livens, D. 5.0., M.C., who served on the Directorate of Gas Services during the war and invented the Livens projector for gas attacks, in the “Daily Mail.” If such devastation could be caused to-day, who knows what the possibilities may be in ten years? Nor can we comfort ourselves with the

thought that, it would be incredible that nations could so act against nation.' In wai‘ no possible advantage can be sacrificed. The staff that did net plan to slay, to cripple, to disorganise, and to. destroy the enemy by every means within their power would be guilty of the blood of their own troops and civilians and unforgivable treason to their country. Can war be limited again and such things be forbidden by international convention? In the first place,, why should they be forbidden? If there is war at all it inevitably means the death and torture of multitudes. In the second place, there is the disquieting and ironic fact that those gas-cylinders were in Hamburg, in Germany, in a country supposedly combed and inspected by an international disarmament commission! Under the stringent disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty, drawn up by the best technical experts available, Germany has the right to manufacture phosgene on a scale which would have allowed her by now, had she wished, an accumulation sufficient to poison half Europe. Phosgene is an industrial chemical required for certain manufacturing processes. So are other deadly things. The case merely shows the futility of attempting to eliminate poison gas from warfare.

If we cannot eliminate the possibility of poison gas by conventions can Governments protect us? The general answer must. I think, be no. Even the possible measures of partial protection become absurd when examined. Are Governments to keep in readiness vast stores of gasmasks sufficient for every man. woman, and child in the country, to institute gasdrill in infant schools; Io enforce regulations that .all shall sleep in gas-masks so many nights in the year, and create a new army of inspectors to enforce regulations?

But poison-gas and aeroplanes brought one protection against war in general before lacking. Until now he tnen who declared war ami those who hoped to profit by it rarely ffered. Now diplomats, politicians, publicists, and profiteers, their wives and families and till that is theirs, are as likely as the rest of us to be wified out with a suddenness as extreme as uncomfortable.