OUTLAWING CIVILIAN BOMBING

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 271, 12 August 1938, Page 20

OUTLAWING CIVILIAN BOMBING

Napier, the military historian, has a fine passage in which he denounces the inhumanity of a general who turned his guns on a mixed crowd of military and civilian fugitives; and of this use of cannon fire his denunciation still holds, says “Scrutator,” writing in the “Sunday Times.” But if the exceptional use of artillery against civilians in Napoleon's wars was rightly denounced as barbarous and cruel, what desperate malady of our civilisation is this which proposes to make the barbarous exception of the past into the normal rule of future war in the air? Even if we suppose that there is no longer any room for chivalry in war, the most callous calculation of self-interest might agree to outlaw this form of war on the ground that mischief is too precious to be wasted. And perhaps it is on the grounds of self-interest that our best hopes depend on abolishing air raids on open towns. For all alike it is a diversion of military effectiveness into senseless murder, multiplying everywhere explosive magazines of hatred. The British Government must be left to choose the best time for obtaining a general agreement, in which, next to ourselves, Germany is most directly interested; but the object must never for a moment be lost in view. *