A SOLDIER ON WAR

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 14 April 1928, Page 11

A SOLDIER ON WAR

“/CONDITIONS within the Empire are such as to make Imperial defence a very expensive business for this country, and we ore now spending on the fighting services, as upon other public services, more than the country can afford to pay, ’' said Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson during a speech at a dinner given by the Lincoln Chamber of Commerce just prior to Christmas, and reported in the “Lincolnshire Chronicle.” The annual amount is some 116 millions, or about 40 millions more than before the war, That hardly seems right, seeing that Germany has now practically no fleet, that her army is restricted to treaty' to 100,000 men, and that there are several other new factors in the general situation which, if matters are rightly handled by our statesmen, ought to permit of our defence arrangements being constructed on a much more modest scale than they now are.

“For instance, wars have often owed their origin to despotic monarchical government and the maintenance of a great national army. Such combinations arc now rare, the last war having terminated the careers of the three emperors who were mainly responsible for starting it, and other monaxchs have, fortunately, disappeared with them. No longer can nations bo ordered into war perhaps for dynastic or personal reasons, by swollen-headed monarch® claiming to be almost the equal of the Almighty. It is in most cases the nations themselves who now decide whether peace shall or shall not- be broken. That is a great change for the better. “Again, we no longer agree, without qualification, that the best way of preventing war is to prepare for it. Instead of preventing war, we know that preparations are apt to precipitate it. Never in history'were preparations so complete or so widespread as during the fifty or sixty years previous to 1914, and yet never were wars so frequent as in that period. France fought Italy, Germany fought, in turn, Denmark, Austria and France. There were the RussoTurkish and Russo-Japanese wars, and many wars in the Balkans, the SpanishAmerican war, wars in China, and our own wars in Afghanistan, Abyssinia, Egypt and South Africa.

STRIKING DENUNCIATION

‘ ‘ Finally, the colossal cost of modem war in lives and wealth must, one would think, also act as a deterrent. The killed and maimed in the last war were counted by millions, and the amount of wealth destroyed was no less staggering. For instance, the cost of artillery bombardments previous to the launching of the infantry attacks amounted in the case of the Battle of Arras to £13,000,000, of Mesines to £17,500,000,. and of the third battle of Ypres to £22,000,000, or a total of over £52,000,000 in these three operations alone. The weight of gun ammunition fired at Hessines amounted to 85,000 tons, and in the first nine weeks of the Battle of Ypres to 480,000 tons! “War has become, in short, a wholly detestable thing; is almost, if not quite, as disastrous to victor as to vanquished; and, consequently, many people condemn it as a failure, hate the very word war, and demand all-round measures of disarmament. OtheT people declare, however, that human nature .being what it was, war will always be with us, and for it we must always be prepared. Upon which view are we to act?

‘‘ My own opinion is, as already indicated, that questions regarding the reduction of armaments require, in our own ease, to be treated with the utmost caution. At the' same time, and let human nature be as wicked, ambitious and unstable as it may, I suggest .that every' man and woman should energetically support all efforts made for devising some more sensible and humane way of composing international differences than the destructive and futile methods upon which reliance has hitherto been unsuccessfully placed.

‘ 1 This suggestion may' be thought a tame and uninspiring termination to an address on Imperial defence. But it happens to represent the only conclusion I can reach after a military career covering, on Sunday next, a period of exactly fifty years—-a period during which I was for some twenty years closely connected with the highest councils of State in which, in some form or other, international questions of armaments and war were daily under consideration.”