SCIENTIFIC WARFARE

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 2340, 9 January 1926, Page 12

SCIENTIFIC WARFARE

AS BAD AS CANNIBALISM. PLEA FOR DISARMAMENT. “War is hell; let's make It so” was the famous dictum, of a soldier personally humane; and he was as good as his word. “Leave them nothing but their eyes to weep with." Fortunate or luckless, according as you read it. are those whose eyes under modern conditions are not among the first senses to go, writes Mr J. L. Garvin in the London “Observer”. Air warfare and the new poison-gases do not begin with a desire to spare them, nor are they required for weeping. The cruelty of modern conflict means a fate past tears and instils an unnatural stoicism. Long after, and unawares, com© the tears, if they come at all, with that "memory of what has been and never more may Lc,” which has been known to bring grieving to the hardest of hearts. If you want to abolish the submarine you must abolish war altogether. The greater Includes the less. The idea of war on limited liability is the most pathetic of human delusions. If you are to have it at all you must have it at its worst, and cannot have it otherwise. The submarine, though it happens to b<! particularly inconvenient to ourselves, is only one symptom of the evil nature of the thing and far from being the most virulent. As the machines, the forces, the agents, the brains of the scientific age become more terrible in (>erversion, what we call armed conlict, if resumed by an ill-fated world must become more relentless, unsparing, until civilisation perishes from a misuse of the powers that might have raised modern life to a new grandeur and happiness and beauty. When war breaks out you cannot limit its instruments nor.mitigate it in any respect by land or sea or air. You might as well ask the conflagration to be mild or the hurricane to ho gentle; or the colliery explosion not to stifle, burn and entomb alive; or the blind waters of the broken dam not to tear habitations from its path and engulf the dwellers. The submarine by Itself will never be abolishefl on British initiative. No one gets credit for a profitable virtue. There was a chance at the Washjng,ton Conference and it was lost. That chance will not return. In three years and more, the world and its circumstances have changed. We are all forced to confront the larger proposition. Disarmament means henceforth a sterner demand upon nations than any of them has yet frankly faced. Piecemeal disarmament, applying to particular alenjenjß and weapons In a manner more to the vantage of "coin'd nations than of others, is henceforth impracticable. The next step must be a measure of disarmament all round; and in that process each people must give up something It especially values to compensate other peoples for the sacrifices they are asked to make.

Let us shake ourselves out of a dream and try to visualise the real character of a next war. The eternal fallacy of military annals Is the idea that the next war will be like the one before. Now, in all probability, a future struggle would be nothing like the last. Air-power has revolutionised everything. Who would be so mad as to make war long if they could make it short"? The s£eed and efficiency of air-squadrons is continually increasing. They will strike at the heart. Their bombs will crash continually on the dtense cities without respect to age or sex. Poison fumes will choke and kill. Fire will ravage. The shattering, the stifling, the conflagrations will go on .together. The civilian population will have the weight of' casualties, not the armies and navies. Over the heads of the armies and navies invasion will occur in its most intense and devastating form. What is the use of sailors of the obsolete school saying that the fleet would still maintain our supplies when it could not save those that consume them, even if—which is doubtful —it could protect the harbours, docks, depots, or railway terminals? The: battleships would be as helpless as mediaeval castles in face of these things. Our army, having to move by sea transport, would probably never see the face of an enemy. • War is as bad now as once when cannibalism was the end of it, or when hands and feet were cut off and eyes put out and babies spitted. We can do no more good by trying to lop the branches. We must bend our minds and souls without deviation to hew it down by the root and extricate the last fibre that feeds it from the darkness below.