Manawatu Daily Times Aerial Sham Fights and Their Moral

Manawatu Times, Volume LIII, Issue 6733, 9 October 1928, Page 6

Manawatu Daily Times Aerial Sham Fights and Their Moral

in London brought vivid memories of the terror of those nights of 1914-18 when death hung in the clouds above the city’s teeming millions. The R.A.F. manoeuvres have made thinking Londoners think furiously. Under the startling headline of “Jazzing into Hades,” one writer voices the thoughts provoked by these all too realistic sham fights 17,000 feet above the roofs of the Empire's capital. He declares that the military science of aerial destruction has made immense strides since the war. Machines, pilots, and explosives, to say nothing of deadly chemical gas, are to-day all improved out of recognition. The whips of 1918 have become more than the scorpions ot 1928. So the certain prospect is, he moralises, whenever the world decides upon another Great War, that within a few minutes of ■’zero” clouds of hostile aircraft will be swarming over the mutual enemies’ cities, and raining down death, pestilence, and destruction wholesale. The domestic hearth is going to be right in the front line of the next Great’ War, whatever pious resolutions may be recorded at the Hague, or whatever righteous resolutions- Geneva arrives at. Chemical destruction from the upper air, gargantuan high explosive bombs, deadly poison-gas clouds, and most likely plagues of disease germs, from an altitude of five or six miles above the earth, will be the programme. How long is civilised humanity going to tolerate such a possible future as that ? Are we sane mortals or all Mad Hatters ? We have just sacrificed an aggregate of at least 10,090,000 lives, and mon than £5,000,000,000 treasure, to the grim maw of the god of battles. Cui bono ? We arc, all of us, to-day busily preparing against the same hideous catastrophe, on a far bigger and more terroristic scale, happening again. Will mankind never outgrow the prehistoric sabre-tjothed-tiger stage ? The overwhelming impulse and instinct oi all the peoples arc for peace and the outlawry of war. But, though wc send our plenipotentiaries to Geneva, our chemists devise new poison-gases! Ten years have sped since the Armistice brought blessed respite to torn terrain and tortured men. But so far our statesmen and peacemakers have been conspicuously less efficient and successful than our chemists and inventors of war munitions. What evil curse, what bloodthirsty spell, binds humanity to self-slaughter on wholesale methods of scientific mass production ? How is it impossible for the rulers of the tired world to give expression to the heartsick aspirations of all the masses of the nations ? Mankind asks for peace. And is given an aerial torpedo! Surely, if wo have not even yet learned wisdom of bitter experience, and, fresh from one Armageddon, gird our loins for the next, the patience of the gods will become exhausted. In sheer contemptuous pity for human imbecility, which makes man the one animal that conspires deliberately at fabulous cost to crucify himself, the Olympians will flatten out this silly little globe of ours with a frown, and pass on to amuse mortal oblivion and divine eternity with some happier joke. The gods need not even be at the trouble of a frown.' All they need do is to leave the indefatigable suicidists to themselves. »