NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 15947, 18 June 1915, Page 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

AEROPLANE IN WAR. Not only is the aeroplane in its infancy, Mr. Prevost Battersby writes in the Edinburgh Review, but the family to which it belongs is there too. To-day an attack by 40 planes excites surprise; conceive the contrast when a flight of 4000 may be a commonplace. It is to those days, surely, that wo should look, if we would try 'to visualise the warfare of the future. . . . The superiority we have developed in the air is tho most amazing sight with the army in Flanders. Wo sweep the skies as onco we swept the seas, with inferior but more effective forces. Will wo understand the power that fata and our national temperament have once moro put into our hands ? Will we treat tho aeroplane as a scout whoso opportunities' aro even now declining, or will we grasp, mentally and mechanically, the tremendous possibilities that lio before it as a weapon of offence? GERMAN FEROCITY. " It is quite possible that a force might be thrown upon the shores of England," says Sir Edward Clarke, one of tho Government commission to investigate Gorman atrocities. "If that happene'd, there would be, in some of tho villages or towns, a repetition of the horrors which have taken place in, Belgium and which have shocked the conscience of the world. I know what those horrors are, and I can say that they excelled in wickedness and ferocity anything that the world has seen for centuries certainly for three centuries. They were not the extravagant violence and wickedness of an unbridled and unchecked soldiery, excited by the passions which war evokes, but tho deliberate infliction of cruel pilnishment upon civilians who" had ventured to dispute the passage of tho German armies. In fact, they were deliberately done, with the intention that they should bo so horrible in character that the whole of the rest of the civilian population would be cowed by the knowledgo of what had taken place. If it. happens that a German force is thrown upon tho English coast, in places like Scarborough and Whitby, I certainly believe we shall have the samo deliberate, calculated repetition of the horrors which have been seen in Belgium, inflicted for tho purpose of tryI ing to break down the spirit.of resistance of tho British people. That it will fail to cow the people I am perfectly sum, 'just as it had failed with those gallant Belgians, who aro now fighting under their brilliant- and heroic King in defence of the small fragment of territory over which ho still holds command."