WARS FEROCITY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16026, 18 September 1915, Page 2 (Supplement)

WARS FEROCITY.

NEW METHODS IN A YEAR.

50,000 MACHINE-GUNS.

The war • which began a year ago is the first of a new order: It has abolished the non-combatant. ; :

In the 18th and 19th centuries war was ■waged by small professional armies, not by whole nations. Even the Germans in 1870 only placed in the field 2£ per cent, of their population, as against over 10 per cent, to-day. The non-combatants, with no taste for the bloody business .of the battlefield, could usually sit comfortably aloof, like a spectator at a glorified gladiatorial show.

With the modern national armies all this is changed. We have gone back to the remote age?. It is not a few hired men who take the field but the whole able-bodied manhood. Only they can hope to win who fight thus and whose people behind the fighting line are organised for war. Aircraft and submarines have deprived women and children of whatever shreds of safety might have been left them by the German ordinances of war as interpreted by the German general staff.

As the aeroplane and Zeppelin murder indiscriminately on land by raining bombs or darts on the quiet streets of remote towns, so does the submarine slay indiscriminately at sea

The New Ferocity. War, indeed, under our German mentors has taken on a new ferocity, of which the Balkan conflicts of 1912-13 gave a dim foretaste. The worst deeds of Napoleon were of lamb-likeof gentleness compared with tha cruelties perpetrated deliberately in cold blood, as part of a settled policy, by the Germans upon the men, women, and children of Belgium, Northern France, and Poland. Yet this strategy of- destruction and massacre is cunningly deviged. The wrecking of towns and factories shatters the antagonists future capacity of production and inflicts on him heavy pecuniary loss. The slaughter of his people impairs his man-power. The enemy methodically bleeds, sacks, and plunders the people of the abandoned zone, drives off the males to work for him with forced labour" in his. shell factories or fields, and puts the women too often to another and even more terrible use. Each foot that the German gains, too, he walls in with an ; immense barrier of barbed wire and concrete. Ramparts more formidable than any great wall of China cross France and are appearing in Poland. So engineered as to be invisible, they are obstacles which all the heroism, and ingenuity of the allies have not yet been able to overcome. On the Warsaw front the German wire is measured in depth not by the yard but- by the mile. Behind this jungle of wire, which is almost as impassable as a morass, are planted machine-guns by the thousand, well protected . with concrete and steel armour, and hidden from any but the sharpest eye.

Withering Hail "of Bullets. The machine-gun, used on this scale,, is a new element in land war. In its hail ofbullets charges wither and casualties .by the thousand are piled up in "a few minutes. By the r - method of its mounting it is generally invulnerable to any but a direct hit, and .with it a single good shot and a couple of attendants'" can do thd ■work of 50 or 60 marksmen. On the French front by the lowest estimate f the enemy has 50,000 of' these guns: by ■ the highest published 95,000, which would give one to every hundred yards of front. . ..New, too, is this feature of an tentrenched front 600 miles long, stretching from sea to neutral territory, with no flanks to be turned, which yet must be forced or turned if the war is to end in a complete allied triumph; new this situation in which millions of armed men month after month face one another across ; a few hundred feet or yards of dead ground, which they cannot. pass. Such is the 'condition,, along the whole front in France; such, or approximately such, the condition on the Italian frontier. Progress is measured not by miles but by fathoms, and to storm a concrete fortress- such as the German Labyrinthdemands the sacrifice of thousands - of lives, even under tlse shelter of a curtain of shells and a rain of high explosives on the enemy's -defences. / s V The defence has advanced so rapidly that a deadlock exists. on all the. fronts where there is not room to manoeuvre. Enormous was the advantages which Germany ; gained by leaping suddenly - upon her unsuspecting neighbours. It was thus ana thus only that the German was able to occupy Belsium and Northern France and Western Poland., '■■■. Poison Gas and Heat Rays. The machine-gun has/ then, affected modern war more profoundly than any other weapon. Aircraft, however," by their fearful power of destruction and by the ease with which they can strike every part of an enemy's territory may exercise a more abiding influence on the future of man. They have not as yet ljeen tested in offensive operations on a grand scale, but if the German hints are serious they will be sooner or later; and we must prepare to see great damage done. Even I if they do not accomplish much in the | present war they will certainly be per- | fected hereafter.

The employment of poisonous gas is an idea stolen by the enemy from Wells; that it was forbidden by Hague conventions mattered nothing to Berlin. It has been followed by the use of chemical and bacteriological poisons. A second -plagiarism from Mr. Wells is. the h'aat ray, in the shape of an oxv-acetvlene jet projected 90ft.