WHY THERE MUST BE NO MORE WARS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3442, 2 March 1920, Page 59

WHY THERE MUST BE NO MORE WARS.

In a paper read before the United Service Institution, Sir Louis Jackson, who during the war was in charge of gas production and was also Director of Trench Warfare and Supplies, delivered an address which (says the Spectator) should give pause to any one who thinks lightly of another war. He did not ostensibly speak for that purpose; he was speaking as a soldier for soldiers, dealing with tactics, equipment, need for preparation, and so forth. Yet the lesson of his address is" perhaps the more striking because it was not, as it were, underlined. He said that in his opinion the next war would, sec a return to open warfare. The tlevelopment of caterpillar traction would make transport independent of roads, and there would be a general speeding up. Artillery would have to be more mobile to keep pace with the rapid movements. In these circumstances the predominant part in war would be played by aircraft. As in open warfare there would be no such targets. as were presented by the congestion of troops and transports behind the "impenetrable barrier" of the trenches in the Great War, it would pay airmen better to bomb the sources of suppty and centres of training far away from the front. If this be so, it might well be that in another war great towns, filled with their civil population, might suffer even more than most of the men at the front. What was deemed to be the post- of safety - might after all turn out to be the post of very uncomfortable honour. Most likely by the time another great war is fought, if another ever should be fought, silent engines for aeroplanes will have been invented, and it will be possible without even a declaration of war—-most wars in the past have begun without a formal declaration —for aircraft to arrive in tens of thousands quite unsuspected over a great city and pour down cascades of lethal gas. It may be said that gas will be ruled out, as it actually had been ruled out before the Great War. But there is no certainty of that, j* <> a matter of fact, if we look into the matter on grounds of humanity alone, there is a good deal to be said for a gas which kills without torturing. At the Hague Conference before the war our representatives would have agreed to use gas as being a means of killing no more objectionable, and perhaps rather less objectionable, than other forms of killing, if Germany had not objected. It was Germany who asked for the r vohibition of gas. This may have been for her own reasons; but at all events we know only too well that it was she who first, by an act of unforgettable disgrace, ignored the prohibition.

Every Avar begins where the last left off. All the experience of previous wars is at the disposal of those who make a new war. It is certain that if there was another great war every man, woman, and child in the nations involved would he conscribed for the warlike service of the

nation. Imagine, then, the nations ia?. stantly condemned, when war began, tar complete industrial sterility. imagine also the cities 'being bombed day and night with deadly gases, every bomb or packet of gas accounting for its hundreds. If that would not kill civilisation, nothing physical or material could. "We think ourselves that it would kill it. "We are not imagining this prospect for the pur-i pose of arguing by means of terror. That would be futile. The spirit of man cannot be daunted, and when civilised man is fighting for his principles, which without exaggeration he fovea dearer than his life, or when his blood is up, he is equal to any fate. We are merely offering a cold 1 and rational argument that civilisation is threatened, that it must be saved, and that it can be saved, so far as we can see, only by the means that is ready to our hand. As Mr Lloyd George well said in his speech, if there were another great war it would not very much matter who won and who lost—all alike would bo ruined. We must aim at a regulated state of peace, or resign ourselves not only to material eclipse but to the greatest condemnation of the human mind ever uttered by itself. This is the season when w£ traditionally meditate upon peace, and this year we have indeed a problem fotf the intellect as well as for the heart.