IS WAR TOO HORRIBLE ?

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXII, Issue 70, 18 March 1912, Page 6

IS WAR TOO HORRIBLE ?

LOSS OF PROPERTY THE MOST TO BE FEARED. PRUSSIC ACID BOMBS. Warfare is, it would appear, inevitably destined to become more terrible and more horrible as scientists make now discoveries. The bomb of prussic acid is the latest idea. It is suggested by Sir William Ramsay, wild is retiring from the Chair of General Chemistry at London University. It is not his desire to help on those who would light, but rather to make war so appalling in its effects that the nations of the world would not wage it for any cause. Hitherto, however, tho nations, when angered with one another, have not hesitated to cull to their aid such weapons as they knew of and could use, however diabolical, and there scorns only a slight prospect that they will hesitate in the future to fight with, whatever is likely to promise victory. Many military thinkers are coming to doubt whether modern weapons really possess their much-ad-vertised “deadliness.’ ’ One authority has said: “In all that is said and written about tho horrible effectiveness of modern guns, and rillos, it seems to bo assumed that you are going to bamboozle the enemy into standing in front of them. “In war to-day the protagonists try to shoot each other at a distance of 2000 yards,' with the result that, as in this last Boer war, the ratio of enemy killed to bullets expended is about one in 200,000. ’ It was in ancient and mediaeval times when people employ,ed really deadly weapons such as clubs, spears, bow's and arrows, and even flintlocks, that war was justly alarming to the individual. “Think of the terrific slaughter inflicted within half an hour by the English bowmen at Aginconrt, Poictiars, and Orc-cy. Then think of the Italian battleship armed with the last word in destructive artillery bombarding Tripoli all day, and killing a cat. “Of course, if we are really allowed to employ the resources of Sir William Ramsay’s science, things would l>o very different. If wo might poison wells, spurt prussic acid through the clouds, and fire bombs full of the germs of deadly epidemic disease, war would speedily become extinct out of its sheer horribleness. ‘But as things are, it is not in its destructiveness to life that we must fluid hope for the final end of war, but in ’its clcstrnbtivcness to property. It is not the mortality of man, but the mortality of wealth'that will stop watj.” ;; 1 '