REPRISALS.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXXVII, Issue 7920, 18 August 1917, Page 4 (Supplement)

REPRISALS.

RETALIATION, THE ESSENCE OF WAR. By HALL CAINE.

In two articles published a few weeks ago in ’“The T made an effort to show that a confusion of thought existed in the public mind on the object and aim of reprisal, and T have since haft the satisfaction of receiving from many influential persons the most helpful letters of support for this view—one of the latest being from Lord Buckmaster, who thinks the Government’s failure in definition was the chief cause of the confusion in the debate in the House of Lords. Tn the painful light of Wednesday’s air raid on London, 1 wish to call attention to another form of confusion on the subject of reprisal—confusion in feeling in the public heart. # A clearer, and at the same time fairer and more humane example of this confusion of feeling could not possibly be found than that which has found expression in Mr. Will Crooks's comments on Wednesday’s frightful scenes. After describing with the simple but overpowering vividness of an eye-witness theVwful spectacle outside the school in which ten little boys and girls had been killed and 50 others injured—the weeping of mothers, the deep and passionate emotion of men—-Mr Will Crooks said:—

It is when I think of the women and their courage that I say I can’t join in the demand for reprisals on German towns. Bomb the Zeppelin bases by all means. Wherever there is a nest of these murderers from the air exterminate them. Exhaust all the resources of science and courage in ridding the earth of them. But if we bomb Berlin or Cologne, we shall have to kill some of their women or children. I couldn’t consent to the harming of anybody's child, not even a German’s. AN ANALYSIS OF EMOTIONS. The first thing to be said about touching and beautiful words like these is that they come out of a good and tender heart; the next is that they come out of a heart that has not been trained to look into itself and to know exactly what its emotions are and whence they spring. Because English mothers weep in the streets of London for the children they have lost by a cruel outrage, a good-hearted Englishman says he could not see German mothers weep for their children in the streets of Berlin. That feling would be true and right if it concerned suffering which either race of mothers had in any way inflicted, or caused to be inflicted, upon the other—if, for example, it had been the suffering that comes of a desolating earthquake, eruption, tidal wave, or similar act of nature in Tier terrible and inscrutable wrath. Then the true-hearted man, knowing that motherhood has the same divine love of its offspring in all races, almost in all species, could indeed say in the deep sincerity of his soul, “God save all mothers everywhere from such sorrow and suffering as I have witnessed to-day.” But the present is no such case of natural calamity shared in a. common conscience. Let us clear our hearts of confusion, and our tongues of cant, and say plainly, what is plainly true, that the air raid of Wednesday was an atrocity deliberately inflicted by the mothers of Germany on the mothers of England. Can any reasonable mind doubt that’ if the German woman had from the first condemned the bombing of London as an outrage on the instincts of motherhood. London woud never have been bombed? Even admitting that the German woman, notwithstanding her education and enlightenment, is not, and never has been, a free woman in the sense and in the measure in which the English woman,, the American woman. and the French woman is free, can it be thought that if she had vehemently opposed a form of warfare which made the destruction of child-life in the country of the enemy a probable and even an inevitable consequence the most arbitrary Government in the world would have dared to practice it? Buch a supposition is impossible of acceptance. Motherhood is a force .which ploughs too deep into national welfare to he defied by any Kaiserism of any military depotism whatsoever. THE GERMAN MOTHER.

We have no need, however, to speak in negative terms in this instance, for positive ones are only too plainly applicable. The German mother has not only not discouraged air raids on London, she has rejoiced in them. -Just a® she held jubilee in the streets and homes of Berlin ovec the sinking of the Lusitania, winch caused the drowning of one hundred helpless little children, and brought no military advantage to the arms of her country, so (in the hope of having assisted in frightening England into submission) she will find joy in the recent tom lying of London,, knowing full well that, it did nothing more'helpful to Germany than to send ten little Englisn boys and girls to the grave and 50 others to the hospital.

These are hard words, but for God’s sake let us sit rip our minds of the delusion that the German woman thinks tin* xiiffciing of the English mother over the loss of her English child’is to be put into the same category of human calamity with the buffering of the German mother over the less or even the peril of her German child. She does not. Whatever her feeling in days - of peace may be, in this time of war she thinks it right to safeguard the welfare of one German child at the cost, h need be, of the lives of ten. thousand English children. At moments of great emotional excitation humanit/v is capable of criminal illusions to the German mother. Some oi us have known of it s?i nee the early days of the war, and if e.t. this moment any tender-hearted person of our own race lias a doubt of its power let him spend a shilling on Mr. Archer's demoniac anthology called “Gems of German Thought.” 'Thera he will end. among other manifestations of

c. moral Imia ey such as the history of the human mind cannot parallel, the most appalling proof that to the heart ot the German woman and l man alike any rets whatever a re justifiable which are directed toward? punishing the English people and forcing them into subjection.

W hen, therefore, Mr. Crooks, out of the tenderness and purity of Ufa humanity, sets his face against our doing > the*German mother a? she has done (or allowed her men to do) to the English mother, he i?/ confusing -Ins heart on two issues; first, that the suffering or Hie German mother in the loss of her child would be the same in innocence as the suffering, of tin* English -mother in- a similar event-; and next, that the motive of the English mother in seeking reprisal would be the same in Spirit as that of the German mother in making the attack. In neiher case could it be the same. Not one of the multitude of English

mothers wh-o, since I began to write on this subject, have sent me letters saying “God bless you!” has betrayed any desire to kill German children. They.’ have only been trembling for the safety of their own. The German mother who sends German airmen to bomb London, with the certainty that they must thereby take the lives of English children, is cominiittiiTg wilful murder for the protection of the welfare (at the utmost, never the life) of her German child'. Whereas the English mother who, in reprisal tor such outrages, would send English airmen to bomb Berlin would, at the worst, be killing Gemran children (as the law kills the murderer, and inflicts suffering on his dependents) solely and only that her English child might not be killed. Whether retaliation in kind would be effectual aa a deterrent is a different aspect cf the question. I may, perhaps, be -permitted to say that Lord Robert Cecil, in writing to me, urges that point as the crux of the problem, and that Mr. lan Macpherhon (with his thoughts centred on the welfare of the British prisoner in Germany) is of opinion that, the whole question of the results of retaliation turns on the psychology of tho two races, while my friend Sir Edward llii'sell takes the view that practical utility is the test of war morality, and that it can never be necessary to commit a futile atrocity.

To nil the-8e objections I answer that retaliation is of the essence of war, and therefore if it is not certain or at least probable that repri -al upon the heart of the German mother for such Crimea as she has committed (or allowed to be committed) irwin the heart of the English mother w ill deter her from committing them (or allowing them to he committed) again, neither is*it certain <>■• probable that reprisals on the battlefield w ill he effect mv 1 in ending the sickening conflict in which brave lives are. every day being d 'shed to destruction, and hence we had better call hack our armies at once and have done for ever with Hie wicked and useless work of But if wo must fight with the blood 1 of our men, for heaven’s sake let us fight with our brains also