REPRISALS.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LX, Issue 17064, 17 August 1917, Page 3

REPRISALS.

RETALIATION, THE ESSENCE OF

WAR

By HALL CAINE

In two articles published a few weeks ago in "The Daily Chronicle" I made an effort to show that a confusion of thought existed in the public mind on the object and aim of reprisal, and I have since had the satisfaction of receiving from many influential -persons the most helpfal 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.

In the painful light of Wednesday's air raid on London, I 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 the'awful 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-ofi the women and their courage that I say I can't join in the demand—for reprisals nn 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, a1 good-hearted Englishman says ne 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 m 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 her 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 indee'l say in the deep sincerity of his soul, "God save all mothers everywhei c 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 reasosi able 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. Lean 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? Such a supposition is impossible of acceptance. Motherhood is- a force which ploughs too deep into national welfare to be defied by any Kaiserism of any military depotism whatsoever. THE GERMAN MOTHER. We have no need, however, to speak in negative terms in this in-^ stance, 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 as.she held jubilee in the streets and homes, of Berlin over the sinking of the Lusitania, wlhich 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 bombing of London, knowing full well that it did nothing more helpful to Germany than to send ten little English boys and girls to the grave and 50 others to the hospital. '

These are hard words, but for God's sake let us strip our minds of the delusion that the German woman thinks the suffering of the English mothsr over the loss of her English child is to be put into the same category of human calamity with the suffering of the German mother over the loss or even the peril of her German child. She does not. Whatever her feeling in days vi: peace may be, in this time of war she thinks it right to safeguard the we7fare of one German child at the cost, if need" be. of the lives of ten thousand English children. At moments of great emotional excitation humanity is capable of criminal illusions to the German mother. Some of us have known of H, since the early days' of the war j and if at this moment any tender-hearted rjerson of our own race has a doubt of ; ts power let him spend a shilling on Mr. Archer's demoniac anthology ■on 11^3 "Horn's of f-JpVman-'nipu-irh.t." The1--' t.e will end, among other manifestations of a, -moral lunacy such as the history of

the humaji mind cannot parallel, the mo3t appalling proof that to the heart of the German woman, ana man alike any acts whatever a re justifiable which are directed towards puuisning the English people and forcing them.into subjection.

When, therefore, Mr. Crooks, out or the tenderness and purity of his humanity, sets his face against our doing •>., the German mother as she has done (or allowed her men'to'do) to'"the ...English mother, he ia confusing his heart ou two issues j first, that the suffering ur the German mother in the loss" of her child would be the same in innocence as the suffering of the Ei.glish mothar 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 mating the attack. In neiher case could it be the same.

Not one of the multitude of English mother's who, since I b.gan to write on this subject, have sent me letters saying "God bless you !" has betoayed 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 committing 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 as a deterrent is a different aspect of the question. I may, perhaps, be permitted to say i^hat Lord Robert Cecil, in writing to me, urges that point as the crux of the problem, and that Mr. Lan Macpherson (with his thoughts centred on the welfare of the British prisoner i:i Germany) is of opinion that the whole question of t-:e results r>x retaliation turns on the psychology of the two races, while my-friend Sir Edward Russell takes the view that practical utility is the test of wax morality, and that it can never be necessary to commit a futile atrocity. To all these objections I answer that retaliation is of, the essence of war, and therefore^ if it is not certain or at least probable' that reprisal upon the heart of the German mother for such crimes as she has committed (or allowed to oe • committed) upon the heart of the English mother will deter her from committing them (or allowing them to be committed) again, neither: is it certain or probable that reprisals ,on the battle field will be effectual in ending the sickening conflict in which breve; lives are every day being dasned to destruction, and hence we had better call back our armies at once and have done for ever with the wicked and useless work cL war. But if we must fight with the blood of our men, for heaven's'sake let us fight with our brains also