WAR AGAINST MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN

Hokitika Guardian, 24 August 1928, Page 1

WAR AGAINST MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN

(By CII’TJIN U\ 1-1. UVKXS D. 5.0., M.C., who served on the Director-, ate of Gas Services during the war and invented the Livens projector for gas attacks.) Little imagination is required to picture tho next war, and strangely different it will he from the last. There is no need to think hack ten years or fourteen years. To create our scene all we require is to combine what we know of the results of a trivial accident in Hamburg with wlmt we saw at Hendon. It will bo remembered that a few weeks ago at Hamburg ail old cylinder containing phosgene (one of the most deadly gases used in the last war) leaked in a crowded quarter of the town. Tho cylinder was only one of many, just as Hendon was hut a display, not a battle. So we must enlarge our vignette and imagine the massed aerial squadrons, and behind them the industrial power of a great nation. Picture the hot and breathless night, multitudes cheering and waving flags. And then the distant hum, droning through the air louder and yet more loud, the flashing beams of searchlights, the rattle of machine-guns, the scream of anti-aircraft shells and the popping of bursting shrapnel thousands of feet up where the screen of fighting ’planes shows clearly in tlie glare, .men the swoop of the great bombing squadrons and the thud of giant cylinders of gas as they rain down and burst. Hendon and Hamburg a thousand fold, and death cuts swathes through the packed masses.

Each puff of wind carries the deadly thing along with the heated air, streets are made desolate and the voices of women and children are stilled. Then the. lading hum of retreating squadrons seeking fresh supplies, another city to attack, and silence. If war were declared to-morrow any one of tlie Great Powers could carry I out such a programme, and with each | advance in invention and in application aeroplanes become larger and faster, increase their radius of action, and grow more numerous. If such devastation could be caused to-day, who knows what the possibilities may bo in ten years? Nor can we comfort ourselves with tlie thought that it would he incredible that nation could so act against nation. In war no possible advantage can' be sacrificed. The- staff that did not plan to slay, to cripple, to disorganise, and to destroy the enemy by every means within their power would be guilty of the blood of.their own troops and civilians and unforgiveable treason to their country. Can war he limited again and such things lie forbidden by international convention? In the first place, why should they be forbidden? If there is war at all it inevitably means the death and torture of multitudes. In the second place, there is the disquieting and ironic fact that those gascylinders were ill Hamburg, ill Germany, in a country supposedly combed and inspected by an international disarmament commission ! Under the stringent disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty, drawn up by the best technical experts avilahle, Germany lias the right to manufacture phosgene on a scale which would have allowed her by now, had she wished, an accumulation sufficient to poison half Europe.

Phosgene is an industrial chemical required far certain manufacturing processes. So are other deadly things. Tlie case merely shows the futility of attempting to eliminate poison gas from warfare.

If we cannot- eliminate the possibility of poison gas by conventions'can Governments protect us ? The general, answer must, i think, bo no. Even the possible measures 1 of partial protection become, absurd when examined. Are Governments to keep in readiness vast stores of gas-masks sufficient for every man. woman and child in the country, to institute gas-drill in infant schools, to enforce regulations that all shall sleep in gas-masks so many nights in the year, and create a new army of inspectors to enforce regulations ? But poison-gas and aeroplanes brought one protection against war in general before lacking. Until now the men who declared war and those' who hoped to profit by it rarely suffered. Nov diplomats, politicians, publicists, and profiteers, their wives and families and all that is J theirs, are as likely as the rest of us to be wiped out with a suddenness as extreme as uncomfortable.