SCIENTIFIC WAR.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 4, Issue 14, 19 February 1915, Page 2 (Supplement)

SCIENTIFIC WAR.

THE LIFELESS MONSTER THAT KILLS THE SOULS AND BODIES OF I MEN. Im. u

, B y H G> WELLS, IN THE "NEW YORK METROPOLITAN."

No real thing is ever simple, for simplicity is reached by abstraction, .and this great struggle of the nations that thunders about the world made up of many factors and presents ' innumerable aspects. Prima - ily it is a struggle of the spirit of freedom and pacific civilisation .against the long-gathered attack or ■German militarism, but into this issue came elaborations, in the Russian Situation, in the Balkan developments, in the mute but very real conflict to control the war between Imperialism and Liberalism in Great Britain, for example. And sustaining German militarism is Ge ™* n . pa ~ ariotism, a thing one may still honour even when one considers it to "be at present aggressive and misled. And German militarism in itself i not simple. We are fighting aga nst a double-headed monster. A moiety of it is as old as old Prussia The Junker-directed soldiering and military policy of Germany are day extraordinarily the same as the} were * the days of Frederick the Great. And a moiety of it is newer than the present century. This extreme efficiency in the German organisation o£ Krupnpw devices and inventions, the Krup pism, the Zeppelinism, P«^ f a J s °" lutely unprecedented aspects of The journalistic mind has se . iz ® d this duality in its denunciation of the "Krupp-Kaiser Combination. And ' so far as the Kaiser-Junker side of the war is concerned, that head maj be counted dead and done for already. The old swagger, the prancing mon arch, the flags, the dumb brave obedience of the ranked soldiers the shouting victories, the pictures these things have gone to join pikes and chain armour in the museum. The Kaiser now keeps out of lhe limelight for fear of aerial bombs; the Crown Prince, , * confused his strategy and stolen snuff boxes has passed into a mystenou iSErity; the o»ce invite massed infantry has fallen in swathes at .Liege and Mons and a score of fights, if has choked the Belgian rivers until the waters have found new courses; its prestige has melted to nothing before the steady fire of English "mercenaries" in &pen orider, Flanders it has fled before Hindu ■havonets and screamed at the signt of brown faces; the German cavalry has been ridden through by ish one to three; the old soldierliness. of the German, booted and spurred, has departed out of the world. Coming to the fore to replace it is the new thing, the industrious and voluminous German intelligence concentrated upon war material. The submarine, the Zeppelin, the great gun the entrenching plough, must Germany now if Germany is to b saved from the punishments of her aggressions. The old war passes into the new war. Now, the new war is no invention of Germany's. But it is a fact, too little heeded in this world, that the type of mind that is least creative is often the one that can best use an invention. The aeroplane is American; the submarine is French, tlie ironclad was first ■American .hen French, and then English, the navigable" is French; the private armament firms that are now the most portentous fact in the world be? n their career in Great Britain Annstrong came before Krupp. We re,.p what we have sown. Essen and Friedrichsafen are only the reaction of the methodical, indefatigable Geiman mind to the initiatives of th 3 intellectually more virile people, t it it is certainly a terrible reaction, fcyery fresh phase of the war shows moif: clearly how completely the Ge ™i£>n imagination has been obsessed jj t t idea of systematic war preparation, all the energy of sixty million people has been concentrated upon the scientific war business in a way that is almost incredible to the versatile, anarchic American or Englishman or Frenchman. Every fresh phase of the war, indeed, justifies the- determination of the Allies to end forever the belligerent culture of Germany For four decades all German life has been made to subserve that droaw of a scientifically perfect war equipment; it has drained the life and wits out of the cavalry and infantry that were once so at is I it has left German diplomacy brainless and tactless; it has eaten up the literature, the philosophy, the criticism. the emotion of a whole people. But it has certainly been carried out with a mag. nificent thoroughness. An organisation of equipment, a military it'.exigence department, a system of military espionage, a scientific preparation of war plans, has been carried to a pitch unparalleled in the world's history. Our generation has been privileged to witness the spectacle of a military machine in action such as mankind has never seen before, and I hope will never tolerate again. It is useless to pretend that all the Allies together have anything to equal the marvels of the German apparatus. It is by the forces inherent in sane humanity, by the individual superiority of their rank and file, by a desperate resolve to endure militant Germany no longer, that they win and will continue to win in the face of these tremendous achievements, gathering fresh allies with each hew confirmation of German efficiency. Let us consider the novelties this war has produced. Tn the first place, it is a petrol war. For the first time war has been fought over a country so highly civilised as to possess abundant pood roads. This gave Germany an immense advantage. She found Luxemburg, Belgium, and, in a lesser degree, France, unprepared for her onslaught, as every sane country whose abilities are intelligently dispersed must necessarily be unprepared. The Germans, therefore, had all the advantage of an armed monomaniac who attacks suddenly, and their first rush upon Paris was made by the best-equipped host that has ever carried fire and murder through a peaceful countryside. Most railway sidings had been prepared upon the Belgian front'er to facilitate the movement of troops, special great guns were ready to smash the obsolescent Belgian fortresses. These first German hosts were so "equipped that even the field-glasses for the riflemen who were to pick off the French and Belgian officers had not been foreot ten. The surprise of Liege failed indeed. but the big guns remedied that; Namur, Maubeuge, were cracked like walnuts; the wave poured on. Over this stupendous advance soared an

overwhelming number of aeroplanes, and along every road poured the automobiles; it was the mechanical perfection of belligerency. Before it there retreated thin lines of khaki riflemen shooting very well, and a field artillery handled by Frenchmen and Englishmen, and to the north certain groups of curiously embittered Belgians unconvinced by these machines. The collapse of France looked for a time inevitable. Yet these men out-fought the German soldiers. Slowly, day by day, they corrected their disadvantage of material. Slowly the friction of the resistances was driving the best and biggest army in history. Within a few miles of Paris the German rush collapsed, the road behind choked with its killed and wounded, smashed automobiles and broken guns served no longer to maintain the supply of food or ammunition. The obstinate Belgians had smashed up their railway system and got all their rolling stock away, and at a little distance from the Prussian frontier the German supplies had to take to the congested and ploughed-up highways. Slowly the resistance gathered, and as I write the ruins of that great invasion, the most tremendous advance in history, beaten back from the Marne, strained by a perpetual stretching to the west, perish slowly along the line of the Aisne. And all the while Germany has been using petrol. No doubt German foresight provided great stores of petrol for a three months' war, but the war still goes on, conquest |fades from ; the German dream, and the Germans have used petrol beyond measuring for transport, for Zeppelins, for those remarkable incendiary bombs that flared through the streets of Antwerp, for every conceivable purpose. There are no German sources of petrol. Only from America and Roumania —neither of which countries is anxious to see the German military monomania dominate the world—and through the by no means enthusiastic channels of Holland, Norway, and Denmark can petrol reach Germany. So that it may be possible for the United States and Roumania presently to turn off this war as one turns off a gas-jet. That is the first extraordinary aspect of this unprecedented war. Suddenly it may become preventable through the sheer waste of this one necessity. . And the next most remarkable aspect of this war is the fact that compulsory military service, combined with the telephone, the telegraph, and the modern facilities of transport, has practically abolished the "civilian." Germany evidently intends to put its whole adult male population into the fighting line before the end of this war, and it has made a prisoner of war of every adult male of mobilisable age of the Allies that it could catch. Its punitive treatment of towns and villages has practically abolished the last immunity of the "non-com-batant." Entire populations are fighting now, and fighting with a disregard for the ancient amenities of warfare for which the German scientific conception of permissible pressure and stratagems is directly responsible. It is a very curious and instructive thing to talk to Belgian refugees or British wounded soldiers and to mark the savage resentment that has developed against the Germans since the first month of the war. At first the English were quite good-tempered; slowly the Belgian outrages have turned their kindly dispositions to hatred. If a German raid were now to reach England it would not be fought sim'ply by the regular troops. It would be set upon and lynched by the general population. The last traces of the eighteenth century convention that war was a business confined to men in uniform are fading out of human thought under the stress of "scientific" methods. . . . And then come the actual machines. ;

There is something preposterously logical in the way in which metallurgy and chemistry and engineering have, under commercial stimulus, taken the ancient claptrap of militarism and worked it out of Europe and on the high seas. The Germans have permitted this to happen to the completest extent because they are most thorough-minded and least subtle people in Europe. Devotion to military preparation bores all intelligent minds, but it has bored the phlegmatic German less than it has bored the English or Irish or French. And the Prussian Government has used press and picture to make the business attractive and exciting to its vulgar taxpayers. It has always, to give them something for their money, kept a good shop-window in the street, and from this it has followed that at tmies the German goods have been rather of the shop-window than the efficient type. This is particularly the case with the air craft. Zeppelins have proved as complete a failure as we journalist-prophets foretold. Their sole feat has been to drop a few bombs into the Antwerp streets on a still night and murder, perhaps, a score | of inoffensive men, women, and chilI dren. As an agreeable side conseq fence of the war I have now staying in my house an electrician who was a garde civile of Antwerp, and who left the town only after the v.!re entanglements. in which he had been keeping certain wires alive and dangerous, were smashed up. He saw a number of shells fall; lie was knocked off liis "velo" by the concussion of one of them, and he has given me very illuminating particulars of the whole business. His contempt for the Zeppelins is extreme. The* six that "rained Pre" upon Antwerp in the newspaper headlines were fabulous monsters; none shared in the bombardment at all, and of the earlier visitants one was ripped in eleven compartments and disabled by rifle fire alone. It. escaped capture only by dropping all its bombs en masse, and everything else that was detachable—happily into a field. Except in calm weather these huge gas sausages are uncontrollable and useless. And the German aeroplanes, though extremely numerous and a source of grave inconvenience as range-finders for the artillery in the earlier stages of 'be war, are individually «nrenor to the British. Both the English and French chase and destroy them; rhe observers fight with repeating rifles, and the Allied machines seem to be not only better bandied, but quicker and easier to manoeuvre. The combatants fly with tho view of gettine: a raking fire across the antagonist's propeller, so that he is unable fo reply except at the risk or Tweaking his

owa blades. Slowly but surely the aerial ascendancy is being recovered by the Allied powers. It Is not only, that they make better machines and faster, but that they maKe better aviators. The northern Frenchman and many Scotch and Engltsn types have a much greater aptitude than any German for all this sort of work, and it is probable that as the battle-line sags back toward the Allied objective in Westphalia, the Allies will have the complete command of the air and Germany will fight blind. It is as a scout, and more_ particularly as an accessory To the artillery, that the aeroplane figures in the newwar. With regard to artillery the Germans have the advantage that results from intensity of intention. Of any gun it may be said, "Why not a larger?" to a quite astonishing point. It is manifest that if a nation devotes its full energies to such a research the other nations in the world must either put a stop to that development or follow suit or go under. So far as ordinary field guns go the German artillery, if more numerous, is in no other way superior to that of the Allies. But in the matter of big guns they altogether outclass their antagonists. A new piece is put upon the chessboard of war in the form of guns vaster than any pre-existing siege guns; great guns tnat can yet be moved, cumbrously, but still moved, from position to position. At a blow, therefore, fixed fortifications are abolished as a refuge for inferior forces on the defensive and the whole strategic method is changed. These pieces are so large tnat they have to be fired by gunners using electricity at some slight distance, «nfl they must be extremely destructive to all the small gear in the immediate vicinitv. They can be fired only at an enormous cost, and with any chance of success only at a fixed target. They need emplacements of very great solidity. And obviously they are open to counter attack both through the air and by ordinary troops. They need, therefore, a strong guard to protect them, a little complete defensive force with ordinary guns and machine-guns, and they are far more valuable to a superior attacking force than to a re-

lowed the solitary boatload of survivors, as a shark will follow a raft, in the hope that some other British warship would expose herself by slowing down to pick up these exhausted men.

If you try to imagine the mental states of the officers of that submarine, you will realise why this paper is headed "The Lifeless Monster That Kills the Souls and Bodies of Men." You will realise why the spirit of man rises in revolt against these hellish new developments of his ancient crime of war. For it is not only that men now suffer wounds more horrible than any that the swords and spears of ancient warfare were capable of inflicting at the worst, not only that they are rent and smashed as no men have ever been rent and smashed before, not even by the insanest tyrants, not by tne cruellest savages that ever contrived torments, but that their minds are deadened and distorted to the service of these mechanical devils. In Antwerp, when my visitor left it, there were splashes of blood about in ttiu strets everywhere, and after one explosion there was picked up amid much other debris the arm and shoulder-blade of a woman with some bloody rags of clothing. One man was sitting fiy liis dying wife. There was an uproar in the street, and he went out upon the balcony to look at the Zeppelin at which the forts were Tiring shrapnel. He was hit by the shrapnel bullets and immediately decapitated. His wife, unaware of the misadventure, called to him and then called again. She kept telling him in her fading voice to come in out of the danger. You see what the scientific development of armaments is doing for Ihe world!

There is no way of stopping this scientific development of warfare without a common law against war equipment, the setting up by a confederation of States above all existing Governments of a common law that shall rule the earth. This may be possible when the militarist delusions of Germany are destroyed. It certainly will not be until they are. For all the rest of the world is sick of war.

treating one. They arso need open and good communication for supplies. And they are of no avail against infantry in a sanely-contrived system of trenches and against an infantry attack. Their use means the thrusting forward of a kind of gun fort into the enemy's co ntry that may easily become an embarrassing entanglement. The larger they are, the more formidable they are, the more do they commit their user to a certain line and certain positions and compel their antagonist to dispersed tactics and movement. They are, indeed, a species of military Juggernaut; one figures the little soldiers about them hauling them forward to perform their wonders very mucli like the servitors of a new religion. These things are, indeed, strangely like gods squatting, gaping, death-sending gods, to which men have given their souls.

These monsters have cracked the armour of Belgium and France, but they cannot break the net of entrenched men that now holds the bled and weary German armies. At Verdun and Belfort the French have advanced and entrenched so that the forts are beyond the utmost range of the new German deities. They lift their black muzzles in vain toward the useless forts they can no longer injure. Legend has it that still larger guns are being made; guns that will fire across the Channel from Calais to England. But let them, if they can, fire from Berlin to London and burst their hearts with their effort. Germany may put her last strength into these guns; they will not bring back the troops w : hose bodiew -already choke the streams and trenches from the Meuse to the Yser, and from the Marne to the Scheldt. Each month Germany and Austria waste against a growing enemy in killed, wounded and prisoners close upon a million men.

No doubt much ingenuity will stand between the Allies and the capture of Essen, where these things are made, and which is the real heart of the new Germany we fight. But CreusotSchneider, Armstrongs, Vickers, Maxim, are on their mettle, and the Allies are no longer lax; they are fighting for their lives now, with better brains and better men than Germany. The Germans began and the Allies will end at their maximum of destructive efficiency. Strange dragons and wonderful beasts of steel will battle in Westphalia before the end, but the end will be the downfall of Essen and Kruppism for ever. Upon the sea the warnings of the prophets have also Peen confirmed. The great ironclad, Though still a necessity for the control of the ocean, is no longer the unchallenged mistress of the seas. There is no perfect command of the seas any more. The mine and the submarine, elusive and unavoidable, have made the narrow waters unsafe even for an overwhelmingly predominant fleet. Naval warfare lias become a mechanical assassination. The successes of these insidious devices are not, it is true, considerable enough to destroy a predominance, but they can distress and hamper and keep an enemy out of shallow waters, and protected straits and river mouths to quite an unprecedented extent. They have not been able to prevent the English transporting enormous quantities of troops and material to France, nor have tliey opened any way for a retaliatory raid, but they have kept the Grand Fleet out of the Baltic and off the Friesland coast and islands. They are purblind antagonists one must admit; that must be blundered upon, and such successes as they have had have been attained chiefly by ruses, by the submarine waiting upon some decoy ship, a trawler with the Dutch flag or suehliko Teutonic devices, that stopped the victim ship by provoking a challenge and so made it a mark. After the Ilawke was sunk a submarine fol-