WAR'S FEROCITY.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 4, Issue 93, 8 October 1915, Page 3 (Supplement)

WAR'S FEROCITY.

" NEW METHODS IX A YE All

50,000 MACHIXE-G I'NS.

The war which began a year ago the first of a new order. It has aooi'isl'. Ed tin- non-combatant. In the 18th and 19th centuries war was waged by email professional armies, not by whole nations. Even tha Germans m IS7O only placed in the field per cent, of their population, as against over 10 per cent, to-day. The non-combatants, with no taste for the bloody business of the batterfield, coul usually s ; t comfortably aloof, like spectator at a glorified gladitoriul show.

With the modern national armies aJI this is changed. We have gone back to the remote ages. It is not a few hired men who take the field but the whole ablo-hodied manhood. Only they can hope to win who fight thus and whose people behind the fighting line are organised for war. Aircraft and submarines have deprived women an 1 children of whatever shreds of safety might have been left them by the German ordinances of war a* interpreted by the German general staff. As the aeroplane and Zeppelin murder indiscriminately on land by rainmg boml>s or darts on the quiet streets or icniote towns so does the submarine slay indicriminately at sea.

THE NEW FEROCITY

War, indeed, under our German mentors has taken on a ner ferocity, of which the Balkan conflicts of 1912-13 gave a dim foretaste. The worst dee us of Napoleon were of lamb-lik" gentleness compared with the cruelties perpetrated deliberately in cold blood, as part of a settled policy, by the Germans upon the men, women and children of Belgium, Northern France, and Poland. Yet this strategy of destruction and massacre is cunningly devised. The wrecking of towns and factories shatters the antagonists future capacity of production and indicts on him heavy pecuniary loss. The slaughter of-Irs people impairs his future manpower.

The enemy methodically bleeds sacks, and plunders the people of the abandoned zone, drives off the males to work for him with forced labour in the shell factories or fields, and puts the women too often to another and even more terrible use.

Each foot that the German gains too, he walls in with an immense ba"rier of barbed wire and concrete. .Ramparts more formidable than any great wall of China cross France and are appearing in Poland. So engineered as to bo invisible, they are obstacles which all the heroism and ingenuity of the allies have not yet been able to overcome. On the Warsaw front the German wire is measured in depth not by the yard but by the mile. Behind this jungle of wire, which is almost as impassable as a morass, are planted machine-guns >:£ the thousand, well protected with concrete and stic?el armour, and hidden from any but the sharpest eye.

WITHERING HAIL OF BULLE'IS

The machine-gun, used on this sent/; is a new element in land war. In its hai; of bullets charges wither and casualties bv the thousand e pilcdi up in a few minutes. By the method of its mounting it is generally invulnerable to any but a direct hit, and with it i single good shot and a couple of attendants can do the work of fifty or sixty marksmen. On the French front by the lowest estimate, the enemy has 50,000 of the;e guns; by the highest published 9">,000 which would give one to every hundred yards of front. New, too, is this feature of an entrenched front 600 miles long, stretcning from sea to neutral territory, with no flanks to be turned, which yet must be forced or turned if the war is to tnd in a complete Allied triumph; new this situation in which millions of. armed men month after month face one another across a few hundred feet or yards of dead ground, which they cannot pass. Such is the condition along the whole front in France; such, or approximately such, the condition of the Italian frontier. Progress is measured not by miles but by fathoms; and to storm a concrete fortress such as the German Labyrinth demands the sacrifice of thousands of lives, even under the shelter of a curtain of shells and a rain of high explosives on the enemy's defences. The defence has advanced so rapidly that a deadlock exists on all the fronts where there is not room to manoeuvre. Enormous was the advantage which Germany gained by leaping suddenly upon her unsuspecting neighbours. It was thus, and thus only, that the Germans were able to occupy Belgium, and Northern France and Western Poland.

The machine-gun has then affected modern war more profoundly than any other weapon. Aircraft, however, by their fearful power of destruction, and by the ease with which they can strike every part of an enemy's territory, may exercise a more abiding influence on the future of man. They have not as yet been tested in offensive operations on a grand scale, but if the German hints are serious they will be sooner or later; and we must prepare to see great damage done. Even if they do not accomplish much in the present war they will certainly be perfected hereafter.

The employment of poisonous gas i > an idea stolen by the enemy from Mr. Wells; that it was forbidden by Hague Convention* mattered nothing to Berlin. It has been followed by the use of chemical and bacteriological poisons. A second plagiarism from Mr. Weils is the heat ray, in the shape of an oxyacetylene jet projected 90ft.