The Next War: An Appeal to Common Sense/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
SECOND YPRES
So the nations went to war, armed to the teeth, ready as nations never were before. It was to be a supreme struggle; all intelligent Europe knew that. Every available ounce of national resource, human material and energy was necessary to victory. If the rest did not understand, Germany soon taught them. And from the beginning, the “code of civilized warfare” began to melt away. In the first week, Great Britain and Germany both violated its spirit if not its letter. It was provided in the code that when siege was laid to a city the non-combatants must have a chance to get away in order to escape starvation as well as bombardment. With her dominant navy, England at once put a food-blockade on Germany. She knew that Germany produced but 80 per cent of her own food; and that this was done only through intensive fertilization and the employment in harvest and plowing time of a million and a half Russian laborers. The state of war would reduce the supply of fertilizers, would cut off the Russian laborers, would take from the land most of the domestic laborers. It was possible, other means failing, to starve out Germany, the weakest civilian baby as well as the strongest soldier. From the first day of the war—in plan if not at once in action—Germany prepared in the same way to starve out the British Isles with submarines. When she applied her submarine campaign, Germany violated at once an old article of the code which provided that merchant ships, about to be sunk for carrying contraband, must be warned and searched and that their crews must be allowed to escape. She began to sink without warning. If Germany abandoned this method in 1915, it was only because the United States protested, and she feared to drag us into the war against her. She resumed her original plan in 1917, and we did enter the war.
It was provided in the code that civilians should be given warning of a bombardment. But the aeroplanes had arrived; and aeroplane tactics depend not only upon speed but upon surprise. In the first fortnight of the war and as unexpectedly as a bolt of lightning from a clear sky, a German Taube appeared over Paris, dropped a bomb which blew in the front of a shop and killed two civilian butchers peacefully wrapping up meat. Germany invaded Belgium. As part of her long-studied plan for keeping everything serene on her line of communications against France, she seized as hostages a few leading citizens of each town through which she passed, shot them if the town did not behave. And the taking of hostages had been so long abrogated by the code that a French Encyclopedia of War issued in the sixties of the last century defined it as “a usage of barbarous and semi-civilized warfare, for centuries discontinued by civilized nations.” The “code” was going fast. A structure of merciful if superficial ethics which had been three centuries building was toppled over in two weeks.
Eight months later, humanity arrived at a date as significant in our annals, I think, as October 12, 1492 or July 4, 1776. It is April 22, 1915, during the Second Battle of Ypres. That day, the Germans rolled across the Western trench-line a cloud of iridescent chlorine gas which sent French, Arab, English and Canadian soldiers by the thousands back to the hospitals, coughing and choking themselves to death from rotted, inflamed lungs. Had the German General Staff possessed imagination enough to use gas wholesale instead of retail on that day, they might have won their war then and there.
The significance of the second Battle of Ypres needs explanation.
Through all the centuries of mechanical and scientific improvement, military armament—the means of killing men—had lagged behind. The primitive man killed in war by hitting his opponent with a hard substance—a club or stone. Later, he sharpened the stone so that it would more readily reach a vital spot, and had a knife or a sword. He mounted the knife on a stick to give himself greater reach, and had a spear. He discovered the projecting power of the bow, which would send a small spear beyond his own reach. Gunpowder arrived; that gave still further and more powerful projection. But the principle, the one method of killing a man in war, remained the same—hit him with something hard. We had learned many ways of controlling and transmuting for the purposes of ordinary life the power stored up by the sun—steam, electricity, the energy of falling water. Military science knew but one way—the explosion of chemicals. If we look into a battleship, that “great, floating watch,” we marvel at the intricacy of her machinery. But we should find that the engines, the turbines, the delicate and complicated electrical instruments, are all devices first invented for purely industrial activities and merely adapted for war. We should find the guns, the actual killing instrument, among the simplest machines on board. In centuries of mechanical invention and mechanical improvement, very little higher intelligence and no genius at all had been put into the mechanics of killing men.
There were good reasons. The men who discovered the great principles back of modern machinery and industrial method, such as Newton in physics, Friar Bacon and Faraday in chemistry, Ampère and Volta in electricity, were concerned only with pure science, with extending the field of human knowledge. The clever inventors and adapters—such as Stephenson with his locomotive, Morse with his telegraph, Edison with his electric light and phonograph, Marconi with his wireless, Langley and the Wrights with their aeroplanes—were concerned with improving the civilian processes of production and transportation, or with adding material richness to modern life. Those who, in biology and kindred sciences, followed the paths blazed by the giants of the nineteenth century, were even more directly benevolent in their ends. Ehrlich and Takamine worked to save, preserve and lengthen human life. No first-class scientific mind was interested in research having for its end to destroy human life.
Nor did the military caste, whose business—stripped of all its gold lace and brass buttons—was to kill, add anything fundamental to the science of destruction. It is traditional that what few real improvements there have been in armament, such as the machine-gun and the submarine, were invented by civilians and by them sold to armies. Military life tends to destroy originality. It makes for daring action, makes against daring thought. In the second place, there was the code. Professional soldiers wanted, sincerely wanted, to render warfare as merciful as possible, They shrank from carrying the thing out to its logical conclusion. Killing by gas had been theoretically proposed long before the war; and most military men had repudiated the idea. They had even fixed their objection in the stern agreements of the Second Hague Conference.
But from April 22, 1915 that agreement and all similar agreements were abrogated. The Germans had found a new method, with enormous possibilities, for killing men. This weapon was powerful enough to win the war, if the Allies refused to reply in kind. They did reply in kind. From that moment, to use the language of the streets, the lid was off. Nations, instead of merely armies, were by now mobilized for war. Those great and little scientific minds, engaged hitherto in searching for abstract truth or in multiplying the richness of life and the wealth of nations, could be turned toward the invention of means of destruction whether they wished or no. A new area of human consciousness was brought to fruition. A new power in men was unloosed and this one most sinister. Its established past performances, its probable future results, I shall consider elsewhere.
This release and stimulation of the human imagination for the business of killing was perhaps the main social event of the Great War. But I hinted at another almost equally important when I said above that nations instead of armies were now mobilized for war.
The Germans had entered Armageddon with an unprecedented equipment of munitions. The electric-minded French perceived at once, the slower-minded British only a little later, that this was to be a war of factories as well as of men and bent all their resources toward organizing the national life for this purpose. Every woman enlisted in munitions-making, in agriculture, in clerical work for the business offices of war, released a soldier to the Front. Women were drawn in by the thousands, later by the millions. At the end of the war Great Britain, homeland and Colonies together, had in arms less than five million soldiers; but homeland and Colonies together were employing three million women in the direct processes of war, besides millions of others who gave as volunteers a part of their time. It became a stock statement that if the women of either side should quit their war-work, that side would lose.
Now since munitions and food had grown as important as men, since to stop or hinder the enemy munitions manufacture or agricultural production was to make toward victory, the women in war were fair game. Near London stood the great Woolwich munition works and armory, turning out guns, explosives and shells. Probably before the end of the war, as many women worked there as men. It was raided again and again by German aircraft. Why not? Totally to destroy the Woolwich works would be equivalent for purposes of victory to destroying several divisions. The old code was logical for its time when it forbade the killing of women and other non-combatants. Then, killing a woman had no point. Now it had a most significant point.
The same stern logic of “military necessity” lay behind the continual air raids on cities, fortified and unfortified. Germany began this process. She was in a position to do so. She held the advanced lines. Her front was only seventy miles from the capital and metropolis of France, less than a hundred from that of Britain, whereas, to attack Berlin, the Entente Allies must travel by air nearly four hundred miles. Tons of illogically sentimental propaganda have been published concerning these air-raids. In the beginning, the intention was, on any standard barbarous, cruel, and stupid. The German General Staff, rich in scientific knowledge but poor in the understanding of human nature, thought by this means to “break down the resistance” of the hostile peoples, to bully them into a submissive attitude. In this they failed utterly; air raids had rather the effect of lashing the French and British into increased effort.
But the raids were continued for a more practical purpose. The nerve-centres of war are in the great cities, and mainly in the capitals. Suppose for an extreme example that the Germans in one overwhelming raid or a series of raids had destroyed Paris. All the main railroad lines which supplied the army at the front ran through Paris. There, the trains were switched, rearranged and made up. In Paris also were the headquarters of those innumerable bureaus vitally necessary to the conduct of modern war, with all its complexities and coordinations. Had the railroad connections been destroyed, had the bureaus lost their quarters, their books, their personnel, the French army at the front must have been thrown into confusion.
By the same token the more they approximated to this end, the more the air-bombardments made toward victory. Both Parisians and Londoners have expressed to me the opinion that the Gotha raids and the Big Bertha bombardments were “worth while” for the effect they had on the business of life. “There’s no use in denying,” said an Englishman, “that we did less work than usual—at least a quarter less—on the days of air raids.”
Still further: defence against air-raids is very difficult; so the French, for example, were forced to hold back from the Front in order to defend their capital scores of aeroplanes and many batteries of guns, whereas the Germans seldom raided with more than a dozen aeroplanes. That factor alone made air raids useful for strictly military ends. When the Allies began raiding German cities in 1917 and 1918, when they prepared to raid Berlin on an unprecedented scale in that campaign of 1919 which never occurred, they were not mainly inspired by revenge, as horror-stricken German civilians and war-heated Allied civilians asserted. The General Staff were after results, not personal satisfaction. They knew that aeroplane raids on cities brought military results. Still further; they knew that armies exist and operate for the defence of peoples. The object of wars, after all, is not the destruction of armies. It is the subjugation of peoples. In striking at the great cities they were striking, a little blindly as yet but still directly, at the heart of resistance.
Of course, when you attack and bombard a city without warning—and an air raid, to be effective must come without warning—you include in the circle of destruction every living thing in that city, the weakest non-combatant with the strongest soldier. “Baby killers” the Londoners called the Zeppelins. They were just that; for baby-killing had become incidental to military necessity.
Let me here add another departure from the “code,” less significant than the new ways of killing and the inclusion of all civilians in the circle of destruction, but still important to humanity. Under its spirit, usually under the letter, an army destroyed property only when that destruction would weaken the enemy's armed forces and his general military resistance. Sherman’s devastation during his march to the sea was ruthless and terrible, and is not yet forgotten in the South. But it had a direct military object—to render impossible the provisioning of the Confederate Army. The Germans, setting the pace, carried the logic of destruction one stage further. In their early rush they had taken and held securely the coal mines of Northern France. Those mines, yielding half of the French native coal supply, they deliberately flooded and destroyed. This had no immediate military purpose. In German hands, the mines were useless to the French army. No, the German General Staff wanted simply to weaken France permanently, to make that part which they did not seize in their proposed German peace a subject nation commercially. The collapse of the Germans in 1918 was so sudden that the Allies did not enter her territory while in a state of war and it is impossible to say that they would not, in other circumstances, have followed the general rule of war and replied in kind.
Let me go no further with all this, but summarize: “The Code,” a merciful though artificial body of ethics, built up by Christianity and all other humanitarian forces through two thousand years of warfare, had collapsed. In most respects, we were back to the ethics of the barbarian hordes. The barbarians of the twentieth century B. C. killed in any manner which their imaginations suggested; so now did civilized men of the twentieth century A. D. The barbarian of the twentieth century B. C. killed the women and children of the enemy as tribal self-interest seemed to dictate; as now did the civilized men of the twentieth century A. D. The barbarians of the twentieth century B. C. made slaves of the conquered people or forced them to pay tribute; so virtually—in such acts as the destruction of the French mines—did civilized men of the twentieth century A. D.
In only two important respects did the code still stand when we emerged from the Great War of 1914–18. We were generally sparing prisoners, granting life to those who gave up resistance and surrendered. But would this article have stood in case the war went on? Germany held several millions of French, British, Belgian, Italian and Russian prisoners. At an ever-increasing pace, she was being starved out. Suppose she had elected to defend herself literally to the last life, as besieged cities have often done? With an underfed army, with civilians dropping dead of starvation in the streets—what of the prisoners? She could not send them back to multiply the number of her enemies. She could not dump them into the adjacent neutral nations to devour their scanty supplies of food. Rather than face this, Switzerland or Holland would have entered the war against Germany. What might have become of the prisoners?
Only one article of the code stood firm. With occasional violations, the “right of the wounded” was respected. Speaking generally, both sides spared the hospitals.
And with the break-down of “the code,” another sinister factor, unknown to the barbarians, had entered warfare—that exact scientific method of research which has wrought all our miracles of industry was at the service of the warriors. The current of scientific work and thought, flowing hitherto toward improvement of mankind, was now dammed; it was flowing backward, toward the destruction of mankind.