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"THE NEXT WAR" 
 
"A BIT OF A BRUTE" 
 
 The use of bayonet practice was moral; by it a blazing, vicious 
 hatred was worked up in the common soldier. 
 
"THE NEXT WAR" 
 
 AN APPEAL TO COMMON SENSE 
 
 BY 
 WILL IRWIN 
 
 AUTHOR OF "MEN, WOMEN AND WAR," 
 "A REPORTER IN ARMAGEDDON," ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. DUTTON fcr COMPANY 
 
 681 FIFTH AVENUE 
 
Copyright, 1921, 
 BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 M -6 192' 
 
 Printed In the United States of America 
 
 g)C!.A617218 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGK 
 
 I. War and Prophecy i 
 
 II. The Breeding of Calamity 5 
 
 III. Second Ypres 23 
 
 IV. The New Warfare 35 
 
 V. Tactics of the Next War 44 
 
 VI. War and the Race 67 
 
 VII. The Cost in Money 79 
 
 VIII. Economics and the Next War 103 
 
 IX. "The Tonic of Nations" 112 
 
 X. The Discipline of Peace 119 
 
 XI. "Defensive Preparation" 128 
 
 XII. The Dramatic Moment 137 
 
 XIII. Proposed Ways to Peace 142 
 
 XIV. The Tempter 158 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 "A Bit of a Brute" Frontispiece 
 
 FACING 
 PAGE 
 
 Obsolete Armament 16 
 
 Artillery Fire in 1815 40 
 
 Artillery Fire in 1915 40 
 
 The Increasing Size of Bombs 42 
 
 A Land Dreadnought 56 
 
 Proposed Aircraft Carrier 58 
 
 A Half Ton Shell 95 
 
 Campus of the University of Michigan no 
 
"THE NEXT WAR" 
 
THE NEXT WAR 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 WAR AND PROPHECY 
 
 Mankind, it has been said, lives by happy com- 
 binations of words, thinks by phrases. With phrases, 
 no less than with engines of destruction, the world 
 fought the Great War of 19 14-18 — "The War for 
 Democracy" on the Allied side, "The Place in the 
 Sun" and "Spreading our Kultur" on the German. 
 Volumes of political essays and bales of editorials 
 have less influence among the American people at 
 present than that popular expression, "A hundred 
 per cent American." 
 
 In the two years since the Armistice, a new phrase 
 has entered the discussion of military affairs not only 
 in America but in all the European countries — 
 "the next war." It appears many times daily in 
 the reactionary press of Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, 
 Paris. It sprinkles the reports in the staff colleges 
 of the Continent, of England, of the United States. 
 It has furnished already the theme for books in all 
 European languages. "The First World War," the 
 
2 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 title of a book lately published by Colonel Reping- 
 ton, is only a variant on this phrase. 
 
 Prophecy concerning the trend of political affairs 
 is not only perilous but well-nigh impossible. In all 
 the prophecy of the late war, who foretold the future 
 course of Russia? There were whisperings, in- 
 deed in the Allied countries, there were loud fore- 
 casts in Germany, that Russia might withdraw from 
 the Entente; but who prophesied the curious circum- 
 stances of her withdrawal and the still more curious 
 results to which it led? Ten European statesmen 
 believed that Holland, Switzerland or even Spain 
 might enter the great war to one who counted on 
 the United States. And who, before 19 17, prophe- 
 sied in what manner we would be the deciding factor 
 or even hinted at our curious influence on the peace? 
 Who looked forward and foresaw the American flag 
 flying over the mighty fortress of Ehrenbreitstein 
 at Coblenz? 
 
 Such affairs as these belong to the political side 
 of war, partake of its uncertainty. It would be 
 foolish, therefore, for even the wisest and best-in- 
 formed statesman, and still less for a journalist, to 
 prophesy what nations or combinations of nations 
 might oppose forces in that "next war." The com- 
 plexity of the question, involving as it does eco- 
 nomics, internal politics, religion, sudden outbreaks 
 of mob-mind, shifts of population, the rise of lead- 
 ers as yet unknown, renders forecast impossible. 
 Beside such a game, chess is as simple as jackstraws. 
 
WAR AND PROPHECY 3 
 
 But forecasting the methods, strategies and effects 
 of future wars is more like a purely mathematical 
 problem, and infinitely easier. Such forecasts have 
 been made in the past; and the best-informed and 
 more intelligent of them have been vindicated by the 
 course of events. Before the Russo-Japanese war, 
 military critics who combined sound information 
 with sound imagination said that in the next war 
 between thoroughly prepared armies, the frontal 
 lines would become deadlocked in trenches, and that 
 battle could then be won only by a sudden and well- 
 conceived surprise on the flank. That is exactly 
 the history of the Russo-Japanese war; Nogi's great 
 flanking movement won the battle of Mukden after 
 the main forces had undergone some weeks of stale- 
 mate in the front trenches. Had the Russians pos- 
 sessed a single scout aeroplane, Nogi's success would 
 have been impossible. The aeroplane appeared a 
 few years later, proved itself not a toy but a prac- 
 tical machine. Then the military critics, of the class 
 before mentioned made a new forecast. A war 
 between densely-populated and thoroughly armed 
 peoples such as those of Europe, they said, might be 
 decided by an overwhelming initial thrust. Failing 
 that, it must settle down to a long deadlock in 
 trenches, a war" of attrition with unprecedented 
 losses, to be decided only when one side or the other 
 crumpled up through exhaustion of economic re- 
 sources and of morale. That view was expressed 
 for the United States in Frederick Palmer's novel, 
 
4 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 "The Last Shot." And these forecasts of the mili- 
 tary critics might stand now as histories of the great 
 war. 
 
 So it is possible to speak with some authority con- 
 cerning the character of that "next war," especially 
 since so many able Europeans have already recorded 
 and analyzed the experiences and lessons of "the first 
 world war." Though we cannot do more than guess 
 at the participants, we can foresee the methods of 
 that struggle and its direct and indirect results on 
 the lives and property, the souls and bodies, of the 
 nations who find themselves involved. 
 
 It is difficult, however, rightly to see the future 
 without at least a glance at the past. It is doubly 
 difficult in this discussion, because during the war of 
 1914-18 certain forces hitherto smouldering burst 
 into blaze. Not only did the character of warfare 
 change, but its whole relation to peoples and to 
 human life. From now on, we must consider war in 
 an entirely new light. An understanding of the dif- 
 ference between old wars and "the next war" is 
 essential to an understanding of the present struggle 
 between militarism and reasonable pacifism, between 
 the aristocratic ideal of society and the democratic, 
 between those who believe in that next war and those 
 who are groping toward a state of society which will 
 abolish war. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY 
 
 Man alone, among the higher animals, seems 
 characteristically to fight his own kind to the death. 
 Doubtless before there was law or morals the primi- 
 tive savage often got the woman, the ox or the stone 
 knife which he wanted simply by killing the pos- 
 sessor. With the organization of society, groups 
 and tribes began to do the same thing collectively 
 as a means of acquiring live-stock, wives, slaves or 
 territory; and we had war. In primitive society, if 
 we may judge from our study of existing savages, 
 wars were often comparatively bloodless affairs, set- 
 tled by a contest between two champions or by a 
 few wounds. Whole groups and tribes may have 
 lived on the pacifist theory, as do today certain 
 African nations which will not keep cattle because 
 cattle bring on raids and peace is with them pref- 
 erable to property. 
 
 When the curtain lifts on recorded history, tribes 
 were collecting into nations, and kingship was firmly 
 fixed in human affairs. By now, war also was a 
 permanent human institution; every throne was 
 propped up by an army. The relation of warfare to 
 
 5 
 
6 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 this early progress has been traced by H. G. Wells 
 in his "Outline of History." A people settled down, 
 developed agriculture, town life, a literature, the 
 mechanical arts, the beginnings of scientific knowl- 
 edge; accumulated wealth and desirable luxuries. In 
 this process, they became to the barbarian point of 
 view "effeminate," and easy prey for conquest. 
 
 Warfare, then and for centuries afterwards, was 
 mostly a matter of individual fighting. That side 
 was the victor which had the greater average of men 
 strong and skilled with the sword or lance, accurate 
 with the bow. The settled peoples, busy with the 
 arts of peace, had not the time for that life-long, in- 
 tensive, athletic training which made good warriors. 
 The barbarians, therefore, beat them in battle, took 
 their wealth, settled down among them, learned their 
 arts. They in turn became weakened for warfare, 
 and another wave of barbarians repeated the pro- 
 cess. Though there were exceptions, such as the 
 long hold of the civilized Roman Empire, this was 
 the general rhythm of ancient wars; even of me- 
 diaeval wars. 
 
 Viewed in this light, we have reason for arguing 
 that warfare was a positive if costly benefit. The 
 world in general was without means of communi- 
 cation; the written word which carried knowledge 
 was unavailable to whole peoples, to all but a few 
 even among the most favored peoples. Travel be- 
 yond one's national boundaries was almost unknown; 
 
THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY 7 
 
 the barbarians had an invariable custom of killing 
 strangers. Possibly by no other means than war- 
 fare could the rudiments of civilization have reached 
 the outer fringe. When the wild Persians over- 
 whelmed them, the peoples of the Mesopotamian 
 Basin had a written language, an understanding of 
 primitive mechanics, a system of star-measurement. 
 Left alone, they might have gone on to advanced 
 mechanics such as the steam engine, to the truth 
 about sidereal space and the world in space. The 
 Persians blew out all that bright promise; yet before 
 they themselves were conquered, they had acquired 
 what their captives had learned. So it went, the 
 world over, except in those three or four rather 
 abnormal centuries during which Rome held sway 
 over the world; and not even Rome was wholly an 
 exception. She conquered Greece; but intellectually 
 she became so absorbed by the Hellenic people that 
 every Roman gentleman must speak perfect Greek 
 or he was no gentleman. The Goths came into 
 Southern Europe unlettered barbarians; in a few 
 centuries, they had in Ravenna the most advanced 
 civilization of their time; and they learned it all 
 from the conquered. The Northmen got their let- 
 ters, their mathematics, their mechanics from subject 
 peoples. The German Junkers professed that they 
 waged the late war to spread their culture by con- 
 quering; the ancient peoples spread their culture 
 by being conquered. He would be indeed a preju- 
 
8 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 diced pacifist who ignored this aspect of old war, or 
 denied the possibility that in such times war was 
 beneficial. 
 
 In those days of primitive nations warfare had 
 no rules, or very few, of mercy or decency. The 
 conquering king and his men, undeterred by scruples, 
 did as they pleased with the conquered. If it 
 served their whim or purpose, they slaughtered a 
 surrendered army, even the women and children, of 
 a whole surrendered tribe. The kingly inscriptions 
 of Egypt and Assyria boast of such deeds as glories 
 of the crown. When the tribe was spared, it was often 
 merely that it might work to pay the victor tribute, 
 or to furnish him with slaves. If there were pro- 
 testing voices they have left no record. But as 
 early as the great days of Greece, we find a little 
 faint criticism both of war itself and its methods. 
 The thing, certain men thought, was an evil, a 
 calamity. It could not be stopped, probably; but 
 it was an evil nevertheless. There did arise, how- 
 ever, a dim code — rudimentary morals of war. It 
 was no longer quite ethical to kill women and chil- 
 dren, to slaughter your prisoners. It was often 
 done; but it required explanation and apology. 
 When, some half-century before Christ, Julius 
 Csesar put to death the Usepetes and Tenectri, he 
 was denounced in the Roman senate, and Cato even 
 proposed that he be turned over to the Germans. 
 
 Christianity, when it came at last powerfully into 
 human affairs, carried forward this moral move- 
 
THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY g 
 
 ment. A divine institution applied by imperfect 
 men, it did not strike at the roots of war; nor in- 
 deed did it seem clearly to recognize them. It es- 
 tablished, however, the principle that an unjust war 
 was wicked; and it did strive to ameliorate the un- 
 necessary horrors and to fix the tradition of chival- 
 rous warfare. The Truce of God, by which it be- 
 came wicked to fight on certain days of the week, 
 was an attempt in this direction. 
 
 The movement collapsed in the great religious or 
 half-religious wars of the sixteenth century, and 
 for a reason quite logical and understandable. Both 
 sides were fighting heresy, a sin and crime — they 
 thought — which did not merely injure men in this 
 life as do most ordinary crimes, but which con- 
 demned their souls to an eternity of misery. No 
 punishment was too severe for heresy. Hence such 
 massacres as those of the Thirty Years' War in 
 Germany, and the sack of Antwerp in the Low Coun- 
 tries. 
 
 When mankind came out of this madness, the drift 
 toward chivalrous warfare was resumed. The code, 
 by the twentieth century, had become definite; it 
 was a chapter in every general military text book, a 
 course in the education of every professional sol- 
 dier; finally it was sanctioned almost as international 
 law by the Hague Peace Conference. In principle, 
 war must rest as easily as possible on non-combat- 
 ants such as women and children; nor might even 
 an armed enemy be killed unnecessarily. In detail, 
 
io THE NEXT WAR 
 
 it was agreed that a city might not be besieged until 
 the non-combatants had been given time to get away 
 from the ensuing bombardment and starvation, that 
 the victors holding occupied territory must be re- 
 sponsible for the lives of the inhabitants, that prison- 
 ers of wars must not only be spared but adequately 
 fed and housed, that surgeons, nurses and stretcher- 
 bearers must have every reasonable opportunity to 
 rescue and succor the wounded; finally that certain 
 "barbarous" methods of killing, such as explosive 
 bullets and poison gases, might not be used. And 
 the military clan of all nations generally accepted 
 this code as the law and the gospel; they had been 
 bred in the idea of chivalry, and had developed a 
 beautiful and strict conception of professional ethics 
 which implied truth and honor toward their own, 
 and a sense of mercy toward their enemies. With 
 such an attitude toward war, the nations entered the 
 unprecedented struggle of 1914-18. 
 
 In the meantime, another current had been run- 
 ning among the European peoples; it rs necessary to 
 understand that in order to understand the present 
 situation. In the period since the religious wars, in 
 general during a long period before that, warfare 
 had settled into the hands of professional armies, 
 officered by the aristocracy, recruited in general from 
 the dregs of the population, padded with mercenary 
 soldiers of fortune. These forces were compara- 
 tively small, even in time of war. 
 
 In 1704, Marlborough won the battle of Blen- 
 
THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY 11 
 
 heim and imposed his will on the Continent of 
 Europe with 50,000 mixed British, Dutch and Aus- 
 trian troops. France was considered, in this period, 
 the great military power of the world. Just before 
 the Revolution of 1789 her armies had a theoretical 
 war strength of 210,000, or about one in 100 of 
 the population. Nor was the economic burden of 
 warfare very heavy. The weapons were compara- 
 tively few and primitive — flint lock muskets for the 
 infantry, sabres and lances for the cavalry, plain 
 smooth-bore cannon for the artiller*y. Speaking 
 generally, ammunition consisted of four standard 
 commodities — black powder, round lead bullets, 
 flints, and solid cannon balls. The factories which 
 supplied enough of this ammunition for the limited 
 armies of the day represented only a very small part 
 of the nation's productive forces. And, except in 
 regions swept by the armies, the industries of the 
 nations went on in war much as in peace. Even an 
 unsuccessful war laid on the people only a compara- 
 tively light burden of taxation. The losses in men 
 were not so great but that the general increase in 
 races almost instantly filled the gap. At Blenheim, 
 before mentioned, Marlborough lost less than five 
 thousand men both killed and wounded, the defeated 
 French and their Bavarian allies only eleven 
 thousand. 
 
 Then came the French Revolution. The new, 
 fanatical French Republic, opposed by an alliance 
 of all the kings of Europe, its frontier invaded, its 
 
12 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 nobility joined with the enemy, faced the alternative 
 of a struggle with every resource it had or ex- 
 tinction and the gallows. The principle of conscrip- 
 tion was decreed for the first time by a great na- 
 tion. Every man capable of bearing arms must serve 
 or hold himself ready to serve. And national in- 
 dustries also were mobilized, even if crudely. 
 Theoretically, at least, all the iron-workers of France 
 went to work on guns, cannon, pikes and ammuni- 
 tion. In the very streets of Paris stood the forges, 
 hammering out bayonets. 
 
 There followed the twenty years of the Na- 
 poleonic wars, wherein conscription was applied in 
 fact if not always in name. From that time, through 
 fifty years of comparative peace, the thing grew as 
 a principle of statecraft. It did not become set- 
 tled and universal, however, until after the Franco- 
 Prussian War of 1870. Prussia, ambitious leader of 
 the German states, herself led by men with ruthless 
 genius, had applied the principle of conscription, had 
 planned and studied the possibilities of modern war- 
 fare as they had never been studied before. The 
 German army was ready "to the last buckle" when 
 it burst on France, swept up the brave but ill-organ- 
 ized army of MacMahon, took Metz and Paris, and 
 in six months brought about a peace which tore from 
 France two provinces, nearly her whole supply of 
 iron ore, a discriminating tariff agreement, and the 
 unprecedented indemnity of a billion dollars. Ger- 
 many had shown the way to the militarists. 
 
THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY 13 
 
 Now we must go back again and trace for a 
 moment a third current, running into that cesspool 
 which overflowed in 19 14. 
 
 The era of kingship, as a focus for human loyalty, 
 had passed into the era of Powers. And these 
 Powers grew as predatory as the Roman Empire, 
 though less frankly and obviously so. The age of 
 machinery, of intensive manufacture, had arrived. 
 Europe produced only a part of the raw materials 
 which she needed for her furnaces, her forges or 
 her looms. That country would prosper best, it 
 was felt, which held the tightest grip on the sources 
 of raw material. Every European nation was turn- 
 ing out more manufactured goods than it could use 
 at home; all needed foreign trade; and "trade fol- 
 lows the flag." Finally, as national wealth was 
 multiplied through the fruitful processes of ma- 
 chinery, Europe began to pile up surplus capital. 
 Investment in new, undeveloped lands was much 
 more profitable to capital than domestic investment 
 under tight conditions. 
 
 Out beyond the fringes of European civiliza- 
 tion lay barbaric and semi-civilized peoples owning 
 raw materials, ready to buy European manufactured 
 goods, promising still other benefits to the nation 
 which could possess them either as conquerors or 
 "protectors." It was easy for a European states- 
 man, who wanted a fruitful barbarian country, to 
 find the pretext. A native king, we will say, was en- 
 couraged to get hopelessly into debt with a Euro- 
 
H THE NEXT WAR 
 
 pean government or banking firm. An "incident" 
 occurred. There were Europeans who made a trade 
 of bringing on such incidents. National honor was 
 offended; also, there was the debt. The army of 
 the European power involved — sometimes blood- 
 lessly, sometimes after a brief campaign — assumed 
 the responsibilities of the native king. The debt 
 was paid in time; but the European control re- 
 mained. I describe here, and only as an example, 
 one method among many. 
 
 When any given power so extended its "influence," 
 it tried to make that influence exclusive. It must 
 have all the raw materials and all the markets 
 which it cared to take. It must have all the rights 
 to invest capital. When the European nation, for 
 fear of its rivals, could not take over any unde- 
 veloped nation outright, it tried to bring it at least 
 within its "sphere of influence" — a kind of half- 
 control leading in time to full conquest. The critics 
 of this system call it "financial imperialism." For 
 European diplomacy, backed by enormous armies, 
 by great national banking houses, by munitions mani 
 ufacturers, had become almost frankly commercial. 
 
 Diplomacy kept the long peace which this policy 
 always endangered by a system borrowed from the 
 eighteenth century and much improved in the nine- 
 teenth. "The Balance of Power" it used to be 
 called; now it was termed "the Concert of the 
 Powers." Nations, led by the great powers, allied 
 themselves in such manner as to keep the opposing 
 
THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY 1$ 
 
 sets of interests at about equal strength. If you 
 expect to make a successful aggressive war, you must 
 have a superiority of forces. Two nations about 
 even in military resources are not likely to fight. 
 The risk of failure is too great. And so with two 
 alliances. But all this time, another current was 
 running strongly among European nations. Each 
 alliance was struggling to build up stronger poten- 
 tial power than the other. This helped when, as 
 happened every four or five years, there rose a 
 visible conflict of interests. The stronger you were 
 in a military way, the stronger would be the situa- 
 tion of your diplomats. Every year, the European 
 "race of armaments" grew more intense. 
 
 Expressed in less abstract terms, this was the 
 general state of Europe during the forty or fifty 
 years which followed the Franco-Prussian war: 
 
 On the Continent, military conscription had be- 
 come universal. If Great Britain did not follow, it 
 was because she, an island kingdom, was checking 
 armies with an unprecedented navy. On the Conti- 
 nent, every young man must serve his two or three 
 years with the colors, learning to be a modern sol- 
 dier. Retired to the Reserve, he must at intervals 
 drop his work and drill again, in order "to keep 
 his sword bright." The financial burden of arming 
 this soldier grew even greater. As I shall presently 
 show, weapons of warfare never until recently im- 
 proved so fast as industrial tools; but they did im- 
 prove almost too rapidly for the finances of the 
 
16 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 nations. The Germans decided that a repeating 
 rifle could be used with advantage in infantry tac- 
 tics; the French must scrap from five to ten million 
 single-shot rifles and replace them by repeaters. 
 When the British proved that a battleship of unpre- 
 cedented size entirely armed with big guns could 
 thrash any small battleship armed with guns of 
 mixed calibres, all existing battleships were headed 
 toward the junk-yard, and the rival nations must 
 build dreadnoughts. When France worked out a field- 
 gun unprecedented for accuracy and rapidity of fire, 
 thousands of German field-guns must go to the melt- 
 ing-pot or to museums, to be replaced by imitations 
 of the French "soixante-quinze." And the expense 
 of these improvements increased almost in arith- 
 metical ratio. A repeating rifle, with its compli- 
 cated mechanism, cost much more than a smooth 
 bore. "First-line" ships for modern navies cost in 
 the seventies one or two million dollars; a crack 
 dreadnought costs now a matter of forty or fifty 
 million dollars. The burden of taxation weighed 
 heavier and ever heavier on the common man and 
 woman of Europe. There were signs just before the 
 Great War that the race of armament was slowing 
 up. Nations seemed to hesitate about adopting 
 obvious but costly improvements. The true cause 
 back of this, doubtless, was that taxation was reach- 
 ing the "point of saturation" — for peace times at 
 least. Agitation against military service began to 
 make itself heard. It took two years from the work- 
 
OBSOLETE ARMAMENT 
 
 The U S. S. Indiana, before and after it became a target for 
 the 14-inch rifles of the superdreadnought Oklahoma 
 
 The Indiana cost $5,800,000 when built. The latest super- 
 dreadnoughts cost at least $40,000,000. 
 
THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY 17 
 
 ing life of every able-bodied young man; and its 
 obvious end was not creation of wealth, but 
 destruction. 
 
 But the nations in general could not let go, even 
 had their statesmen desired to renounce "Financial 
 Imperialism" and its buttress of great standing 
 armies. If for no other reason, because Germany 
 sat in the centre of Europe, unconverted to any 
 theories which involved military disarmament; and 
 England sat behind her sea walls, afraid of any 
 theories which involved naval disarmament. But 
 Germany was setting the pace. She had learned 
 the "lesson" of the Franco-Prussian war — a "nation 
 in arms," an army methodically, scientifically pre- 
 pared from its boots to its plan of campaign, eter- 
 nally ready for that sudden stroke which catches the 
 enemy unprepared. Scientific military preparation- 
 had laid the foundations for the prosperity and 
 greatness of modern Germany. More scientific prepa- 
 ration — more prosperity and greatness ! That Ger- 
 man genius for organization, scarcely suspected be- 
 fore 1870, sprang into full blaze. And the army 
 was organized into every German institution. The 
 state schools educated the children to make them not 
 only good citizens and efficient workers, but also 
 good soldiers. With a skill and thoroughness which 
 was the marvel of its time, Germany wove the army 
 into the fabric of civilian life. Her state railways 
 were laid down not only for commercial needs but 
 also with a view to moving great bodies of troops 
 
18 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 toward any critical point on the frontiers. Her great 
 steel works, making and exporting the tools and 
 machinery of civilian life, could be changed over with 
 a minimum of trouble into factories for munitions 
 of war. She specialized, indeed, on munition making 
 — furnished the rifles and cannon for the little wars 
 of the far countries. 
 
 The "psychological preparation" imposed by the 
 rulers of Germany was just as thorough. A state- 
 controlled pulpit, a state-controlled press, state-con- 
 trolled teachers and university professors, ham- 
 mered or insinuated into the German people exag- 
 gerated, conceited patriotism and the thought of, 
 war — the "Religion of Valor." With the national 
 talent for intellectual speculation, the Germans of 
 the governing class worked out a philosophy which 
 sounds quaint to practical-minded Americans, but 
 upon which men lived and died. The state was a 
 thing with a soul. It was the duty of the subject, 
 his highest end, to advance the glory and interest of 
 the state, no matter if that glory made every 
 subject poorer and less happy. We, of course, look 
 upon the state as a means of getting together and 
 promoting the happiness and security of its mem- 
 bers. If it does not generally have that result, it is 
 nothing. When it comes to promoting the interests 
 of the state — this philosophy held — all ordinary 
 rules of morals are off. Acts like theft, murder, un- 
 chastity, cruelty, calling for severe punishment when 
 
THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY 19 
 
 performed against other citizens of the state, became 
 holy when performed for the state. 
 
 War was the highest manifestation of the state, 
 the supreme act which gave it glory, the opportunity 
 for the subject to prove his devotion. War was good 
 in itself. It was, first of all, natural. All biological 
 life was a struggle. The weak went down, the 
 strong survived; by this process the species evolved 
 and improved. So, the weaker races go down be- 
 fore the stronger, for the improvement of the human 
 breed*. Of course, your own race was the strongest, 
 the most worthy of survival. Races grew soft in 
 peace, strong in war. The talk about doing away 
 with warfare was "immoral, unnatural, degrading." 
 
 Such, briefly, were the ideas upon which Germany 
 was being fed. We all know that, I suppose. Most 
 of us have heard of Bernhardi and his book "Ger- 
 many and the Next War" — the extreme expression 
 of this view. What we do not perhaps appreciate 
 is that such opinions were not peculiar to Germany. 
 In the Great War, in the settlement after the Great 
 War, Europe was divided not only by a horizontal 
 
 *I shall treat later on of other articles of this faith but this 
 one might as well be nailed here and now. Admitting what is 
 popularly called the Darwinian theory of the origin of species 
 through survival of the fittest, evolutionists still doubt whether man 
 did not free himself from the law of evolution at the moment when 
 he fashioned the first tool, built the first fire. From that time, he 
 became not the creature of his environment, but its master. But 
 even if the man-species still lives, grows and improves by the 
 law of evolution, the struggle for existence is, in the natural, ani- 
 mal state, between individual and individual, not between tribe 
 and tribe, horde and horde. This is like many other militarist 
 arguments; it is neither true nor scientific; it only seems so. 
 
20 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 line between Entente Allies and Germanic Allies, but 
 by a vertical line between the aristocratic element 
 and the democratic element. The set of ideas which 
 I have quoted above were distinctly aristocratic in 
 their aims and origins; by an aristocracy in secure 
 control they were disseminated. But the other 
 European aristocracies held exactly the same view — 
 not so logically worked out perhaps, not so frankly 
 expressed, but the same at the bottom. Lord 
 Roberts, the venerable and respected British gen- 
 eral, issued a kind of manifesto at the beginning of 
 the war. Less brutal and feverish in expression, it is 
 in thought the same thing as the mouthings of the 
 German Junkers. "War is necessary for the souls of 
 people," he said in effect; "it is the tonic of races." 
 You heard the same sentiments from the French Gen- 
 eral Staff. The difference was only this: whereas in 
 the Entente countries the democratic idea kept a 
 balance with the aristocratic as in Great Britain and 
 Italy, or maintained the ascendence as in France, 
 the aristocratic element held in Germany the con- 
 trol over government, over most material activities, 
 over most sources of public opinion. Germany, said 
 the aristocrats of the neutral European nations, had 
 made aristocracy scientific, brought it up to date, 
 showed how it could be fastened on to a modern 
 state. That was why these neutral aristocracies 
 were one and all pro-German. 
 
 There were German dissenters, of course. There 
 were in fact many of them, as the Social Democratic 
 
THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY 21 
 
 vote showed in 1913, the Revolution in 191 8. But 
 their dissent was as yet ineffective. Probably the 
 majority of Germans believed in this Religion of 
 Valor which they had learned with their Christian 
 prayers. Certainly the majority believed that the 
 intensive, perpetual preparation for instant war was 
 a necessity to a nation "ringed with enemies." The 
 preparation went on, ever and ever more burden- 
 some and complex. So did the propaganda, the 
 "mental preparation." By 19 14, the Germans pub- 
 lished and read more books on war than all the other 
 nations of the world put together. "The man who 
 builds the ship will want to sail it," say the nautical 
 experts. And the man who forges the sword will 
 want to wield it. By 19 14, the mine was laid and 
 ready. With their "financial imperialism," their 
 "concert of the powers," their race for dominating 
 armament, all the European nations were responsi- 
 ble for that. The assassination of an Austrian 
 prince, a mere police court case, lit the fuse. Acci- 
 dent alone was responsible for that. The fuse might 
 have been trampled out; but the Kaiser and his 
 counsellors held back, held others back. Germany 
 was responsible for that — Germany and an aristo- 
 cratic, militarist system, "prepared to the last 
 buckle." On the day of mobilization, the French 
 conscripts went to their appointed places sober or 
 pale or weeping according to their individual char- 
 acters. The first young British volunteers marched 
 to the recruiting offices with a solemn consecration 
 
22 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 in their faces, as men who go to take a sacrament. 
 The Germans rushed to arms shouting and singing. 
 During the early days of the Belgian invasion a Ger- 
 man Junker officer, who seemed well informed upon 
 events within the enemy lines, spoke to me with 
 tears of pride in his eyes concerning this contrast. 
 "Ah, Germany was beautiful — beautiful!" he said. 
 
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 civi- 
 lized 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 domi- 
 nant 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 em- 
 ployment 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 
 
 23 
 
24 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 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 ac- 
 tion — 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 19 15, 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 19 1 7, and we did enter the war. 
 
 It was provided in the code that civilians should 
 be given warning of a bombardment. But the aero- 
 planes 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 ap- 
 peared 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 keep- 
 ing everything serene on her line of communica- 
 tions 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 
 
SECOND YPRES 25 
 
 by the code that a French Encyclopedia of War is- 
 sued 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 them- 
 selves 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 scien- 
 tific 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 
 
26 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 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 trans- 
 muting 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 in- 
 vention 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 dis- 
 covered the great principles back of modern machin- 
 ery and industrial method, such as Newton in physics, 
 Friar Bacon and Faraday in chemistry, Ampere 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 tele- 
 graph, Edison with his electric light and phono- 
 
SECOND YPRES 27 
 
 graph, 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 re- 
 search 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 dar- 
 ing action, makes against daring thought. In the 
 second place, there was the code. Professional sol- 
 diers 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, 191 5 that agreement and all 
 similar agreements were abrogated. The Germans 
 
28 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 had found a new method, with enormous possibili- 
 ties, 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 mo- 
 ment, 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 inven- 
 tion 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 un- 
 loosed and this one most sinister. Its established 
 past performances, its probable future results, I 
 shall consider elsewhere. 
 
 This release and stimulation of the human imagi- 
 nation 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 armiesi were now 
 mobilized for war. 
 
 The Germans had entered Armageddon with an 
 unprecedented equipment of munitions. The elec- 
 tric-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 muni- 
 
SECOND YPRES 29 
 
 tions-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 mil- 
 lions 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 im- 
 portant 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, ex- 
 plosives 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 
 
30 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 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 En- 
 tente 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 prac- 
 tical 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 in- 
 numerable bureaus vitally necessary to the conduct 
 of modern war, with all its complexities and co- 
 ordinations. Had the railroad connections been 
 destroyed, had the bureaus lost their quarters, their 
 
SECOND YPRES 31 
 
 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 dif- 
 ficult; 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 19 17 and 
 1 91 8, when they prepared to raid Berlin on an un- 
 precedented scale in that campaign of 19 19 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 strik- 
 
32 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 ing 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 sol- 
 dier. "Baby killers" the Londoners called the Zep- 
 pelins. 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 human- 
 ity. Under its spirit, usually under the letter, an 
 army destroyed property only when that destruc- 
 tion 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 pro- 
 visioning 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 de- 
 stroyed. This had no immediate military purpose. 
 In German hands, the mines were useless to the 
 
SECOND YPRES 33 
 
 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 19 18 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 gen- 
 eral 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 hu- 
 manitarian forces through two thousand years of 
 warfare, had collapsed. In most respects, we were 
 back to the ethics of the barbarian hordes. The bar- 
 barians 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 
 19 14-18. We were generally sparing prisoners, 
 
34 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 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 mil- 
 lions of French, British, Belgian, Italian and Rus- 
 sian prisoners. At an ever-increasing pace, she was 
 being starved out. Suppose she had elected to de- 
 fend 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 en- 
 tered warfare — that exact scientific method of re- 
 search which has wrought all our miracles of in- 
 dustry was at the service of the warriors. The cur- 
 rent of scientific work and thought, flowing hitherto 
 toward improvement of mankind, was now dammed; 
 it was flowing backward, toward the destruction of 
 mankind. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE NEW WARFARE 
 
 Now let us take up one by one the new factors in 
 warfare introduced by the Great War of 19 14-18, 
 and see what effects they had on that war, what 
 inevitable or probable effects on "the next war." 
 To make it all easier to follow, let us begin with that 
 factor which we can grasp most readily — the busi- 
 ness of killing. Here, in treating of the past, I shall 
 take testimony of the war itself mostly from my 
 own direct or second-hand observations, extending 
 from the Battle of Mons to the Battle of the Ar- 
 gonne ; and in speculating on the future mostly from 
 the sayings and writings of professional soldiers, 
 many of them — though not all — thorough believers 
 in militarism and "the next war." 
 
 After the Second Battle of Ypres lifted the lid, 
 those men of science, those high technicians, who had 
 put themselves at the service of armies, experi- 
 mented with new methods of killing. Liquid flame 
 — burning men alive — was introduced on the West- 
 ern front. This proved of only limited usefulness. 
 The British introduced the tanks. These were im- 
 portant to the general change in warfare, as I shall 
 
 35 
 
36 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 show later; but they added nothing to the direct 
 process of destroying life. Gas seemed by all odds 
 the most promising of the new weapons. That 
 simple chlorine which the Germans used in 19 15 
 gave place to other gases more complex and more 
 destructive to human body-cells. At first released 
 only in clouds and dependent upon a favorable wind 
 for their, effect, the chemicals which generated these 
 gases were later loaded into shells and projected 
 miles beyond any danger to the army which employed 
 them. 
 
 As gas improved, so did the defence against it. 
 The crude mouth-pads, consisting of a strip of gauze 
 soaked in "anti-chlorine" chemicals, which the 
 women of England rushed to the Front after Second 
 Ypres, were succeeded by more secure and cumber- 
 some masks. The standard mask worn by the 
 Americans in 19 18 was a complex machine. It was 
 cleverly constructed to fit the face air-tight; its tank 
 held antidotes for all known German gases. How- 
 ever, this was an imperfect protection, because men 
 could not or would not wear it all the time. It took 
 the sternest discipline to make troops keep on their 
 masks even in time of danger. Surprise gas-bom- 
 bardments were always catching them unmasked. A 
 slight leak was fatal. In that stage of chemical 
 warfare, the losses from gas-shells in proportion to 
 the quantity used, were at least as great as those 
 from high-explosive shells. 
 
 Yet the mask was a protection; let us therefore 
 
THE NEW WARFARE 37 
 
 study to beat it. In the spring attack of 19 18, the 
 Germans introduced their "mustard gas." Unlike 
 its forerunners, it was poisonous to the skin as well 
 as to the lungs. Breathed, it was deadly; where it 
 touched the skin, it produced terrible burns which 
 resisted all ordinary treatment. These wounds were 
 not fatal unless they covered great areas of the body. 
 In that, mustard gas was unsatisfactory. 
 
 Now in all the experiments following Second 
 Ypres, the chemists had in mind three qualities of the 
 ideal killing gas. First, it should be invisible, thus 
 introducing the element of surprise. The early, 
 crude gases, even in small quantities, betrayed their 
 presence by the tinge they gave the atmosphere. 
 Second, it should be a little heavier than the atmos- 
 phere; it should tend to sink, so as to penetrate 
 dugouts and cellars. Third, it should poison — not 
 merely burn — all exposed areas of the body. Ameri- 
 can ingenuity solved the problem. At the time of 
 the Armistice, we were manufacturing for the cam- 
 paign of 19 19 our Lewisite gas. It was invisible; 
 it was a sinking gas, which would search out the 
 refugees of dugouts and cellars; if breathed, it killed 
 at once — and it killed not only through the lungs. 
 Wherever it settled on the skin, it produced a poison 
 which penetrated the system and brought almost 
 certain death. It was inimical to all cell-life, ani- 
 mal or vegetable. Masks alone were of no use 
 against it. Further, it had fifty-five times the 
 "spread" of any poison gas hitherto used in the war. 
 
38 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 An expert has said that a dozen Lewisite air bombs 
 of the greatest size in use during 191 8 might with 
 a favorable wind have eliminated the population of 
 Berlin. Possibly he exaggerated, but probably not 
 greatly. The Armistice came ; but gas research went 
 on. Now we have more than a hint of a gas beyond 
 Lewisite. It cannot be much more deadly; but in 
 proportion to the amount of chemical which gen- 
 erates it, the spread is far greater. A mere capsule 
 of this gas in a small grenade can generate square 
 rods and even acres of death in the absolute. . . . 
 
 So much at present for gas. It is the new factor, 
 the one which may hold the greatest promise for fu- 
 ture improvement in war. But there has been much 
 improvement in certain methods already known and 
 used, which in future wars may be auxiliary to 
 gas. There was the old, stock, weapon of modern 
 wars — the tube from which hard substances were 
 projected by chemical explosion — in short, the gun. 
 In proportion to initial cost, the power of the gun 
 and of the auxiliary explosion its chemical had in- 
 creased enormously. The smokeless TNT and other 
 high explosives employed in this war were but 
 little more expensive, pound for pound, than the old 
 black powder of past wars; in effect they were in- 
 comparably more destructive. Men in war defended 
 themselves against this increased destructive power 
 by an old method made new; they burrowed deep 
 into the inert earth. But even at that, destruction 
 proceeded faster than the defence against destruc- 
 
THE NEW WARFARE 39 
 
 tion — hence the unprecedented death-list of this war. 
 
 When we came to the vital element of property 
 — the accumulated wealth of the world — we find 
 the disparity between cost and effect much greater. 
 
 Let us reason here by example : the battle of 
 Waterloo, whose glories and horrors Europe sang 
 for a hundred years, resolved itself at one stage into 
 a struggle for Hougoumont Chateau. All through 
 the battle, French and British regiments, supported 
 by artillery, were fighting for that group of buildings. 
 The guide to the Chateau points out to the tourist 
 the existing marks of artillery fire and the restora- 
 tions. A corner knocked off from the chapel, a tiny 
 outhouse battered down, a few holes in the walls no 
 bigger at most than a wash-tub — that is the extent of 
 the damage. Now while it is impossible to make an 
 accurate estimate, it is still quite certain that the 
 damage to Hougoumont Chateau was smaller in 
 money value than the cost of the cannon-balls, shells 
 and gun-powder which caused it. By contrast : dur- 
 ing 19 1 6, the Germans dropped into the town of 
 Nancy some of their 380-millimetre shells — the larg- 
 est and most expensive generally used in the war. 
 The cost of such shells was probably between three 
 and four thousand dollars. I was in Nancy during 
 one such bombardment, when a big school house was 
 hit directly. It seemed literally to have melted. In 
 restoring it after the war, the French had to re- 
 build from the ground. And that school house cost 
 more than two hundred thousand dollars. As a gen- 
 
40 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 eral rule, when a shell of the Great War bit a build- 
 ing, it destroyed much more value in property than 
 its own cost plus that of its projecting charge. The 
 shells which missed are aside from this discussion; 
 for the artillerymen of Napoleon's army missed just 
 as often in proportion. 
 
 Yet Nature always imposes limits on human in- 
 genuity. We arrive at a point beyond which we 
 cannot much further improve any given device. Mili- 
 tary experts generally agree that we have about 
 reached that impasse with guns and their explosive 
 projectiles. The "Big Bertha" which bombarded 
 Paris from a distance of seventy miles was only an 
 apparent exception. It was not a real improvement; 
 it was a "morale gun," useful to the "psychological 
 campaign" of the Germans. It had no accuracy; 
 the gunners "ranged" it on Paris in general, and 
 the shells, according to atmospheric conditions, fell 
 anywhere over an area some four or five miles across. 
 
 No; there will be no great improvements in guns 
 and high-explosive projectiles. Even if we have not 
 reached the limit of invention, other methods of de- 
 stroying life and property hold out much more 
 promise. Among these is the aeroplane. There, 
 we have not nearly reached the barrier set by Na- 
 ture upon Ingenuity. 
 
 A modern weapon works by two distinct processes 
 — the projection, which sends the death-tool far into 
 the region of the enemy and the action — usually 
 some kind of explosion — by which it kills. The 
 
ARTILLERY FIRE IN 1815 
 Hougoumont Chateau. During the Battle of Waterloo, it was 
 bombarded all day by Napoleon's cannon. Result: A small out- 
 building wrecked (ruin in the foreground), a corner at the peak 
 of the chapel (to the left) knocked off, and some small holes, since 
 repaired, in the front wall9 and the roofs. 
 
 ARTILLERY FIRE IN 1915 
 A chateau in Northern France. It was wrecked by a single 
 big-calibre German shell. 
 
THE NEW WARFARE 41 
 
 bombing aeroplane is essentially an instrument of 
 projection. It extends "range" beyond any distance 
 possible to a gun. The army aeroplanes of 19 14 
 were, in 19 16, mentioned by the aviators as "those 
 old-fashioned 'busses'." In 19 18, airmen employed 
 similar scornful language concerning the machines 
 of 19 1 6. However, the range of the 19 14 aero- 
 planes greatly excelled that of any gun; they could 
 venture at least a hundred miles from their bases. 
 By 19 1 8, they were venturing two or three hundred 
 miles; and the Allied armies planned, in the spring 
 of 19 19, to make regular raids on Berlin, some four 
 hundred miles away. 
 
 To adopt again the terminology of artillery; as 
 the aeroplane grew in range, so did it grow in 
 calibre. The bombs dropped on Paris in 19 14 were 
 not much bigger than a grape-fruit; the bombs pre- 
 pared for Berlin in 19 19 were eight feet high and 
 carried half a ton of explosive or gas-generating 
 chemicals. Not only were they greater in them- 
 selves than any gun-shell, but they carried a heav- 
 ier bursting-charge in proportion to their size. As 
 you increase the calibre and range of a gun, you 
 must increase the thickness of the steel casing which 
 forms the shell, and correspondingly reduce the pro- 
 portion of explosives or gas-forming chemical. But 
 an air bomb — which is dropped, not fired — needs 
 only a very thin casing. A big shell is in bulk mostly 
 steel; an air bomb is mostly chemical. It was in 
 shells like these that we would have packed our 
 
42 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 Lewisite gas had we decided to "eliminate all life 
 in Berlin." 
 
 However, air-bombardment was during the Great 
 War essentially inaccurate. A gun, in land opera- 
 tions, is fired from a solid base; the artilleryman 
 can aim at his leisure. A bomb is dropped from a 
 base which is not only in rapid motion but par- 
 takes of the instability of the air; the bombing avi- 
 ator must make an inconceivably rapid snapshot. 
 Still, even at this crude stage, air-fire grew much 
 more accurate. In 19 14 and 191 5, the bombs sel- 
 dom hit their objective, unless that objective were 
 a city in general. By 19 18, they were usually hit- 
 ting on or near their targets. It was still, however, 
 mostly a matter of individual skill, not of accurate 
 machine-work. 
 
 Then, just before the Armistice, an American, 
 binding together many inventions made by civilians 
 for civilian purposes, showed a dazzling way to the 
 warfare of the future. He proved that aeroplanes, 
 flying without pilots, could be steered accurately 
 by wireless. This meant that the aeropiane had 
 become a super-gun. Calibre was increased in- 
 definitely. An aeroplane could now carry explo- 
 sive-charges or gas-charges up to its whole lift- 
 ing capacity of many tons. It was no longer merely 
 a vehicle; it could be virtually a self-propelling shell. 
 And in the matter of accuracy, the uncertain human 
 factor was nearly eliminated, as happens in most 
 highly-improved machines. An expert on this kind 
 
THE INCREASING SIZE OF BOMBS 
 
 (Left) A bomb in 1 914-15. A sample of the largest aerial 
 bomb used at the beginning of the war. 
 
 (Right) A bomb in 1918. This bomb carried an explosive 
 charge of one ton, and was prepared to bomb Berlin in 1919. 
 
THE NEW WARFARE 43 
 
 of marksmanship, hovering in an aeroplane or 
 Zepplin many miles away, with a fleet of protecting 
 battle-planes guarding him to prevent hurried work- 
 manship, could guide these explosive fleets to their 
 objective whether town or fortress. Here, in effect, 
 was a gun with a range as long as the width of Eu- 
 ropean nations, a bursting charge beyond the previ- 
 ous imaginations of gunnery. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 
 
 Now before going further, let us pull together 
 our argument, so far as it has gone. 
 
 Here is a projectile — the bomb-carrying aero- 
 plane — of unprecedented size and almost unlimited 
 range; here is a killing instrument — gas — of a power 
 beyond the dream of a madman; here is a scheme 
 of warfare which inevitably draws those who were 
 hitherto regarded as non-combatants into the cate- 
 gory of fair game. We need but combine these three 
 factors in our imaginations, and we have a prob- 
 ability of "the next war" between civilized and pre- 
 pared nations. It will be, in one phase, a war of 
 aeroplanes loaded with gas shells. And professional 
 military men in all lands are remarking among them- 
 selves that the new warfare may — some say must — 
 strike not only at armies but at the heart of the 
 matter — peoples. 
 
 A Prussian officer, of the old school said to his 
 American captor in 191 8, "France is the sheepfold 
 and Germany is the wolf. The French army is the 
 shepherd's dog. The wolf fights the dog only in 
 order to get at the sheep. It is the sheepfold we 
 
 44 
 
TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 45 
 
 want." Upon such sentiments the Allied world 
 looked with some horror — then. Even the Ger- 
 mans somewhat withheld their hands. I cannot find 
 that gas-bombardment was ever used on the cities 
 behind the lines. Yet the Germans were prepar- 
 ing in 191 8 a step toward that method. Had the 
 war continued, Paris would have been attacked 
 from the air on a new plan. A first wave of aero- 
 planes would have dropped on the city roofs tons 
 of small bombs which released burning phosphorus 
 — that flame cannot be extinguished by water. It 
 would have started a conflagration against which the 
 Fire Department would have been almost powerless, 
 in a hundred quarters of the city. Into the light fur- 
 nished by this general fire, the Germans proposed 
 to send second and third waves of aeroplanes loaded 
 with the heaviest bombs; they could pick their ob- 
 jectives in the vital parts of the city as they could 
 not during an ordinary moonlight raid. From that 
 the gas-bombardment would have been but a step. I 
 have shown what we might have done to Berlin in 
 19 19 with giant bombs carrying Lewisite gas. The 
 Allies, I can testify personally, did not intend to use 
 this method "unless they had to." But the elimi- 
 nation of civilians by the hundreds of thousands, 
 perhaps by the millions, through gas bombardments, 
 was a possibility had the war continued until 1920. 
 In "the next war," this gas-bombardment of cap- 
 itals and great towns is not only a possibility but 
 a strong probability — almost a certainty. Military 
 
46 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 staffs have had time to think, to carry out the changes 
 and discoveries of the Great War to their logical 
 conclusion. They see that even with the known 
 gases, the existing aeroplanes, Paris, Rome or 
 London could in one night be changed from a me- 
 tropolis to a necroplis. If any military man hesi- 
 tates to apply this method — and being human and 
 having a professional dislike of killing civilians, he 
 must hesitate — the thought of what the enemy might 
 do drives him on to consideration of this plan of 
 warfare, and to preparation. There are at this 
 moment at least two elements in the world quite 
 capable of turning this trick had they the means and 
 control. The method is so effective that if you do 
 not use it, some one else will. You must be pre- 
 pared to counter, to reply in kind. 
 
 Here are the words of a few authorities: 
 
 Brigadier General Mitchell of the United States 
 Army, pleading with the House Committee on ap- 
 propriations for more defensive aeroplanes, said 
 that "a few planes could visit New York as the cen- 
 tral point of a territory ioo miles square every eight 
 days and drop enough gas to keep the entire area 
 inundated . . . 200 tons of phosgene gas could be 
 laid every eight days and would be enough to kill 
 every inhabitant." 
 
 Captain Bradner, Chief of Research of the 
 Chemical Warfare Service, said at a Congressional 
 hearing: 
 
 "One plane carrying two tons of the liquid [a 
 
TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 47 
 
 certain gas-generating compound] could cover an 
 area of 100 feet wide and 7 miles long, and could 
 deposit enough material to kill every man in that 
 area by action on his skin. It would be entirely pos- 
 sible for this country to manufacture several thou- 
 sand tons a day, provided the necessary plants had 
 been built. If Germany had had 4,000 tons of this 
 material and 300 or 400 planes equipped in this way 
 for its distribution, the entire first American army 
 would have been annihilated in 10 or 12 hours." 
 
 Brevet Colonel J. F. C. Fuller this year won in 
 England the Gold Medal of the Royal United 
 Service Institution for his essay on the warfare of 
 the future. All through, he avoids this topic of 
 attacks on the civilian population; he is treating, 
 like a true old-time military man, of armies alone. 
 But Fuller says concerning the general possibilities 
 of gas, which he believes to be the weapon of the 
 future: "It is quite conceivable that many gases 
 may be discovered which will penetrate all known 
 gas armor. As there is no reason why one man 
 should not be able to release 100 cylinders simul- 
 taneously, there is no reason why he should not re- 
 lease several million; in fact, these might be released 
 in England today electrically by a one-armed cripple 
 sitting in Kamchatka directly his indicator denoted 
 a favorable wind." 
 
 And Major-General E. D. Swinton, of the Brit- 
 ish army, said in discussing Colonel Fuller's paper: 
 
 "It has been rather our tendency up to the pres- 
 
48 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 ent to look upon warfare from the retail point of 
 view — of killing men by fifties or hundreds or thou- 
 sands. But when you speak of gas . . . you must 
 remember that you are discussing a weapon which 
 must be considered from the wholesale point of view 
 and if you use it — and I do not know of any reason 
 why you should not — you may kill hundreds of 
 thousands of men, or at any rate disable them." 
 
 Here, perhaps, is the place to say that Lewisite 
 and the gas beyond Lewisite are probably no longer 
 the exclusive secret of the United States Govern- 
 ment. We had allies in this war; doubtless they 
 learned the formula. Even if not; once science knows 
 that a formula exists, its rediscovery is only a mat- 
 ter of patient research, not of genius. And gas- 
 investigation is quietly going on abroad. If they 
 have not arrived at the same substances, the chemists 
 of Europe have worked out others just as deadly. 
 The scientific investigation of the killing possibilities 
 in gas is only four years old. 
 
 Colonel Fuller says bluntly in his illuminating 
 essay that the armies which entered the late war 
 were antiquated human machines, that military 
 brains had ossified. Warfare, he says, must be, will 
 be, brought up to the standard of civilian technique. 
 Henceforth, general staffs must not wait for un- 
 stimulated civilians to invent new machines or meth- 
 ods of attack and defence. They must mobilize high 
 technicians and inventors in the "pause between 
 wars" as well as in war, bend all their energies 
 
TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 49 
 
 toward discovering new ways of killing. And vir- 
 tually, that improvement in warfare is already be- 
 gun. In the laboratories of Europe, — just as the 
 farseeing prophesied after Second Ypres — men are 
 studying new ways to destroy life. 
 
 Scientific discovery involves the factors of leisure. 
 To reach great things, a man cannot be hurried. 
 War is all organized hurry. With both sides rac- 
 ing for victory, the savants of Europe had not the 
 leisure to reach out toward the unknown. They 
 worked with poison gas; that was already discov- 
 ered, and merely needed improvement. Now, in the 
 pause since the Armistice, they are venturing into 
 the unknown. Let us take testimony again from 
 the public and official remarks of General Swinton: 
 
 ". . . ray warfare. I imagine from the progress 
 that has been made in the past that in the future 
 we will not have recourse to gas al'one, but will em- 
 ploy every force of nature that we can; and there 
 is a tendency at present for progress in the develop- 
 ment of the different forms of rays that can be turned 
 to lethal purposes. We foave X-rays, we have light 
 rays, we have heat rays. . . . We may not be so 
 very far from the development of some kinds of 
 lethal ray which will shrivel up or paralyze or poison 
 human beings . . . The final form of human strife, 
 as I regard it, is germ warfare. I think it will come 
 to that; and so far as I can see there is no reason 
 why it should not, if you mean to fight. . . . pre- 
 pare now ... we must envisage these new forms of 
 
50 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 warfare, and as far as possible expend energy, time 
 and money in encouraging our inventors and sci- 
 entists to study the waging of war on a wholesale 
 scale instead of . . . thinking so much about meth- 
 ods which will kill a few individuals only at a time." 
 
 In the war just finished, — according to neutral 
 and scientifically dispassionate Danish historians — 
 nearly ten million soldiers died in battle or of 
 wounds; probably two or three million soldiers were 
 permanently disabled. Yet we were killing only by 
 retail, where in "the next war" we shall kill by 
 wholesale. 
 
 The same late war, according to those same Dan- 
 ish statisticians, cost thirty million more human be- 
 ings — mere civilians — "who might be living today." 
 Yet taking Armageddon by and large, the weapons 
 were deliberately turned against civilians with com- 
 parative infrequency. Declining birth rates account 
 for a part of those thirty millions. The rest, for 
 the most part died of the "accidents," of such war- 
 fare as we waged. If we except the Armenian mas- 
 sacres, we find that only a small fraction of the total 
 went to their graves through attacks aimed directly 
 at their lives — as in the atrocities of the Hungarians 
 against the Serbs, the Russians against the East 
 Prussians, the Germans against the Belgians; or in 
 attacks aimed indirectly at their lives — as in the 
 submarine sinkings and air raids. Most of them 
 died just because they were in the way of war — 
 died of malnutrition in the blockaded countries, of 
 
Estimated Loss of Soldier Lives 
 
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 AMERICAN FRANCO - 
 
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 CIVIL WAR PRUSSIAN WAR 
 
 AMERICAN WAR 
 
 WAR 
 
TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 53 
 
 starvation and exposure in the great treks away 
 from invading armies. But now we are to have 
 killing by wholesale instead of retail; and killing, 
 unless I miss my guess, aimed directly at civilian 
 populations. 
 
 So much for civilian lives in "the next war." What 
 about soldier lives, when we come to kill by whole- 
 sale instead of by retail? The answer involves a 
 discussion of military weapons, tactics and strategy 
 in "the next war." 
 
 I have not yet discussed the tank. Britain con- 
 tributed that improvement, as Germany contributed 
 gas. It involved the combination of one device al- 
 most as old as warfare — armor — with two devices 
 borrowed from the arts of peace — the gasolene 
 engine and the caterpillar wheel. It was an instru- 
 ment of the offensive in that it gave men and guns 
 greater mobility; it was defensive in that it pro- 
 tected soldiers and their weapons as they advanced 
 into the enemy's territory. The British employed 
 their tanks, as the Germans their gas, timidly and 
 experimentally in the beginning. The wholesale 
 use of tanks at the Somme in 191 6 would have won 
 the war. The munition makers, in the two years 
 between the Somme and the Armistice, somewhat 
 improved this new weapon. The early types could 
 advance only four or five miles an hour over ordinary 
 rough ground — just the pace of a man at a brisk 
 walk. The improved types could make ten or twelve 
 miles an hour — practically, the speed of cavalry in 
 
54 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 action. The tanks of the Somme carried merely 
 machine-guns. Many of those used in the Battle 
 of Liberation were armed with standard-calibre field- 
 guns. Practically, there is no limit to the possible 
 size of tanks. Munitions designers are preparing to 
 build them bigger and bigger, just as naval designers 
 have built warships bigger and bigger — from two 
 hundred-ton caravels which fought the Armada to 
 the 20,000-ton dreadnought. The "land battleship" 
 will doubtless grow in bulk until expense sets a limit. 
 And now, military experts are considering a new 
 possibility of tanks. If a submarine warship may be 
 rendered water-tight, so may a tank be rendered 
 gas-tight. 
 
 Poison gas, as I have repeated even to weariness, 
 seems to be the killing weapon of the future. How- 
 ever, the explosive shell is by no means out of date. 
 It merely becomes more or less of an auxiliary to 
 gas. Gas cannot batter down intrenchments and 
 fortifications, destroy buildings, puncture masks or 
 air-proof tanks and fortresses. The explosive shell 
 will still blast the way; the gas will for the most 
 part do the actual job of killing. Explosive-project- 
 ing artillery will either be encased in tanks or, when 
 it takes the open, generally mounted on the cater- 
 pillar wheel, which gives it far greater mobility, even 
 over rough country, than the swiftest horse-drawn 
 artillery. Designers of tanks and modern gun-car- 
 riages are of course studying to increase their speed. 
 We may reasonably expect that even the heavy artil- 
 
TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 55 
 
 lery will be able, by "the next war," to go twenty 
 or twenty-five miles an hour. Hitherto, armies have 
 needed roads in order to advance. But the caterpil- 
 lar wheel makes artillery comparatively independent 
 of highways. 
 
 These, then, will probably be the tactics of the 
 next war on land, provided that we make no great 
 basic discovery in the art of killing, but only improve 
 up to their best possibilities the instruments we have 
 and know. The better to imagine the scene, let us 
 repeat the situation of the last war, and imagine a 
 thoroughly-prepared Germany attacking and trying 
 to invade a thoroughly j prepared France. 
 
 The attackers will probably dispense with a dec- 
 laration of hostilities, following the precedent estab- 
 lished by the Japanese in their war against Russia. 
 "Wars will no longer be declared," says the Colonel 
 Fuller so often quoted above, "but like a tropical 
 tornado there will be a darkening of the sky, and 
 then the flood. To dally over the declaration will 
 be considered as foolish as a Fontenoy courtesy — a 
 wave of a plumed hat — 'Gentlemen of France, fire 
 first!'" Germany will start from her frontier an 
 army of tanks, big and little, gas-proof, their guns 
 provided with gas shells to kill, with explosive shells 
 to open the way for killing. They will be backed by 
 the heavy artillery on caterpillar trucks. The French 
 will probably have a defence ready for this form 
 of attack. Across their frontiers will stretch a line 
 of retorts capable of setting up a lethal cloud four 
 
56 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 hundred miles long — "from Switzerland to the sea.'" 
 At the burst of hostilities, the French will loosen this 
 defence; if it works perfectly, they will have leisure 
 to mobilize. The Germans may elect to advance 
 their force of gas-proof tanks through this cloud; 
 they may wait for it to dissipate; they may have 
 means to drive "alleys of immunity" through it, and 
 so permit the passage of their forces. What method 
 they try depends largely on the future of infantry; 
 and that is still a moot point. 
 
 Certain optimistic soldiers have registered the 
 belief that the dense masses of infantry, which have 
 been the backbone of all previous modern wars, will 
 disappear from the new warfare. Tanks, the cavalry 
 of the future, will win and lose battles. It will be 
 impossible for any nation to manufacture enough 
 tanks to contain its whole mobilizable force; there is 
 not so much steel-making capacity in the world. 
 Therefore, we shall come down again to compara- 
 tively small professional armies of experts. 
 
 Most soldiers with whom I have talked do not 
 endorse this view. They think that nothing will 
 ever wholly displace infantry. Artillery was king 
 of battles in the late war; all national resources were 
 bent toward making guns and still more guns, shells 
 and still more shells. Yet the masses of infantry re- 
 mained; the General Staffs were shrieking not only 
 for more guns, but for more men. You wage war 
 to occupy positions and territory; nothing can finally 
 seize and hold positions and territory but great 
 
TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 57 
 
 bodies of armed men. These soldiers to whom I 
 have talked believe that this old, basic rule of war- 
 fare will not change in the next war, any more than 
 it changed in the late war. The infantryman may, 
 however, abandon his rifle, and carry instead the 
 shorter-ranged but far more deadly gas-grenade — 
 though even the passing of the rifle, in its multiplied 
 form of the machine-gun, seems doubtful. 
 
 There is some question whether these masses of 
 infantry will come directly to grips with each other. 
 But that does not mean that they will not be killed 
 "by wholesale, not by retail." They may be held 
 back until the machines of war have stamped out 
 resistance, and then brought up merely to hold the 
 territory; but they will be constantly under attack 
 from the air. 
 
 For even before the tank-army starts toward that 
 belt of lethal mist which marks the frontier, the air- 
 fleets will be on their way. I have shown how un- 
 manned aeroplanes may be directed by wireless, and 
 so become projectiles of unimagined range and 
 calibre. Such fleets, and other aircraft armed with 
 machine-guns, high explosive bombs, gas-bombs, will 
 search out the masses of waiting infantry. The de- 
 fenders will fight these fleets with their own aero- 
 planes; while the tanks are waging war on solid 
 land, the aircraft will be engaged in a wholesale 
 version of the retail air-holocausts which we knew 
 in the late war. Whenever squadrons of these at- 
 tacking aeroplanes get through to their objective, 
 
58 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 whether bodies of soldiers or towns, they may make 
 even the slaughter of Verdun seem by comparison 
 like bow-and-arrow warfare. 
 
 Such a war, probably, would not last long. That 
 is not a certainty, however. One can imagine a 
 drawn first attack; a situation where after incredible 
 slaughter and destruction on both sides, the bel- 
 ligerents would settle down to a war of gas on the 
 frontiers and of aeroplane raids on the towns, while 
 each side strove to manufacture enough munitions 
 for a decisive victory. However, even a war of a 
 few weeks or months would be enough. It would 
 probably roll up at least as large a score of killed 
 and maimed soldiers, of property destruction, as the 
 late war of unblessed memory. It would probably 
 kill many more civilians. 
 
 What of the defence — less importantly against 
 air-bombs loaded with tons of explosive, more im- 
 portantly against poison gas? Now, you must de- 
 fend not only armies but citizens of towns, not only 
 soldiers but the weakest girl baby. Usually, when a 
 new weapon is introduced into warfare, some time 
 passes before men invent an adequate defence. The 
 knife, carried in the hand or mounted on a shaft, 
 dates from prehistoric times; we were well ad- 
 vanced into historic times before body armor became 
 good enough to turn the edge of a knife. The best 
 defence against gun-fire — burrowing in the earth — 
 though long known, was not fully worked out and 
 universally applied until the late war. The mask 
 

 4-> O <U G, 
 
 w 
 
 9 o 
 
 -c £> 
 
TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 59 
 
 formed a pretty good defence against the first poison 
 gases; its difficulties and imperfections I have men- 
 tioned before. But the German mustard gas, the 
 American Lewisite gas, attacks the skin, the one 
 producing bad burns, the other fatally poisoning the 
 system. To protect the individual against such at- 
 tack there are envisaged at present two methods. 
 The skin of the whole body may be greased with an 
 ointment containing an antidote for the poison. The 
 British were preparing, when the Armistice came, 
 to adopt this defence for their armies against Ger- 
 man mustard gas. But this was recognized as an 
 imperfect defence. After your greased troops have 
 for a few hours wallowed in the trenches or en- 
 dured a rainstorm on the march, the ointment is 
 rubbed off or washed off in patches. Better, if it 
 could be done, would be a protective, chemically- 
 treated suit with gloves and headpiece, perfectly 
 fitting to the mask — in other words, a mask extended 
 to cover the whole body. This may be tried, for 
 armies. After all, they must have uniforms. Finally 
 comes the method of sending the advanced forces to 
 action enclosed in gas-proof tanks. 
 
 But when you consider these methods of defence 
 for civilian populations, you encounter special diffi- 
 culties. In the next European war, shall we have all 
 the inhabitants of Paris living in a coating of pro- 
 tective ointment, the mask ready to hand? Every 
 line officer knows how hard it was to make disci- 
 plined soldiers keep on their masks in time of danger. 
 
60 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 To make civilians keep themselves greased, to make 
 them assume their masks promptly and intelligently 
 in the event of a general killing raid over London 
 or Paris, we should have to render universal mili- 
 tary training really universal, and begin it not in 
 the schools but in the cradle. The same objection — 
 with expense in addition — would apply to the pro- 
 vision of "anti-gas" suits for all civilians in the great 
 cities. 
 
 The gas-proof tank, a military improvement now 
 virtually accomplished, points the way to the per- 
 fect defence. Colonel Fuller imagines "centres of 
 defence" — fortresses, or something like them, ren- 
 dered gas-tight, wherein you may keep your reserve 
 forces, to which your tanks will return for repairs 
 and replenishment of supplies. We can reconstruct 
 our great cities so as to furnish for our civilians "cen- 
 tres of defence." That was done imperfectly in the 
 late war, when in constantly-raided towns such as 
 Venice the authorities banked the deep cellars with 
 sandbags, thus turning them into dug-outs like those 
 used by the troops. However, cellars will never form 
 a defence against sinking, lethal, cell-killing gas like 
 Lewisite and its probable successors. The shelters 
 must be large enough to accommodate the people of 
 a whole city; they must be deep enough in the ground 
 to resist the enormous explosive power of the great, 
 new bombs; they must be gas-proofed, either by 
 rendering them air-tight and furnishing oxygen to 
 keep the inmates alive, or by providing ventilators 
 
TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 61 
 
 which make the outer air pass through an antidote. 
 They must be as easily accessible as a subway — even 
 more accessible. This virtually involves rebuilding 
 modern cities, if the inhabitants expect to survive 
 a war. It is absurd, of course. 
 
 Unless some General Staff in Europe is hugging a 
 deep and sinister secret, we have not yet found the 
 killing ray. That lies beyond the present frontiers 
 of science; its discovery involves pioneer work. If 
 it comes, it may change and intensify warfare in 
 many ways which we cannot at present conceive. 
 But warfare by disease-bearing bacilli is already pre- 
 paring in the laboratories. Here, for example, is 
 one method which I have heard suggested and which, 
 I learn from men of science, seems quite possible: 
 Find some rather rare disease, preferably one which 
 flourishes in a far corner of the world, so that peo- 
 ple of your own region have no natural immunity 
 against it, just as the American Indians have no 
 immunity against measles. Experiment until you 
 find a good, practical serum which may be manu- 
 factured on a wholesale scale. Cultivate the bacilli 
 until they are strengthened to that malignant stage 
 with which the recent influenza epidemic made us 
 familiar — that can be done with some species of 
 bacilli. Innoculate your own army; if necessary your 
 own civilian population. Then by night-flying aero- 
 planes, by spies, by infected insects, vermin or water, 
 by any other means which ingenuity may suggest, 
 scatter the germs among the enemy forces. In a 
 
62 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 few days, you will 'have a sick enemy, easily con- 
 quered. It takes time to discover a specific or a 
 serum for a new disease. The mischief would be 
 done long before the laboratories of the enemy could 
 find a defence for this especially romantic and valor- 
 ous form of battle. As germ warfare is at present 
 conceived, it would be directed against armies alone. 
 But any one who followed the late war knows what 
 human chains bind the troops in the trenches to the 
 general population. With almost every one min- 
 istering in some capacity to the army, soldiers and 
 civilians are inextricably mixed. Armies simply could 
 not be quarantined. Among the possibilities of the 
 next war is a general, blighting epidemic, like the 
 Black Plagues of the Middle Ages — a sudden, mys- 
 terious, undiscriminating rush of death from which 
 a man can save himself only by fleeing his fellow 
 man. 
 
 Then — there are easily cultivated, easily spread, 
 diseases of plants. What about a rust which will 
 ruin your enemy's grain crop and starve him out? 
 That method of warfare has been suggested and is 
 now being investigated. 
 
 So much for the direct effect of the next land war 
 upon human life, and especially upon civilian life. 
 Before I leave the subject, however, I must go into 
 naval operations, of which I have hitherto omitted 
 mention. The submarine, in the hands of the Ger- 
 
TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 63 
 
 mans, proved its distinct value. Many naval men 
 say that the Germans made the same mistake with 
 their submarines that they did with their gases, 
 and that the British did with their tanks. They did 
 not realize the power in their hands. Had they be- 
 gun the war with as many submarines as they manned 
 in 19 17, had they stuck from first to last to their 
 policy of sinking without warning, they might have 
 starved out England and won. The submarine grew 
 mightily in speed, in cruising radius, in offensive 
 power. The German U-boats of 19 14 were as 
 slow as a tub freighter; they could make only short 
 dashes from their bases; they depended almost en- 
 tirely on their torpedoes. Those of 191 8 were 
 almost as fast on the surface as an old-fashioned 
 battleship, they proved that they could cross and re- 
 cross the Atlantic on their own supplies of fuel, they 
 mounted long-range five- and six-inch guns. That 
 much greater improvement is possible, all naval 
 designers agree. Certain naval architects hold that 
 virtually all warships of the future will be capable 
 of diving and traveling concealed under water — 
 the submersible dreadnought. I shall not go into 
 the present controversy between the experts who 
 would stick to the surface dreadnought and those 
 who believe in scrapping fleets and designing only 
 submersibles. I, the landman, will not presume to 
 judge between nautical experts. But I notice that 
 those who adhere to the theory of surface fleets 
 
64 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 qualify their statements with — "for the present." 
 They seem to believe that it will come to submarines 
 or submersibles in the end. 
 
 We all know from the expression of the late war 
 how perfectly the ocean protects submarines. Ger- 
 mans have told me since the Armistice that at no 
 time did the Imperial Navy have more than fifty 
 of these craft cruising at once; usually there were 
 only about twenty-five. Against them, the Allies 
 were using at least half of their naval resources; 
 thousands of craft, from giant dreadnoughts to swift 
 little chasers, mobilized to fight imperfectly less than 
 fifty of these deep-sea assassins! You can attack 
 them with other naval vessels only from the surface. 
 That "submarine cannot fight submarine" is a naval 
 axiom. In the next war, a few hundred submersibles 
 of the new, swift, powerful type could almost un- 
 doubtedly accomplish what Germany failed to ac- 
 complish in 19 1 7 and 19 18 — establish an effective 
 food-blockade of England or of any other region 
 dependent upon overseas importation for its bread 
 and meat. 
 
 And whoever starts such a campaign will un- 
 questionably heed the plea of "national necessity" 
 as did Germany in 1917-1918: abrogate the old sea- 
 law which compelled attackers to warn ships about 
 to be sunk, and strike out of the darkness and the sea- 
 depths. For the lid is off. 
 
 So we may add to the possible death-cost in the 
 
TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 65 
 
 next war not only malnutrition but actual starvation 
 "by wholesale." 
 
 Remember those Danish statistics. Ten million 
 soldiers in arms died in the last war; and thirty 
 million others "who might be living today" are not 
 living. War on civilians was not yet a generally 
 acknowledged fact; it was only a practical result. 
 In the next war, it will be an acknowledged fact. The 
 civilian population, I repeat once for all, will be an 
 objective of military necessity — fair game. 
 
 It would not be, could not be, if we fought only 
 with the old, primitive weapons, saw with our own 
 eyes the effect of our blows. During the invasion 
 of Belgium, a friend of mine stood beside a German 
 private playing with a little Belgian girl. "Our dis- 
 cipline is perfect," said the officer. "You see that 
 soldier. He likes that child. He has toward her 
 humane sentiments. Yet if I ordered him to run 
 his bayonet through her, he would obey without an 
 instant's hesitation." Now personally, I doubt that. 
 The man in question might have obeyed; I do not 
 believe that the average German soldier would have 
 obeyed — slightly brutalized though he was by "the 
 system." There were German atrocities in Belgium 
 — I can testify personally to that — but they did not 
 happen in that way. Contrary to a rumor widely 
 circulated and believed by many Americans as gos- 
 pel, the Germans did not cut off children's hands. 
 
66 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 But the new warfare takes advantage of the limits 
 of human imagination. If you bayonet a child, you 
 see the spurt of blood, the curling up of the little 
 body, the look in the eyes. . . . But if you loose 
 a bomb on a town, you see only that you have made 
 a fair hit. Time and again I have dined with French 
 boy-aviators, British boy-aviators, American boy- 
 aviators, home from raids. They were gallant, gen- 
 erous, kindly youths. And they were thinking and 
 talking not of the effects of their bombs but only 
 of "the hit." If now and then a spurt of vision shot 
 into their minds, they closed their imagination — as 
 one must do in war. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 WAR AND THE RACE 
 
 So much for civilians. Now let us turn our imagi- 
 nations again upon those ten million soldiers dead in 
 the last war, and the unestimated millions in the next. 
 Let us forget the obvious; let me forget it who have 
 seen war — the gray-green streak down Douaumont 
 Ravine where lay tens of thousands of German dead, 
 the rib-bones sticking everywhere out of Vimy Ridge, 
 the wave of moaning from the three thousand 
 wounded and dying in the Casino Hospital at 
 Boulogne. Let us remember that all men must die, 
 and consider the thing cold-bloodedly from the 
 standpoint of the particular race which draws the 
 sword, and of the whole human species. We shall 
 find, then, that the chief loss of the late war was 
 not the hundreds of billions of dollars of property 
 value destroyed, nor yet the thirty million civilians 
 "who might be living today," but the ten million sol- 
 diers. 
 
 From the pacifist literature which preceded our 
 entrance into the European War, three books stand 
 out in memory. Jean Bloch, a Pole, maintained that 
 war could not be; the horrors of modern warfare 
 
 67 
 
68 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 were so great that men would not long face them. 
 Events discredited Bloch; we found unexpected res- 
 ervoirs of valor in the human spirit. Every week, 
 along the great line, bodies of men performed acts 
 of sacrifice which made Thermopylae, the Alamo and 
 the Charge of the Light Brigade seem poor and 
 spiritless. Normal Angell, writing from the eco- 
 nomic viewpoint, predicted not that war could not 
 be, but that it would not pay; the victor would lose 
 as well as the vanquished. Events so far have tended 
 to vindicate Norman Angell's view; perhaps the 
 next ten years may vindicate him entirely. The third 
 work, less known than the others, came out of 
 Armageddon unshaken. It is Dr. David Starr Jor- 
 dan's "War and the Breed." 
 
 Jordan is an evolutionist, and looks at all society 
 from the viewpoint of the so-called Darwinian the- 
 ory. The reader may belong to a sect or a scientific 
 creed which rejects evolution. But he need not be a 
 Darwinian to accept Jordan's argument. He need 
 only believe — I assume every one does — that the 
 characteristics of ancestors are transmitted to their 
 offspring, that strong men and women breed strong 
 descendants, that weak men and women breed weak 
 descendants. And Jordan maintained that a gen- 
 eral war, fought by conscript armies under modern 
 conditions, would set back the quality of races for 
 centuries — that it would be a gigantic accomplish- 
 ment in reverse breeding. 
 
 This is how it works : if you are a grower of live- 
 
WAR AND THE RACE 69 
 
 stock, trying to produce the champion horse or cow, 
 you select from your colts or calves the finest speci- 
 mens, and breed them; the others you slaughter or 
 sterilize. The average cow new-caught by the bar- 
 barians from the wild herds of the European steppes 
 probably gave only a gallon or so of milk a day. We 
 have cows which give their dozen gallons of milk a 
 day; and they have been evolved from the wild 
 steppe-cow by nothing else than this long process of 
 selective breeding. Now if it were an object to do 
 so, breeders could take their herds of big, strong, 
 twelve-gallon Holsteins and breed them back to the 
 scrubby little one-gallon-cow. They need simply to 
 reverse the process — make it impossible for the fine 
 specimens to breed, and produce their calves, gen- 
 eration after generation, from the scrubs. 
 
 Modern war — conscription plus increased killing 
 power — does exactly this with the males of the hu- 
 man species. You introduce universal service. Every 
 young man, usually at the age of twenty, is drafted 
 into the standing army for a service of two or three 
 years. Gathered in the barracks, these conscripts 
 are examined. Those not fit for military service, 
 on mental and physical tests, are thrown out — in 
 other words, the deformed, the half-witted or under- 
 brained, the narrow-chested, the abnormally weak- 
 muscled, the tuberculous — the culls of the breed. 
 These culls are free to go their way, to marry if 
 they wish, to become fathers. The rest are generally 
 forbidden to marry until they have performed their 
 
70 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 term of "first line" military service. Scientifically 
 these men are selected as the flower of the nation. 
 The term of first-line service completed, the young 
 man at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three goes 
 into the first reserve. He must take part annually 
 in certain manoeuvers; otherwise he is free to work 
 and to marry. At the age of twenty-six, twenty- 
 eight or thereabouts, he is passed on to the second 
 reserve. At about thirty-five, he becomes a "terri- 
 torial" and remains in that classification until he is 
 about forty-five, when his military duty is supposed 
 to be done. 
 
 "Fighting age is athletic age," say British sol- 
 diers. I do not have to tell Americans, a sporting 
 people, that the best days of the average athlete, 
 especially in sports like boxing or football which 
 require intense effort and physical courage, come in 
 the early twenties. Those first-line troops are the 
 best troops. 
 
 Moreover, they are under arms when war breaks; 
 they do not have to be gathered together, redrilled 
 and redisciplined. So they go first into battle; lead 
 all the early attacks; form generally the advanced 
 forces all through. The second line, almost equally 
 valuable, almost as much used, consists of men in 
 the first reserve; and so on, until we get down to 
 the territorials, the men between their late thirties 
 and their middle forties. Theoretically, these "old" 
 men are not supposed to get into action at all ex- 
 cept when the necessity grows desperate. They 
 
WAR AND THE RACE 71 
 
 guard roads and bridges, dig reserve trenches, garri- 
 son captured territory, perform the hundred and 
 one varieties of labor which an army requires behind 
 its line. 
 
 When all the statistics of the war are compiled 
 and classified, their graphic chart will look like a 
 pyramid. They will show that the losses bore by 
 far the heaviest on the ages between twenty and 
 twenty-five ; they shaded off until in the ages between 
 forty and forty-nine they became almost negligible. * 
 
 Here is reverse breeding on a wholesale, intensive 
 scale. The young, unmarried men go first to be 
 killed; are most numerously killed through the whole 
 war. They are the select stock of their generation ; 
 and practically, not one has fathered a child. Their 
 blood is wholly lost to the race. Next come the 
 men in their middle twenties. Some of them have 
 married since they left the first line, and some have 
 not. It is doubtful if they average more than one 
 child apiece when their turn comes to die. So it 
 goes on, class by class; smaller losses and more chil- 
 dren, until we come to the Territorials of forty-five. 
 In that category, the losses of life are proportion- 
 ately very small, and if we study vital statistics, we 
 find that men of this age have had about all the 
 children they are going to have. But all this time 
 
 * Forty-five years was the usual limit of military service; 
 though for a few months during 1918, the British stretched con- 
 scription to fifty. But many French and German Territorials who 
 entered the war aped forty-five, were kept in the army until the 
 end; and were therefore forty-nine in the year of the armistice. 
 
72 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 the culls of whatever age, the men exempted because 
 they are below standard, are living out their lives 
 and fathering children. 
 
 In our own draft, we proceeded on the European 
 plan, calling to arms the men between twenty-one and 
 thirty, and generally exempting the married. That 
 age was set largely to get the men of best fighting 
 age — "athletic age." But we were moved by an- 
 other consideration, which showed itself in the ex- 
 emption of married men. We wished to minimize 
 human grief and human hardship. If an unmarried 
 boy of twenty is killed there are only his immediate 
 blood-family to mourn him. A married man of 
 thirty-five has in addition a wife and children. 
 Moreover, if he goes to the war in the ranks, he must 
 leave his wife and children virtually to shift for 
 themselves. Great Britain recognized the same 
 principles when, in her advance to universal con- 
 scription, she took the young before the old, the 
 unmarried before the married. 
 
 Humane and beautiful as well as expedient, all 
 this; yet from the racial point of view, unscientific 
 even to immorality. Better, far better, would it be 
 to begin at the other end of the scale, mobilizing for 
 first-line troops the men between seventy and sixty, 
 for the second-line those between sixty and fifty, 
 for Territorials those between fifty and forty-five. 
 With these old men the race, as such, has little con- 
 cern. They have mostly fathered their children, 
 done their duty to the strain. 
 
WAR AND THE RACE 73 
 
 Nature does not care in the least what becomes of 
 the plant after it has produced its seed and the new 
 crop is growing. If, allowing war, we were con- 
 ducting it scientifically for the best interests of the 
 race, the slogan of conscription would be not "single 
 men first" but "grandfathers first." Of course, this 
 is ridiculous. But it seems to me that whenever we 
 carry out any aspect of modern war to its logical 
 conclusion, we arrive at the ridiculous. 
 
 The older wars of modern times were not con- 
 ducted by conscription, as we know it now. The 
 rank and file, as far as we can read the records, con- 
 sisted very largely of the dregs of the population 
 who had been forced into the army by press gangs. 
 There was a sprinkling, however, of young, vigorous 
 youths who went to war for the adventure; there 
 were organized bodies of soldiers of fortune who 
 hired out as mercenaries, and who must needs be 
 sound physically. Occasionally, too, we find a body 
 of sturdy peasantry like the English yeomen 
 who followed the lords of the land to war. There 
 was, however, no selective conscription, no careful 
 medical examination to reject the culls of the blood 
 and send the best to slaughter, usually no rule of 
 "single men first." Even at that, the breeding-stock 
 killed in the old wars was probably superior to the 
 average level of the race and species. Jordan be- 
 lieves that he can trace a kind of rhythm in the his- 
 tory of "dominant nations." The war-like race, 
 continuously engaged in battle, reaches a point where 
 
74 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 it begins to go decadent, to find its force sapped. 
 Spain, lord of the world up to the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, holding her power by means of the famous 
 Spanish infantry, "the wall which repaired its own 
 breaches," suddenly faded away until by the nine- 
 teenth century she was the football of Europe. But 
 the off-hand recruiting systems of those old days 
 could not possibly hit the breed as hard as our mod- 
 ern method of scientific conscription. Just as techni- 
 cally-improved war has worked toward greater and 
 greater property-destruction, so has it worked to- 
 ward greater and greater race-destruction.* 
 
 The thirty million civilians deprived of life by 
 Armageddon probably struck about the average 
 level of the breed. Those who died of starvation 
 or exhaustion in the great treks before the ad- 
 vancing hordes of the late war were below that 
 average. These flights were primitive struggles for 
 existence, wherein the weakest died first. Without 
 quite the same certainty, we may say that those who 
 died of malnutrition and the epidemics directly en- 
 gendered by war were somewhat below average. 
 That — to be perfectly cold-blooded — was a gain 
 to the race. But the unborn — for the most part 
 they never came into this world because their po- 
 
 * Jordan's militaristic opponents asked once for facts to support 
 his theory. This caused Dr. Vernon Kellogg to investigate the 
 old French records. He found that in the generation following 
 the Napoleonic wars, the standard of height and weight for French 
 recruits had greatly to be lowered by the military authorities. 
 More significantly, he found the percentage of men rejected for 
 physical unfitness greatly increased. 
 
WAR AND THE RACE 75 
 
 tential fathers were away in the trenches or dead. 
 Those fathers were the flower of Europe, physi- 
 cally and mentally; meantime, the weaklings, re- 
 jected by the recruiting offices, remained at home, 
 breeding their vitiated blood into the strain. That 
 was a loss to the race. Probably these items just 
 about balance one another, and we get in the civilian 
 losses an average of the mental and physical 
 strength of the European breed. 
 
 In the ten million soldiers lies the dead loss. Take 
 France, who suffered most heavily of all. She had 
 nearly a million and three-quarters men killed in 
 action, died of wounds and "missing in action." But 
 that does not tell the whole story. Of her young 
 soldiers between nineteen and thirty-one years of 
 age, about sixty per cent died in the war. While 
 statistics are not yet compiled on this special point, 
 it is doubtful if this glorious young company left 
 nearly so much as an average of one child apiece. 
 In the absolute, Germany lost more heavily, in the 
 relative less heavily; she counts two million killed 
 or missing in action or dead of wounds. And if we 
 should hand over the human race to a breeder, to 
 improve by the same methods he uses to improve a 
 breed of horses, these are precisely the million and 
 a half or two millions whom he would have chosen 
 from the men of France and Germany for his pur- 
 pose. 
 
 This reduction of the strength in the European 
 breed through the selective conscription system, plus 
 
76 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 war by machinery, is one of those situations which 
 one can prophesy in advance with mathematical ac- 
 curacy. The vital statistics of the young and adoles- 
 cent in the years between 191 8 and 1938, compared 
 with those between 1894 and 19 14, are going to 
 prove the point in cold figures. 
 
 So far, wars in general have struck at the strength 
 of the male strain alone. However much the women 
 have been massacred, there has been no scientific 
 selection in the choice of victims. The strength of 
 woman has been left to war-depleted nations to re- 
 new their blood. But in the next war we shall 
 probably do away with that archaic check on the 
 purpose of the great god Mars. Women, as I have 
 already shown, have proved their value for indirect 
 military purposes, and so put themselves within the 
 circle of destruction. Already, the general staffs of 
 Europe are saying that the recruiting of women in 
 the late war was irregular, hit-and-miss, wasteful. 
 In a struggle between national resources as well as 
 national armies, it would be far more efficient and 
 economical to mobilize them all and select the war- 
 workers by scientific methods, according to national 
 convenience and necessity. All of which is true and 
 logical. And if women are put under conscription 
 for munitions work, for ambulance and truck driv- 
 ing, for the thousand and one varieties of light labor 
 which they can perform in the rear areas of an army 
 zone, we must proceed by the same methods which 
 we use in selective conscription of the male ele- 
 
WAR AND THE RACE 77 
 
 ment. We shall, first of all, spare the mothers, the 
 women who have already given their strain to the 
 breed. They are needed in their homes for the 
 vital business of rearing children. We shall take 
 the young unmarried women, and choose from them 
 by scientific test the strongest and most brilliant, re- 
 jecting the weakest and most stupid. That process 
 was begun in the late war. The best managed mu- 
 nitions works gave no woman a job until medical and 
 psychological tests proved that she had the body and 
 brains for the work. Just as with the men, we shall 
 send the culls back to civilian life, free to pour their 
 inferior blood into the veins of the new generation. 
 In the late war, a few thousands of these superior 
 women, chosen from among the volunteers for muni- 
 tions workers and for transport drivers in the army 
 zone, died through air raids and long-distance artil- 
 lery fire. These losses were not great enough to 
 have much effect on the breed. But they pointed the 
 way we are going. In the next war, with its over- 
 whelming air raids, its gases blotting out life over 
 square miles, its bacilli, possibly its rays, munitions 
 works and the services of the rear will be special 
 objects of attack. There, as at the front, we shall 
 kill by wholesale not by retail, and we shall kill our 
 selected female breeding stock. So to the anti-social 
 effects of the next war we must add one never ac- 
 complished before in human history: the sapping of 
 the feminine strength in the human race, as war — 
 even before that great reversal of selective breed- 
 
78 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 ing which was Armageddon — seems usually to have 
 sapped the masculine strength. 
 
 The extreme militarist declares that the highest 
 civic duty of man is the advancement of the power 
 and glory of his race or nation; nothing else really 
 counts. He is confounded out of his own mouth. In 
 the long story of races, what doth it profit a nation 
 if during two or three generations she rules a world- 
 circling empire as Spain did in the seventeenth 
 century, and then sinks back exhausted and impotent 
 as Spain did in the nineteenth? Does that make 
 for the power and glory of the race? Yet biologic 
 law seems to ordain that the sharp sword of the war- 
 like nation cuts both ways; and when we intensify 
 nature with modern science, the matter gets beyond 
 seeming. In the idea that by war he advances the 
 power and the ultimate glory of his race, the mili- 
 tarist is again mistaking appearances for reality. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE COST IN MONEY 
 
 So far, we have discussed mostly the direct effects 
 of war — the last and the next — on human life. The 
 loss of that accumulated wealth of the world which 
 is property touches human life indirectly in a thou- 
 sand ways, and is therefore of more than secondary 
 importance. And here, we run into bewildering 
 perplexities. What in the arbitrary terms of money 
 the late war cost the European peoples, we already 
 know. We know also approximately what it cost in 
 out-and-out destruction of houses, fields, factories, 
 mines and railroads by bombardment and conflagra- 
 tion. But the shrewdest economist cannot guess the 
 final cost. It is not enough to compile the national 
 debt, so great as to lie beyond the imagination of 
 the average man. Those debts cannot all be paid; 
 in some manner or other, many of them will be re- 
 pudiated. The true economic loss, which cannot be 
 repudiated, lies in the disturbance of that delicate 
 machine of manufacture and trade by which modern 
 industrial nations lived and worked before the great 
 war. We see that loss every day in the absurd con- 
 ditions of the third year after the Armistice. There 
 
 79 
 
80 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 are three factors to industrial production — labor, 
 machinery and raw materials. In Germany are near- 
 ly three million cotton operatives, as expert as any 
 in the world. Standing ready to their hands is a full 
 equipment of the most modern machinery. Half of 
 the cotton operatives of Germany are living in idle- 
 ness and semi-starvation for lack of raw material. 
 We raise the raw material in the South of the 
 United States — and our southern farmers are in 
 financial difficulties this winter because they have no 
 market for their cotton! 
 
 It was agreed in the Versailles treaty that Ger- 
 many should furnish to France the equivalent of the 
 coal-production destroyed when the Lille and Valen- 
 ciennes mines were flooded. Germany has nearly 
 fulfilled at least that clause of the treaty. At this 
 moment (January, 192 1) German coal in enormous 
 quantities lies piled up on sidings of France, unused. 
 France has the expert operatives; except in the dev- 
 astated North, she has her intact machinery; she 
 has a great job of building to do, and that involves 
 steel, which is made with coal. But she cannot use 
 that German coal just now, because a combination 
 of adverse exchange, undermined credits and shaken 
 confidence keeps her working men from their ma- 
 chines. There is in Poland and Austria that same 
 combination of strong men and good machines, 
 ready to work for their daily bread. But the men 
 are starving because they have no work by which 
 to earn food; and at the same time our farmers and 
 
THE COST IN MONEY 81 
 
 those of the Argentine are complaining that they 
 have slack markets for their food-products. 
 
 What shrewd observers expect of the next few 
 years in Europe may be seen in the present policy of 
 the British Labor Party. Rightly or wrongly, the 
 party leaders believe that they can take over the 
 power in England. But they say frankly that they 
 do not intend to do it now, because the next four or 
 five years will bring such economic consequences of 
 the late war as to swamp and discredit the faction 
 in power. They prefer to let the "old crowd" take 
 the onus. Possibly, the heaviest costs of the late 
 war are still to come. 
 
 Nor can we reckon the economic losses of Arma- 
 geddon without counting in the past — the thirty or 
 forty years of intensive preparation which preceded 
 the explosion of 19 14. During that period, when 
 chancellories kept the peace by the old-fashioned 
 system of checks and balances, Europe was tradi- 
 tionally an armed camp. Economically, it was in a 
 state of perpetual warfare. National wealth grew 
 in this period, but national expenditure on armies 
 and navies grew faster. In France, which for va- 
 rious reasons we may study most easily, the military 
 and naval budget increased from fifteen to twenty 
 per cent during each decade; and the indirect appro- 
 priations for the army, as for example in the item of 
 strategic railways, even faster. Directly and indi- 
 rectly, she was by 1905, ten years before the great 
 war, spending between two hundred and ten and two 
 
82 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 hundred and twenty-five million dollars annually on 
 her army and navy. At the same time, she was 
 paying about a hundred and fifty millions annually 
 in interest on the debts of old wars — she was still 
 financing the campaigns of the two Napoleons. Such 
 figures mean nothing to the average mind; but here 
 is a basis of comparison. France is strongly central- 
 ized. Most of her popular education is financed not 
 by the city or county as with us, but by the national 
 government. And in the years when it was paying 
 more than two hundred millions for the next war, 
 a hundred and fifty millions for old wars, the na- 
 tional government spent on education about forty-six 
 millions. 
 
 Now this was almost dead economic loss. In the 
 ordinary processes of industry, part of the receipts 
 at least are going to increase the world's wealth. 
 Take for example the ultimate destiny of a dollar 
 paid into the cotton manufacturing business. Most 
 of it buys someone bread and meat and shelter and 
 clothing. But just so many cents or mills of that 
 dollar buy factories, machinery, swifter transporta- 
 tion — something which will make more wealth and 
 still more wealth. It is like a crop of which the 
 greater part is eaten, the lesser part kept for seed. 
 The money spent on armies and navies in no wise in- 
 creases the world's real wealth, even when the shells 
 merely lie and disintegrate in the magazines, the 
 guns grow old-fashioned in the barracks. And when 
 
THE COST IN MONEY 83 
 
 they are used, of course they are actively destroying 
 wealth. 
 
 The war came; and it was possible under the urge 
 of national necessity to increase taxation. All did, 
 some more, some less. England crowded on the 
 taxes until the man of an average middle-class in- 
 come was paying before the end some forty per cent 
 of his income. Germany and France paid less 
 heavily at the time. Each was calculating on vic- 
 tory, and on making the loser pay. France won; 
 and already she realizes that she cannot begin to 
 reimburse herself, even though she milks from Ger- 
 many her last mark. And Germany the loser — 
 expression fails in the face of her predicament. 
 
 But tax as they might, the nations had at once to 
 begin drawing on their future, asking for unprece- 
 dented loans both from their own people and from 
 foreigners. Debts piled up beyond imagination. 
 
 Let me set down a few figures. They will not 
 mean much to the reader, I suppose, any more than 
 they mean much to the writer; they are too over- 
 whelmingly big. In actual money, paid out over the 
 counter, virtually all taken from the world's accu- 
 mulated wealth, the war cost one hundred and 
 eighty-six billion dollars. If you add the indirect 
 cost such as destruction of property, loss of produc- 
 tion and the capitalized value of the human lives, 
 the sum reaches three hundred and thirty-seven 
 billion dollars. The national debts of Great Britain 
 
84 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 rose from three and a half billions to thirty-nine 
 billions; of France from six and a third billions to 
 forty-six billions; of the United States from one 
 billion to nearly twenty-five billions. 
 
 By certain comparisons, we may arrive at an un- 
 derstanding of these figures. Again I will take 
 France as the best example at hand. Her total 
 national wealth — farms, mines, factories, buildings, 
 railroads, canals, everything she owns — was esti- 
 mated in 1920 at ninety-two and a half billion dol- 
 lars. Her debt, as I have said, is forty-six billion 
 dollars — almost exactly half her total wealth. That 
 wealth was her heritage. When the first Gaul, long 
 before Julius Caesar came, cleared land on the bor- 
 ders of the Seine, he was creating national wealth 
 for the France of 1920. It had been accumulating 
 for more than twenty centuries. Now we will say 
 that you own a factory worth, at current market 
 rates, something like one hundred thousand dollars. 
 There comes a period of unprecedented hard times, 
 in the midst of which you have a fire which — since 
 you carry no insurance — destroys the value of a part 
 of your plant. You find that your business is worth 
 ninety-two thousand and five hundred dollars; and 
 that you have been forced to put upon it a mortgage 
 of forty-six thousand dollars. Then you face an- 
 other period of hard times, with money tight, mar- 
 kets poor, raw materials hard to get. That, in terms 
 of business, is the situation of France. Great 
 Britain is only a little less affected. Her national 
 
National Debts of 
 United States, Great Britain 6) France 
 in 1913 and in 1Q2Q 
 
 1913 
 
 19 20 
 
 I 
 
 1913 
 
 1920 
 
 1 
 
 I 
 
 1913 
 
 1920 
 
 UNITED STATES 
 
 GREAT BRITAIN 
 
 FRANCE 
 
THE COST IN MONEY 87 
 
 wealth is one hundred and twenty billions; her debt 
 is nearly forty billions. So it goes, in greater or less 
 degree, with Germany, Italy, the Austrian states, 
 the Balkan states. This apart from the actual 
 physical destruction of property. 
 
 There again we run into incomprehensible figures. 
 I have spoken already of the growing disproportion 
 between the cost of the cannon and its charge on 
 the one hand and the destruction which it can accom- 
 plish on the other. Of that, Northern France 
 stands as the living proof. France lost the most 
 heavily in property, as she did in life. Proportion- 
 ately to her population and wealth, Belgium's loss 
 is only a little less; among the greater nations, Italy 
 stands next. Physical destruction of property was 
 very unevenly distributed. But it all comes out of 
 the wealth of the world; and so interlocked are the 
 activities of modern nations that you cannot destroy 
 any considerable body of wealth in one region with- 
 out causing disturbances in others. 
 
 Let us abandon abstract figures and make this 
 the basis of comparison: In 1906, the city of San 
 Francisco was partially destroyed by earthquake and 
 fire. A year or so later, we had a brief financial 
 depression; there were lesser depressions in England 
 and Germany, where insurance companies had been 
 hard hit. And many economists said that it was all 
 due to the loss of wealth and the disturbance of con- 
 ditions caused by the San Francisco disaster. 
 
 In Northern France, about as many buildings 
 
88 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 were destroyed — omitting those merely damaged — 
 as there are in Greater New York; and New York 
 has twelve or thirteen times the population of San 
 Francisco at the time of the disaster. The region 
 of San Francisco lost no canals, railroads, or im- 
 proved highways. She was not a manufacturing 
 city; and such factories as she had mostly escaped. 
 But France did lose factories, canals, railways, high- 
 ways in her most thickly populated country — a belt 
 four hundred miles long, from five miles wide in 
 Alsace to fifty miles wide north and west of Noyon. 
 In the region merely invaded, about Lille, she lost 
 enormous values in machines turned into scrap-iron, 
 and eventually into shells, by the conquerers. The 
 disaster of 1906 destroyed no agricultural land. 
 France lost to agriculture, for at least a generation, 
 from four to five hundred thousand acres — land 
 with its top-soil blown to the winds, or ground into 
 the clay subsoil. Roughly, I estimate that the de- 
 struction of visible, physical property in Northern 
 France — to say nothing of Belgium, Italy, Serbia, 
 Greece and East Prussia — was equivalent to twenty 
 or twenty-five San Francisco disasters. Leaving out 
 the direct property loss of other nations, the orgy 
 of spending during four and a quarter years, the 
 incredible national debts and their interest, this belt 
 of destruction in France alone would almost account 
 for the present disturbances of conditions in the 
 whole world. 
 
 The war-bill of nations in peace times consists of 
 
Cosb of World Wax 
 
 compared with 
 
 Cosb of All Wars 
 
 from 1793 (be£iimin£ of Napoleonic Wars) 
 
 to 1910 
 
THE COST IN MONEY 91 
 
 interest on the national debt, caused by old wars, 
 plus the direct cost of supporting armament. Still 
 using France as an example; if she spends as much 
 on her army and navy in the period between 1920 
 and 1930 even as she did in the period between 1900 
 and 1 9 10, her war-bill will be multiplied by about 
 three and a half. She may get a certain amount of 
 German indemnity. That, probably, will not be 
 enough to restore her North and to finance her pen- 
 sions; it will not go toward lightening the taxes 
 which pay the war-bill. France, like the other Eu- 
 ropean nations, was taxed in 19 14 to the point of 
 absurdity; now, she must eventually multiply the 
 taxes by three or four. Even this calculation does 
 not involve a sinking-fund to pay off the debt. Fifty 
 years from now, possibly a hundred years, France 
 will still be paying the bill of 19 14-18. And this is 
 true not only of France, but of all the other nations 
 who fought through the great war. In hardship, 
 toil, reduced standard of living, the next two gener- 
 ations will pay — or else — this is still possible — 
 European civilization will tumble into the gulf of 
 anarchy. H. G. Wells said to the writer, a month 
 after the war began, "All our lives we shall be 
 talking of the good, old days of 19 13." That war- 
 prophecy is being fulfilled. 
 
 Let us now bring the subject home. We, of all, 
 lost the least in property as in men. We had, in- 
 deed, profited greatly in the two years and a half 
 of our neutrality. We held, by the end of that 
 
92 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 period, almost half of the gold in the world. Of 
 course, we poured all that prosperity and much more 
 into the last two years of the world war. We multi- 
 plied our national debt by twenty-four. We are 
 beginning for the first time to know what taxation 
 really means. We grumble at the heavy income tax; 
 yet if we are to meet our obligations, it must con- 
 tinue at something like its present scale for the life- 
 time of this generation. Fifty years from now, we 
 may still be paying. We experienced during the two 
 years following November, 191 8, an era of hectic 
 prosperity — followed by a collapse, in which we are 
 learning that war-gold is fool's gold. All things 
 considered, we came as near as anyone to winning 
 Armageddon. But everyone loses a modern war, 
 the victors along with the vanquished; economically, 
 we too lost. 
 
 Before we entered the great war, we were called 
 a pacifist people and as such were the scorn of 
 European militarists. Indeed, war had troubled us 
 less than any other great people. Since our federa- 
 tion, we had fought only one first-class war, that 
 between the states in 1861-65. The war of 1812, 
 the Mexican War, the Spanish War were, socially 
 and economically speaking, comparable only to the 
 small colonial expeditions of Great Britain and 
 France. Beginning with the eighties and nineties of 
 the past century, we had built up a comparatively 
 strong navy; by 19 14, it ranked third or perhaps 
 fourth among those of the great powers. However, 
 
Cosb of the World War 
 during its last year 
 
 The money the World M&r cost for a single Hour 
 during the last year would, huild ten high schools 
 costing one million dollars each. 
 
 The money it cost for a single doxy would build in 
 each oF the 48 states two hospitals costing $500,000 
 each; two $ 1,000,000 high schools in each state; 
 300 recreation centers with gymnasiums arid swim- 
 ming pools costing' *30Q00O each; and there would 
 be left *6,000,000 to promote industrial education. 
 
 $ 240,OO0,00O was the total cost per day for all 
 countries. It includes only direct costs, not" 
 the destruction of civil property. 
 
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THE COST IN MONEY 95 
 
 our standing army was to European militarists a 
 joke. At one period between the Spanish War and 
 the Great War we had only twenty-five thousand 
 regulars under arms, whereas in several European 
 countries of smaller population than ours the stand- 
 ing army consisted of more than three quarters of a 
 million soldiers; and every able-bodied man had 
 been trained and equipped. 
 
 Yet in the year 1920, with the war over and done, 
 with our great army demobilized and our fleets back 
 to the business of manoeuvres and visiting, we were 
 spending the greater part of our national revenues 
 on wars, old and new. In 1920, the proportion was 
 ninety-three per cent. 
 
 What could our government do with this money? 
 What could it not do! 
 
 A little before the Great War, I was talking to 
 an expert, nationally famous, on good roads. He 
 spoke of the highways so vitally important in our 
 great and wide-spreading country and of the stag- 
 gering costs of road improvement. "We could of 
 course pave every country road in the United 
 States," he said, "and the economies it would intro- 
 duce into transportation would make it a paying 
 proposition in the end. But the initial cost and the 
 upkeep — you can't possibly raise enough money. 
 It would take, I estimate, seventy-five per cent of 
 our Federal revenues." There you are. This "im- 
 possible" but paying proposition would take seventy- 
 five per cent of our revenues; war in 1920 took 
 
96 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 ninety-three per cent. We could make all the com- 
 mon roads of the United States like the famous 
 main highways of France or Belgium, for the cost 
 of our wars, past, present and future — and still 
 have money in the bank. 
 
 In our government are a number of bureaus con- 
 cerned with increasing production, fighting disease, 
 supervising, as it seems that only governments can 
 supervise, the agencies which conserve life and in- 
 crease production. Our entomologists have reduced 
 such plant scourges as the San Jose scale and grape 
 phylloxera almost to impotence, so saving us many 
 millions yearly; they are on their way to conquer the 
 boll weevil in cotton. Our ichthyologists have plans, 
 now only partly realizable from lack of money, 
 greatly to increase our fish supply. Our boards of 
 health, under national supervision, have virtually 
 killed yellow fever and smallpox, greatly reduced 
 malaria and typhoid fever, are beginning to attack 
 those "social diseases" which are next to war the 
 great scourge of the human race. 
 
 Go into any of these Washington bureaus and 
 some specialist, some practical dreamer struggling 
 along at a salary running from fifteen hundred dol- 
 lars to three thousand dollars a year, will tell you 
 what "his people" could do to multiply production 
 and improve human conditions, to lengthen and 
 fortify life, to increase the beauty or usefulness of 
 the world "if we only had the money." But they 
 haven't the money. For these activities, the Gov- 
 
Actual expenditures of the United 
 States for the fiscal year 1Q19 "20 
 (Loans to European Governments 
 not included) 
 
 *<s 
 
 / 
 
 sf 
 
 J> 
 
 4? 
 
 / 
 
 & 
 
 .<? 
 
 / 
 
 J 
 
 f 
 
 D D 
 
 226 MILLIONS 
 
 85 MILLION6 
 
 
 50 MILLIONS 
 
 PENSIONS, INTEREST 
 AND OTHER EXPEN- 
 SES ARISING FROM 
 FfcST WARS 
 
 2,890 MILLIONS 
 
 ARMY & NAVY 
 (PREPARATIONS 
 FOR FUTURE 
 WARS) 
 
 1,348 MILLIONS 
 
THE COST IN MONEY 99 
 
 ernment grants less than one per cent of the Na- 
 tional revenue. In 1920, the existing army and 
 navy absorbed thirty-eight per cent; and the whole 
 war bill, as I have said, was ninety-three per cent. 
 
 What could we, "the pacifist nation of the world," 
 not do with that ninety-three per cent? You re- 
 member the Roosevelt Dam in the Far West — 
 hundreds of thousands of acres transformed from 
 desert to fertile farms with a little government 
 money. Millions more are awaiting the same trans- 
 formation. Here is a chance to increase our true 
 national greatness; but the government, of course, 
 cannot undertake that because it cannot spare the 
 money. Our forests are shrinking; we feel the ef- 
 fect in the rising price of lumber, the shortage of 
 wood-pulp. We need to reforest on a large scale; 
 that work, European countries have learned, can be 
 most cheaply, easily and intelligently done by a cen- 
 tral government. We are reforesting, if at all, 
 on a microscopic scale ; we are barely keeping down 
 fires. All because we cannot afford the money from 
 our national revenues. Wars, past, present and 
 future, cost too much. 
 
 Then comes the period when our long prepara- 
 tion for new wars becomes— 'action. Then arrive* 
 an orgy of spending without return — and a greater 
 war-bill for the future. 
 
 But we are treating of "the next war." By that 
 we mean of course not a little "settling" war such 
 as the present British and French campaigns in the 
 
ioo THE NEXT WAR 
 
 Near East, the skirmishes along the Russian border, 
 nor yet the minor colonial expeditions. We mean a 
 struggle between industrial nations, thoroughly pre- 
 pared. In terms of economics, will that struggle 
 be less costly than the last, or more? 
 
Cost of Wars bo the United Stages 
 
 REVOLU- 
 TIONARY 
 WAR 
 
 WAR 
 
 OF 
 
 1812 
 
 MEXICAN 
 WAR 
 
 I 
 
 SPANISH- 
 AMERICAN 
 WAR 
 
 WORLD 
 WAR 
 
 "National debt at end of w\r. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 ECONOMICS AND THE NEXT WAR 
 
 In all the major wars of the past three centur- 
 ies, one traces a certain progression from armed 
 contest between individual nations to armed contest 
 between alliances. Sometimes indeed, two hostile 
 nations are "isolated," as when the rest of Europe 
 managed to keep out of the war between France 
 and Germany in 1870. But the tendency remains. 
 And there is a reasonable cause for this — the in- 
 creasing speed and facility of transportation, the 
 increasing interdependence of nations. In 19 14, 
 according to an authority on transportation, any 
 man was in terms of time eleven times nearer to any 
 given point in the world than in 18 14. There you 
 have one explanation for the world-wide spread of 
 the Great War. 
 
 If things in this "new world" are to go in the old 
 manner, the chancellories of Europe will seek to 
 keep an impermanent peace, will give themselves a 
 "breathing-space between wars" by forming al- 
 liances. With the major nations struggling even for 
 greater advantage, with the smaller nations in grow- 
 ing fear of their own defencelessness, the alliances 
 
 103 
 
104 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 will naturally tend to grow greater and greater. "In 
 the next war there will be no neutrals," some say; 
 almost certainly, in the next European war. Spain, 
 Switzerland, Holland, Scandinavia, Greece, will be 
 afraid, remembering Belgium, to remain out of al- 
 liances. Indeed, Belgium has pointed the way. A 
 recognized neutral up to the Great War, she has re- 
 nounced the principle of neutrality, and allied her- 
 self with France. Probably the great European 
 powers will draw in the Orient actively — Japan's 
 part, China's part in the late war were merely 
 passive. For the world-machine tends to become 
 ever more complex, and nations ever more interde- 
 pendent. The swift airship is here; if a man is 
 eleven times nearer any given point than he was in 
 1 8 14, soon he will be twenty times nearer. 
 
 Can we stay out of the next general war? We 
 could not stay out of the last. We are passing from 
 a stage where we depended for foreign trade mainly 
 on raw materials, whose sale does not need to be 
 "pushed," to the industrial stage. Increasingly, our 
 exports will consist of manufactured goods. For- 
 eign markets will be to us not dumping-grounds for 
 short seasons of overproduction but real factors in 
 our national prosperity. And foreign markets for 
 manufactured goods need cultivation, even forcing. 
 With our unrivalled wealth, we shall store up sur- 
 plus capital, which will find more attractive returns 
 in undeveloped regions at home. That is happening 
 already. Since the war, hundreds of millions, per- 
 
ECONOMICS AND THE NEXT WAR 105 
 
 haps billions, of American dollars have been invested 
 in new, promising commercial fields abroad. So, 
 if we play the game as we find it, we shall enter the 
 circle of "financial imperialism" and find ourselves 
 in some way much more closely affected by the next 
 war than we were by the last, and correspondingly 
 under a greater urge to enter it as belligerents. 
 
 The spread of the next war may conceivably be 
 limited by diplomacy as was the war of 1870; even 
 so, the next one after that probably cannot be lim- 
 ited; and all our "proud isolation," our tradition 
 against entangling alliances, will not keep us out. 
 
 The Great War, considered in terms of econom- 
 ics, began not in 19 14 but in 1871, when the French 
 and Germans signed the Treaty of Frankfort — 
 when the European nations began to increase their 
 standing armaments. In the same sense, the next 
 war began when, after the Armistice of 191 8, the 
 great powers kept up their armies, started experi- 
 ments with more efficient but more expensive ways 
 of killing. It will be war by machinery from now 
 on, not war by hand. And machine-work requires 
 a much greater initial outlay of capital than hand- 
 work. Naval warfare has always been war by ma- 
 chinery. It will not be necessary for me to prove 
 by figures the greater cost of a navy, in proportion 
 to the number of men employed, than of an army. 
 That is going to be changed. The tank and the 
 aeroplane have come — air-machines and land-ma- 
 chines, equivalent to the destroyer, the submarine 
 
106 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 and the battleship, which are sea-machines. Of 
 course, a big tank can whip a little tank just as a big 
 man can whip a little man. There is no more prac- 
 tical limit to the size of tanks than to that of naval 
 vessels. The same rule probably holds true of 
 aeroplanes. Consequently, as soon as the European 
 powers begin to wriggle out of their present fix, 
 we may expect them, with what margin they have, 
 to begin a race of armament more expensive in pro- 
 portion to their resources than the race of 1871- 
 19 14. The tank of today may be compared to a 
 caravel. We shall have the destroyer-tank; then 
 some nation will come along with the cruiser-tank, 
 and the others must follow or underwrite defeat. 
 And so on, up to the dreadnought tank — a gas- 
 proofed fortress on caterpillar wheels, perhaps as 
 complex and expensive as the sea-dreadnought. And 
 if one alliance increases her fleet of land-dread- 
 noughts from a hundred to a hundred and twenty, 
 from a thousand to twelve hundred, the rival al- 
 liance must let out another notch and follow. You 
 may, if you wish, translate all this into terms of 
 aircraft, and the economic result will be the same. 
 In the last war, nations learned that they must 
 bend every resource, and especially every industrial 
 resource, to victory. But some of them learned it 
 rather late. Even Germany was for a long time 
 manufacturing and exporting to the adjacent neutral 
 countries such commodities as machinery. Later, in 
 the fierce stress of the war, Germany turned all her 
 
ECONOMICS AND THE NEXT WAR 107 
 
 machine-factories into munitions factories. Eng- 
 land went on for nearly two years with a business- 
 as-usual policy before she learned she had better 
 make munitions her sole business. There can be no 
 such dalliance in the next war. "It will not be de- 
 clared; it will burst." Upon the promptness and 
 speed of the initial thrust may depend victory — then 
 or later. Not only must the magazines be always 
 full, the tanks and aeroplanes always in complete 
 commission, the gas retorts always charged; but you 
 must have your factories always ready for an imme- 
 diate change. You must be prepared at the shortest 
 notice to turn your dye-and-chemical works into 
 poison gas works, your sewing-machines and type- 
 writer factories into factories for shell-parts — and 
 so on through a thousand industries. This requires 
 an industrial readjustment obviously expensive, still 
 more subtly expensive. 
 
 When the war comes, you start war-work not 
 desultorily as in 19 14, but full speed from the mark 
 — not at a five per cent scale gradually increasing, 
 as in 1 9 14, but as near as possible to a one hundred 
 per cent scale. Your whole population has been 
 mobilized, perhaps partly trained, in advance. Your 
 young woman knows her place in the factory and 
 reports at once to the foreman, just as your young 
 man knows his place in the ranks and reports at 
 once to the sergeant. The process of turning the 
 whole national energy from wealth to waste begins 
 at once, full power. The next war may be shorter 
 
108 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 than the last; it can scarcely, at this intensive pace, 
 be less costly. 
 
 Concerning the actual destruction of physical 
 property, one may speak with less certainty. It all 
 depends upon the larger strategy. I have suggested 
 the elimination of all life in such a city as Paris — or 
 New York — as a possible result. That could be ac- 
 complished by such a gas as Lewisite. Now Lewisite 
 whirled in a lethal cloud over Paris would not 
 greatly injure property. When at length the poison 
 was dissipated, the Opera would still be there and 
 the Louvre and the great railway terminals and 
 the factories — a little corroded perhaps, but still 
 usable after you cleaned out the corpses and tidied 
 up a bit. So perhaps a better way of breaking up 
 the "resistance of the rear" would be to exterminate 
 not the human Paris but the physical Paris. That 
 could be done in one gigantic conflagration started 
 by inextinguishable chemicals dropped from a few 
 aircraft. The method is practicable even now, in 
 the infancy of chemical warfare; and the military 
 chemists of Europe are experimenting further along 
 these lines. Such a campaign would of course not 
 be confined to Paris; although Paris as a centre for 
 the brains of war, as the most vital knot in the rail- 
 way web and as a great factory city, is eminently 
 important. It would be aimed also at Lyons and 
 St. Etienne, great manufacturing cities, at Mar- 
 seilles, Cherbourg, Havre and Bordeaux, the great 
 
ECONOMICS AND THE NEXT WAR 109 
 
 ports, at a hundred little cities which do their part 
 in making munitions. 
 
 In such a campaign of conflagrations, the loss of 
 life would necessarily be less than in a killing attack 
 with gas. But possibly not much. Imagine Paris 
 suddenly become a superheated furnace in a hundred 
 spots; imagine a swift rush of flame through every 
 quarter; imagine the population struggling, piling 
 up, shriveling with the heat; imagine the survivors 
 ranging the open fields in the condition of starving 
 animals. 
 
 Such a campaign could in a few weeks nearly 
 equal the property-losses of the Great War; espe- 
 cially if the defenders, whom I have imagined to be 
 the French, retaliated on the attackers — say the 
 Germans — and burned Berlin and the Rhine towns. 
 
 So far as we can see now, gas will probably be 
 the standard weapon of the next war. High ex- 
 plosive will still be used on an extensive scale; but 
 it will be auxiliary to the new killing instrument. 
 It is unlikely that there will be a locked trench-line 
 and a steady bombardment lasting for years. Con- 
 sequently — ignoring the possibility of great confla- 
 grations — we may hope for a smaller loss in the 
 item of buildings. On the other hand, the bill will 
 probably show a larger item for destroyed fields — 
 agricultural wealth. The struggle just finished was 
 the first in history where any considerable area of 
 land was ruined for cultivation. Now it is a prop- 
 
no THE NEXT WAR 
 
 erty of the new poison gas that it sterilizes — not 
 only kills cells but prevents the growth of cells. 
 Concerning one successor of Lewisite gas an expert 
 has said: "You burst a container carrying a minute 
 quantity of the substance which makes the gas, at 
 the foot of a tree. You do not see the fumes rise; 
 it is invisible. But within a few seconds you see 
 the leaves begin to shrivel. While we are not quite 
 certain, we estimate that land on which this gas has 
 fallen will grow nothing for about seven years." In 
 the next war, — unless we discover meantime some 
 still more effective method of killing — clouds of such 
 gas will sweep over hundreds of square miles, not 
 only eliminating all unprotected life, animal and 
 vegetable, but sterilizing the soil — "for about 
 seven years." What were farms, orchards and gar- 
 dens will become in a breath deserts. The power 
 of its soil to produce food is the first, vital item in 
 the wealth of nations. It would seem that this in- 
 creased loss of productive land should at least 
 balance the decreased loss in buildings. 
 
 So modern warfare, in its economic aspect, fol- 
 lows the same rule as in its human aspect. Now 
 that we have renounced all pretty rules of chivalry, 
 now that we have put brains into the business, its 
 destructiveness ever increases. There, perhaps, lies 
 the best chance of eliminating it from the world. 
 The desire to create and to conserve wealth is deeply 
 implanted in the bosom of man. Why not? The 
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 desire for food and the desire to reproduce. This 
 desire springs from the primary desire for food. 
 Someone has pointed out that the temperance re- 
 formers of the United States made little progress 
 so long as they harped on the sin of drunkenness. 
 Only when they touched the question on its economic 
 side, showed that alcohol was a great enemy to 
 wealth and production, did the prohibition move- 
 ment go with a rush. In some fifty years of agita- 
 tion, pacifists have dwelt on the cruelties and horrors 
 of war — always the moral and sentimental side. 
 Now we are learning that it does not pay. The vic- 
 tor may, relatively, lose less than the vanquished. 
 But victor and vanquished both lose in the absolute. 
 That may be the clinching argument. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 "the tonic of nations" 
 
 The moral value in peace, war and military 
 preparation can of course be treated with less cer- 
 tainty than the racial and economic values. You 
 cannot measure virtue with a yardstick nor establish 
 by statistics the comparative virtue and vice, honor 
 and dishonor, truth and falsehood in any man or 
 any race. Here one must rely on general observa- 
 tion. 
 
 Up to the great struggle in 19 14-18, the mili- 
 tarist and the aggressive patriot had somewhat the 
 better of the moral argument. Obviously the man 
 who offered up his life for the welfare or glory or 
 whatsoever of his clan, tribe or nation is doing a 
 fine, high thing. "Greater love than this hath no 
 man." But modern war is changing even that. Of 
 the ten million killed in battle, the forty million 
 under arms, comparatively few made the supreme 
 sacrifice voluntarily. They were conscripts. They 
 had to go and take the chance of being killed — or 
 die with certainty against a wall. Most of these 
 men had received their one, two or three years of 
 military training. It had involved mental training, 
 
 113 
 
"THE TONIC OF NATIONS" 113 
 
 designed to lash them up, when the moment of ac- 
 tion came, to a love of war and a desire for victory. 
 That, and the new experience, seemed to keep them 
 in a state of blithe morale for the first few months. 
 There is a curious, exalted state of mind about the 
 early days of a war. All of us who dodged about 
 the rear, immune from its hardships, nearly immune 
 from its dangers, felt that mood. Never again 
 shall I be so poignantly moved by the beauty of 
 paintings, of old cathedrals, of women, of blossom- 
 ing fields, as during those early days of the war. It 
 was as though I were constantly and pleasantly a 
 little drunk. Now the men at the front — wallow- 
 ing in filth and misery, hardening themselves against 
 instant death — felt nevertheless something of the 
 same mood. Then it passed, as intoxication will. 
 Thereafter, they "carried on" because they must. 
 They had been taught it was their duty; most of 
 them believed that; but deep down lay a rebellion 
 against the whole principle of the, thing. Boards 
 of morale and of propaganda invented the phrase 
 "the war to end war." The men of the trenches 
 clutched at that. "It must never happen again" — 
 you hear the phrase to weariness from the British 
 ranks, the French ranks, the Belgian ranks, the 
 Italian ranks. They did not consider themselves as 
 men making an act of sacrifice but rather as men 
 caught in a wheel from which there was no present 
 escape. Germany went to war in a state of exalta- 
 tion, lashed up through forty years of military prepa- 
 
114 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 ration. But the German ranks must have felt the 
 same; else there would have been no German revo- 
 lution. Read Philip Gibbs's "Now It Can Be Told" 
 and Henri Barbousse's "Under Fire" — tolerant ob- 
 servers of high intelligence and of wide experience 
 these two — and learn how little exaltation of self- 
 sacrifice there was in Armageddon. 
 
 Much propaganda was spilled during the war to 
 show how, in the same manner, Armageddon prof- 
 ited the higher morals of the civilian population. 
 We heard of the "flapper" who became a heroine; 
 of the frivolous matron who put off her silks and 
 chiffons, put on denim and went to work "in muni- 
 tions"; of the selfish rich man who gave up servants 
 and automobiles and shooting lodges to help finance 
 the war. This was indeed a moral gain — a tem- 
 porary one at least. It is good for the souls of the 
 overfed that they fast; it is good for the souls of 
 the idle that they go to work; it is good for the souls 
 of the selfish that they feel the thrill of a generous, 
 common emotion. But how large was this special 
 moral gain? Only as large as the upper class. 
 Every country has its submerged tenth and corre- 
 spondingly its exalted tenth. The other eight-tenths 
 do not sacrifice comfort or nourishment or leisure — 
 at least not voluntarily. They have no margins of 
 the kind to sacrifice. When the accidents of war 
 drove a family ahead of an invading army to perish 
 of hunger or hardship in the fields, when a whole 
 population lived on reduced rations because of a 
 
'THE TONIC OF NATIONS" nj 
 
 blockade — that was not a voluntary sacrifice. To 
 take seriously the argument that such a war as we 
 have just endured is good because people "know the 
 nobility of self-sacrifice" is to imply that the upper 
 class is the only class which counts. 
 
 Unquestionably, there came with the war a move- 
 ment back to whatever religion the peoples of 
 Armageddon have. But I could never feel, observ- 
 ing Europe during the war, that this was the highest 
 and healthiest form of religion. With their sons in 
 peril of death, their homes in peril of destruction, 
 their nations in peril of extinction, people turned 
 toward whatever God they had — to ask for some- 
 thing. Nor — again I speak from observation — did 
 this special form of religion seem to survive the war. 
 
 And there was a strong back-current which cen- 
 sorships, both official and implied, prevented us 
 from describing while the war was on. Whole 
 classes of the European population threw off the 
 ordinary moral restraints imposed by peace. The 
 performances of a certain large and wealthy group 
 were notorious; and once I spoke frankly on this 
 matter to a woman of the class in question. "Oh, 
 it's eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die," 
 she said. "Our people are doing the things they've 
 always wanted to do. Their inhibitions are off. 
 They feel that nothing matters any more." 
 
 At best, whatever moral force was loosed by the 
 Great War seems to me an impermanent thing. It 
 did not survive the Armistice. It became no part of 
 
n6 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 the moral heritage of mankind. Lord Roberts de- 
 scribed war as "the tonic of races." He confused 
 substance with shadow, I think. It is a stimulant, not 
 a tonic. Most of us know the difference. Iron is 
 a tonic; alcohol a stimulant. Iron strengthens the 
 system; alcohol seems to give temporary strength. 
 Iron is a permanent gain; the reaction makes alco- 
 hol a permanent loss. It is related that the Oriental 
 alchemist who first discovered alcohol thought he 
 had the elixir of life — and drank himself to death. 
 The militarist mind, still primitive in its workings, 
 still believing that things are so because they seem 
 to be so, makes the same mistake. Regarded in the 
 most favorable light, the state of war is a stimulant, 
 not a tonic. 
 
 At the beginning of the late war, we heard from 
 German, French, British and American militarists 
 that nations grew soft through peace. China 
 they set up as the awful example — notwithstanding 
 the fact that war is the only practical activity for 
 which China of the past two hundred years has 
 shown any aptitude. Her Tai-Ping rebellion spilled 
 more blood than any other military struggle of the 
 nineteenth century. But do nations grow soft 
 through peace? The late war seemed to prove quite 
 the contrary. 
 
 During the forty-four years between 1870-19 14, 
 the Western nations of the European continent, 
 while armed for war, had preserved peace by the 
 concert of the powers. There were small colonial 
 
"THE TONIC OF NATIONS" 117 
 
 expeditions, it is true; but those involved compara- 
 tively few men, only a little strain on the national 
 resources. Britain's expedition against the Boers 
 was only a second-rate war. Europe never knew a 
 period of peace so long and so profound. When the 
 Germans marched on France, not one in ten thou- 
 sand French or German soldiers had ever expe- 
 rienced the buzz of a bullet past his ear. From 
 these people grown soft through peace we might 
 have expected cowardice, timidity — whole armies 
 breaking at the first fire. We got unexampled hero- 
 ism. It was written in the old books on infantry 
 tactics when a body of troops lost ten per cent or at 
 most fifteen, they became an uncertain quantity — 
 even though you had been able to replace the losses, 
 it was time to take them out if you could. In the 
 Battle of the Somme, the Allied Armies regularly 
 kept divisions in the line until the replacements 
 numbered fifty per cent — sometimes more. Whole 
 companies, whole regiments fought so often to the 
 traditional "last handful" that the newspapers 
 scarcely troubled to record such performances — 
 they had grown too common. Study, if you want 
 concrete proof, the record of the famous French 
 Twentieth Corps, recruited from Paris — city men, 
 and therefore most affected by the soft influence of 
 peace. 
 
 Militarists have answered that universal military 
 training accounts for this unexpected hardness. 
 Frenchmen, Germans and Italians had been edu- 
 
n8 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 cated for war, taught to think from their infancy 
 in terms of war; and we are dealing with a state of 
 mind. Then what about the British? The Island of 
 Britain had protected herself by navies, not armies. 
 Her small army was composed of volunteers. The 
 average Englishman, Scotchman, Irishman or 
 Welshman did not know the trigger of a rifle from 
 the muzzle. He had never thought of war as a pos- 
 sibility of his life. When Britain took to the draft, 
 she gathered in the last of these young men, ran 
 them through four or five months of intensive train- 
 ing, sent them to the line. Generally such troops, 
 as one might expect, were inferior to the veterans 
 in military technique. They were little if any in- 
 ferior in "hardness." I saw a British draft-division 
 once literally staggering back to the rest-station. It 
 was a time of special stress, when relief divisions 
 were hard to find. These men had been kept in the 
 line until nearly seventy per cent of their original 
 strength was gone and replaced. Yet they had held 
 firm to the end. I have shown how modern war- 
 fare under the conscription system chooses the best, 
 takes their activity from the existing generation, 
 their strong blood from the next generation. That 
 is your true softening process. Nations do not grow 
 hard through wars and preparation for wars. This 
 is another thing which is not so, but only seems so. 
 Armageddon affords proof that the reverse is true. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE DISCIPLINE OF PEACE 
 
 All this leads up to the question of the moral 
 factor in general military preparation — whether 
 peace-time conscription or universal military train- 
 ing. Is it useful only as a means of national defence, 
 or has it a real value for the general purposes of 
 society? The militarists say that it has. To begin 
 with, it inculcates obedience, and the instinct of 
 discipline. It spreads the habits of civilization 
 among the masses. It takes boys with round shoul- 
 ders, shuffling gait, uncleanly ways, lawless manners, 
 and makes them straight, upstanding, clean, orderly, 
 obedient men. During the war, they showed us 
 photographs of these awful examples, before and 
 after taking. 
 
 Now it is true that tens of thousands of our 
 young men, perhaps hundreds of thousands, were so 
 transformed by army training. But we must con- 
 sider averages, not exceptions. Millions of others 
 — certainly the great majority — came from a good, 
 sound American environment. All of them in their 
 childhood, most of them in their youth, had prac- 
 tised athletic sport in some form. They presented 
 
 119 
 
120 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 themselves to the drill-sergeant with fine, well-de- 
 veloped bodies. They knew how to keep themselves 
 clean. They had been under the tight discipline of 
 the modern world from the moment they opened a 
 first reader — in school, in factory, in business. And 
 after they left school, it was a kind of voluntary 
 discipline making, it seems to me, for higher aims 
 in character than any kind of involuntary discipline. 
 In the modern world as contrasted with the an- 
 cient we all live under strict discipline, partly self- 
 imposed. Every morning, the reader gets up and 
 goes at a set hour to his office or shop. No bugle 
 wakes him; no sergeant barks out the order to fall 
 in and go to work. If he grows weary of getting 
 up at six or seven, he has only to quit his job. He 
 will not be shot or jailed or publicly disgraced for 
 that, as he would if he deserted from the army. To 
 quit the job might hurt his career, might work 
 privation on his family — that is all. Every morning 
 after breakfast I sit down and write. Today, there 
 is a dog-show in town. I want very much to go. I 
 am not going, because I have too much work to do. 
 So I hold myself to writing — voluntarily. Now 
 both the reader and I are doing a thing, it seems to 
 me, better for our mortal fibre than as though the 
 bugle blew us out of bed and the sergeant, backed 
 by the whole force of the United States government, 
 ordered us to work. It is self-discipline, self-con- 
 trol, as contrasted with external discipline, external 
 control. The modern world requires always more 
 
THE DISCIPLINE OF PEACE 121 
 
 and more of this kind of discipline. That is one 
 reason for the unexpected hardness and valor of all 
 European and American troops in the late war — 
 forty years of the discipline of peace. 
 
 The Germans showed the way to the perfect 
 "psychological preparation." Its main object, 
 though not its sole one, is perfectly to overcome the 
 natural fear of death. The Italian peasants of the 
 ancient Roman army, it is said, fought so valiantly 
 partly because the men feared their officers more 
 than they did the enemy. We have found another 
 and more scientific way — the power of habit. Take 
 a man and accustom him to obedience, instant and 
 unquestioned, in every act of his life. To obey be- 
 comes in time a fixed habit, almost an obsession. 
 The moment arrives when he must obey the whistle 
 or the officer's command, and advance to probable 
 death. Personal pride, fear of the disgraceful con- 
 sequences in refusal, love of country, even sense of 
 adventure, urge him forward of course; just as the 
 natural shrinking from pain and death hold him 
 back. But the governing factor in the perfect sol- 
 dier is the ingrained habit of instant, unquestioning 
 obedience. He goes because his very nervous re- 
 flexes tell him that he must. 
 
 I cannot find that in the old days of chivalrous 
 warfare conscious hate played much part in the 
 training of a soldier. The ideal — imperfectly felt 
 and realized, but still an ideal — was the generous, 
 adventurous warrior who hated his enemy perhaps, 
 
122 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 but who spared him, too. "Brave as a lion, gentle 
 as a woman." The Germans showed that there was 
 a more useful method. "The best soldier is a bit of 
 a brute," they said. In our military schools, we 
 have always forbidden hazing. The German mili- 
 tary schools encouraged it, in forms more gross than 
 any of our youth imagined. That was done to culti- 
 vate the required touch of brutality. In the close 
 race for victory of the last war, we all had to follow. 
 Uninstructed civilians, visiting the American, French 
 and British training-camps, wondered at the time 
 given to bayonet practice. They knew that the 
 bayonet was rarely used in action. Why so much 
 stress upon it? Any sergeant could explain that. It 
 was a means of cultivating hate, of making your 
 soldier a bit of a brute. That dummy at which you 
 were thrusting — the instructor encouraged you to 
 imagine him a German, to curse him, to work up a 
 savage delight in mutilating him. It was a part of 
 the higher psychology of modern war. 
 
 There was propaganda, too — and here I must 
 condense a theme for a whole book. This was one 
 of the human forces existing before the great war, 
 which the war reduced to its scientific terms; made 
 tremendously usable. It was, really, our contribu- 
 tion. The American science of advertising had 
 shown by what means an idea may best be implanted 
 in the greatest number of people. With all the press 
 under control, the European Boards of Morale and 
 Bureaus of Propaganda proceeded with conscious 
 
THE DISCIPLINE OF PEACE 123 
 
 purpose to put into every people a mob-instinct of 
 hatred for the enemy, man, woman and child. Since 
 everyone who has a pair of working hands is useful 
 to the purposes of a modern war, the hate-propa- 
 ganda was aimed at the civilians as well as the sol- 
 diers. But "keeping up morale" in the army was 
 the main object. Generating hate in the civilian 
 population made toward that end. If the soldier 
 on leave heard from his women, his father and his 
 uncles that the enemy were all a set of ruffians, a 
 race which had nothing in common with the human 
 race, it made him a better hater when he returned 
 to the line. Half-truth was the best tool of this 
 propaganda; but, war being the negation of all ordi- 
 nary morality, the propagandists did not gag at lies. 
 For a familiar example, there is the story about the 
 Germans cutting off children's hands in Belgium. It 
 was not true. I repeat that I was in Belgium during 
 the first month of the war; that there were German 
 atrocities, some of which I witnessed — atrocities 
 committed by order, for the strategic purposes of 
 the General Staff — but that no case of the kind I 
 mention was ever fully proved. Nevertheless it was 
 a popular war-rumor in the beginning; it had all the 
 qualities which make a story "go." It was taken 
 up by the propagandists, spread as a means of lash- 
 ing up hate by men who knew better; so firmly fixed 
 in the public mind that I myself have but lately been 
 called "pro-German" for denying it. In fairness, 
 I may add that they lied more grossly in Germany, 
 
124 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 especially when the case grew desperate. There, 
 cutting off women's breasts was the favorite night- 
 mare tale. 
 
 This hate-propaganda failed a little of its main 
 purposes. The soldier swallowed it less avidly than 
 the civilian population. If you wanted a tolerant 
 view of the enemy, you were most likely to get it 
 from a soldier sitting in a dugout under fire, his gas- 
 mask at the alert. If you wanted to hear that the 
 enemy was a creature not quite human, but a species 
 of gorilla which should be exterminated to the last 
 baby, you must go to some comfortable home in 
 Paris or London — or equally I suppose in Berlin. 
 Indeed, whole elements in the European armies 
 quietly closed their minds to this form of propa- 
 ganda. British officers of the old school, for exam- 
 ple, tried to maintain the tradition of the warrior 
 chivalrous even in his thoughts. It was a conven- 
 tionality of most British headquarters messes not to 
 speak ill of the enemy. If the civilian visitor intro- 
 duced the "hate-stuff" into the conversation, he was 
 answered by polite denials or by frigid silence. 
 
 All this must be changed in the next war. You 
 must focus your hatred where it is most useful and 
 needed — in the soldiers at the front. And we are 
 studying to change it. The propagandists and 
 boards of morale are working and experimenting 
 like the chemists — coolly reviewing the methods and 
 mistakes of the last war, finding new methods with- 
 out mistakes. 
 
THE DISCIPLINE OF PEACE 125 
 
 Has the involuntary discipline of armies much to 
 do with the voluntary discipline of peace? The 
 aftermath of the late war goes to prove that the 
 relation is a little remote. I know hundreds of 
 young men — British, French, Belgian, Italian, Amer- 
 ican — whom the war seemed to have spoiled at least 
 temporarily for civilian pursuits. Accustomed to be 
 disciplined by others, they seemed to have lost the 
 habit of disciplining themselves. They found it 
 difficult, almost impossible, to make themselves go 
 to work at regular hours, stick to any one job or any 
 practical object very long at a time. This psycho- 
 logical aftermath of the war we all know, I think. 
 You might lay it all to the actual war — its stresses 
 and excitements, its alternate tense action and idle- 
 ness — were it not that we find the same state of 
 mind in young Americans who were mobilized in the 
 draft, had their year and a half of army training, 
 and never got abroad. It was hard to "settle 
 down'*; which means that it was hard to change 
 from imposed discipline to self-discipline, from the 
 regularity of army life to the fast, irregular compe- 
 tition of civilian life. 
 
 The world over, we found that the hate-propa- 
 ganda, the conscious effort to make the soldier "a 
 bit of a brute" had long effects. Everywhere were 
 "crime waves" — highway robbery, burglary, sudden 
 murders of passion. Ours was perhaps the lightest 
 of all. The police records of Berlin in 19 19 read 
 like annals of the old days of Jack Sheppard. The 
 
126 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 Belgian police were forced, for the first time since 
 Barons ruled in Flanders, to fight organized gangs 
 of bandits. England boasted in old years a low 
 murder rate; and her courts had a swift and certain 
 way of hanging for murder without regard to wealth 
 or social rank. "The unwritten law" did not exist 
 for British juries. Just after the war, England ex- 
 perienced a series of "murders of passion," by ex- 
 soldiers and ex-officers; and British juries acquitted 
 the murderers as lightly as once did Latin judges. 
 How much of this mentality back of these crime- 
 waves sprang from actual experience at the Front 
 and how much from the education in brutality of the 
 new military training, no one of course can say. 
 Doubtless both influences bore on this crime wave. 
 
 Here in America and abroad, there are plans 
 afoot for knitting army training a little more closely 
 into civilian life. Experts on physical culture have 
 testified that drill and setting-up exercises, as hith- 
 erto practiced by armies, give an imperfect and one- 
 sided physical development. It is proposed to revise 
 army physical training on modern lines. It is pro- 
 posed, further, to teach the men, while they are in 
 the ranks, the elements at least of useful civilian 
 trades. These are compromises, at best designed to 
 reduce the ultimate cost of armies to society, at 
 worst sops to public opinion. The chief end of 
 military training is to teach men to fight. They 
 must be drilled, first in order to inculcate the instinct 
 of perfect obedience and second so that large bodies 
 
THE DISCIPLINE OF PEACE 127 
 
 of troops may be moved without confusion. They 
 must learn to use weapons, from the trench-grenade 
 and the rifle to the aeroplane and the tank. Most 
 of this training, from the point of view of ordinary, 
 peace-time industry, is wasted. One of the chief 
 economic losses in military training is the time and 
 energy it takes from the most teachable years of best 
 young men. It will be "war by machinery" in fu- 
 ture; and those told off for the higher functions of 
 war — such as tanks, aeroplanes and gas — will get, it 
 is true, a certain training in mechanics and chemistry. 
 But in just as much as these devices differ from the 
 devices of peace, in just so much will the training 
 be wasted, socially and economically. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 "defensive preparation" 
 
 What should be our American attitude toward 
 military preparation? The average hard-headed, 
 practical American will perhaps say that if war has 
 grown so deadly, it is all the more reason why we 
 should prepare to defend ourselves. Without de- 
 fence, we stand in peril of general extinction; with 
 defence, we may avert war at least for a time, may 
 soften the blow when it comes. Let us prepare 
 then, says the American citizen, not for conquest, or 
 "fulfilment of national aspirations" but for defence. 
 
 Yes, provided only that we can, in this age of 
 confusions and complexities, keep our military prep- 
 arations defensive. And that is extremely difficult. 
 Indeed, when you come to thorough defensive prep- 
 aration, a hundred per cent efficient, it becomes 
 perhaps impossible. The term "defence" needs de- 
 fining; it has hitherto been used as a most effective 
 hypocrisy of militarism. Keeping our coasts and 
 borders against an invading enemy is pure defence; 
 no one disputes that. But in the modern world a 
 nation is not confined to its own political borders. 
 The American mining engineer developing a lode 
 
 128 
 
Money appropriated by the Unibed 
 S tabes for Military Preparedness 
 before and afber 
 the World War. 
 
 1909- 
 1910 
 
 1920- 
 1921 
 
 ESTIMATES 
 1921 - 1922 
 
"DEFENSIVE PREPARATION" 131 
 
 for the Ameer of Afghanistan is a part of America, 
 just like the mining engineer driving a tunnel in 
 Colorado. At this moment, that larger America is 
 spreading. There is a new movement in world- 
 industry. Instead of bringing the raw material to 
 the power, men are beginning to bring the power to 
 the raw material. India raises much first-rate cot- 
 ton; she has also inexhaustible resources of labor. 
 Hitherto, she has sold the raw cotton to England, 
 where the coal is; now, India is going to spin and 
 weave part of this cotton beside her own fields, 
 partly with native water-power, partly with im- 
 ported coal. We have the money of the world; and 
 American capital has been flowing by hundreds of 
 millions into such projects as this. If we are to have 
 the perfect defence, we must prepare to back up 
 American citizens and "American interests" in India 
 as well as in Indiana, in New Guinea as well as in 
 New York. It is hard, it is almost impossible, to 
 draw the line; so we are pulled insensibly into the 
 old, vicious circle. 
 
 There comes a point in any thorough military 
 preparation when the spirit of defence runs subtly 
 into the spirit of offence. Again, Germany is the 
 typical case. She was, her emperors, kings and gen- 
 erals said, "ringed with foes." That, in the begin- 
 ning, was not an entirely insincere presentation of 
 the case. On one side lay France, smarting with 
 the injustice of 1870; on another lay the barbaric 
 Russia of the Czars, with double Germany's man- 
 
132 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 power and an eye on Germany's developed wealth. 
 On her seacoast lay the strong British Navy. 
 "What is Germany?" asked question i in the public 
 school catechism on geography, "It is your Father- 
 land, entirely surrounded by enemies." Militarism 
 was hammered into the German people in the form 
 of defence, defence, always defence. And let me 
 repeat; in the beginning the men who urged this 
 were not all insincere. 
 
 Germany went into the game of financial imperial- 
 ism with the rest. The world was spotted with 
 "spheres of influence," where German capital har- 
 vested fields of trade or raw materials for the fac- 
 tories of Berlin, Leipsic, Diisseldorf. These inter- 
 ests must be protected; other capital must be kept 
 out. The German army began to pass from a de- 
 fensive force to an implied offensive force. In such 
 crises as the transfer of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 
 the Germans won because the Kaiser rattled his 
 sword and the others yielded for fear he might turn 
 loose his perfect army. 
 
 There came, too, a mental change. "He who 
 forges the sword will want to wield it." Here is one 
 of the ways in which a national mind works like an 
 individual mind. You have found, we will say, that 
 you play an extraordinary game of lawn tennis. You 
 will not long be satisfied with scrub games. You 
 will want, if you are a normal man, to enter tour- 
 naments, to prove your accomplishment and su- 
 periority before the world. You discover that you 
 
"DEFENSIVE PREPARATION" 133 
 
 write good poetry or fiction. How long will you 
 be contented with sugared sonnets among your pri- 
 vate friends? Sooner or later you will want to 
 publish it and let the world see how clever you are. 
 And so when you have the perfect army or navy, 
 perfectly knit into the structure of the state, you 
 will find some impulse which you may not at the 
 time analyze, urging you toward its proof in action. 
 
 Germany did. There was never such a glittering 
 display of military power as in the old summer ma- 
 noeuvres before the war. Doubtless any German 
 who saw that great charge of massed cavalry by 
 which they always ended, felt somewhere in him a 
 glow as he thought of what Germany might do in 
 real battle. The cloud gathered. With Germany — 
 as even most Germans now admit — lay the decision 
 for peace or war; and she chose war. It is absurd 
 to blame the Kaiser alone; almost equally absurd to 
 blame his counsellors alone. They were carried 
 along, all of them, by a flood which had been rolling 
 up in Germany for forty years. 
 
 Yet even then, they maintained the fiction to their 
 people — and half to themselves — that they were 
 fighting a defensive war against the "ring of foes." 
 The average German soldier whom I saw in Bel- 
 gium during 19 14 believed this devoutly. Barbarous 
 Russia and envious England had attacked the 
 Fatherland. He fought in her defence. France 
 must be crushed because she had foolishly joined 
 these major enemies. Poor France! Now, if they 
 
134 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 survive, these same Germans are calling France the 
 source of all their woes, the true enemy. For the 
 current is running in another direction, and the 
 strategy of propaganda has changed. But this is a 
 digression. Germany illustrates, among other 
 things, the danger in the perfect defensive prepara- 
 tion and the difficulty of drawing the line between 
 defence and offence. 
 
 Some may note that I have not touched upon the 
 question of national honor. The individual in so- 
 ciety sometimes meets a situation outside the law so 
 intolerable that he is less than a man if he does not 
 take the law into his own hands; and so it is with 
 nations. The circumstance which drew us into the 
 Great War was an unusually clean-cut example of an 
 unpardonable affront. Germany had announced 
 cold-bloodedly, flatly, that American vessels could 
 no longer sail the most frequented seas of the world; 
 if they did, the hulls would be destroyed, the crews 
 killed without warning. The occasions of war are 
 not commonly so simple as this. "National honor" 
 is more often the excuse for economic and political 
 interests, or the mere focus of trouble arising from 
 a conflict of such interests. The occasion of the 
 Great War, the spark which set the mine, was the 
 assassination of an Austrian prince in Serbia. Be- 
 hind that lay thirty or forty years of intrigue lead- 
 ing up to a "situation." Austria wanted to make 
 Serbia a vassal economically, and in the end politi- 
 
"DEFENSIVE PREPARATION" 135 
 
 cally. Germany wanted to extend a "line of 
 influence" through the Balkans in order to build an 
 all-German Berlin-to-Bagdad railway. The Entente 
 nations wanted to prevent all this. Had no such 
 situation Iain behind the assassination at Sarajevo, 
 the matter would have been settled with an apology, 
 punishment of the criminals and perhaps indemnity. 
 
 Let us imagine another case. Mr. Colby, then 
 our Secretary of State, visited South America in 
 1920. Suppose that in Rio de Janeiro some fanatic 
 or band of fanatics had murdered him. Would that 
 have led to war between the United States and 
 Brazil? Almost certainly no. But suppose that 
 Brazil and the United States had long been engaged 
 in an economic and political struggle to control by 
 their capital the resources of Ecuador, Colombia and 
 Central America. Suppose them both prepared to 
 the last belt-buckle. Would it then have led to war? 
 Almost certainly yes. And most Americans would 
 say — as did the Austrians in 19 14 — that we were 
 drawing the sword to avenge national honor and 
 wipe out an intolerable insult. 
 
 Building up armies, navies, and munitions indus- 
 tries solely through the fear of national insult, solely 
 to protect honor, seems a little like carrying a loaded 
 pistol night and day lest perhaps someone insult you 
 intolerablv, beyond recourse of law. 
 
 Yet the fact remains: few Americans of spirit will 
 want, in this era of the world, to strip us of all our 
 defences. That goes beyond the reasonable pacifism 
 
136 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 which has hitherto been the general American atti- 
 tude toward war. It becomes the non-resistance of 
 the dreamer, Tolstoi. Apart from its danger, 
 completely laying down our own arms would be no 
 good, except by example. We must reach further 
 back than that into the structure of things; try, with 
 all the others, to repair this world-machine. At 
 present, it is like some great, complex engine which 
 has broken a vital part. It tends to beat itself to 
 pieces with its own power. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE DRAMATIC MOMENT 
 
 Now is the appointed time to begin action, and 
 we are the appointed people. The lesson of the last 
 war is still fresh in mind; and unto us, by luck rather 
 than our own foresight, has been given the dominat- 
 ing position in the world of the next quarter-century. 
 The course which the United States chooses will 
 largely be the course of the other nations. 
 
 It is the appointed time for still another reason, 
 less obvious, no less compelling. All old, imperfect 
 human institutions have their uses in their period; 
 then that usefulness passes and we must rid our- 
 selves of them. Monarchy in its absolute form 
 served the development of humanity. The half- 
 civilized man could not grasp conceptions so ab- 
 stract as his relation and his duty toward other men 
 in his group or clan or nation. He needed a visible, 
 personal representation of power. So was built up 
 loyalty; from loyalty grew the fine sentiment of 
 patriotism; from patriotism the sense of team-work 
 in society. Then monarchy was outworn. We 
 sloughed it off, at first in its absolute form, then 
 faster and faster in any form at all. Slavery may 
 
 137 
 
138 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 have been necessary to build up the habit of steady 
 work among tribes and nations. Races learned the 
 habit of steady work, and sloughed off slavery. 
 
 War on the whole was long useful to humanity — 
 expensive, but the best way we had. I have pre- 
 viously quoted Wells to show how it drew races 
 into the circle of progress. Long before there was 
 history even in popular ballad, some genius in some 
 tribe of the Asiatic steppes invented the wheel. His 
 tribe went to war and won or lost — that does not 
 matter. Before the war was over, the enemy had 
 seen the wheel, learned its usefulness, was making 
 wheels of his own. But for war, outlying tribes on 
 the fringe of humanity might have skidded their 
 heavy burdens along the ground for centuries and 
 aeons. At the end of the Stone Age, some savage 
 discovered that tin and copper, thrown into the fire, 
 melted, blended, produced a substance which could 
 be hammered to a fine, sharp edge — a tool much 
 better than any chipped stone. He used his bronze 
 knife in war; the enemy felt its edge, admired, pene- 
 trated the secret, passed it on by war to tribes still 
 further outlying. So we progressed from the Stone 
 Age to the age of metals. 
 
 War, too, worked with monarchism to develop 
 what scholars call the group-consciousness. It 
 stirred up in men a fine, high, human emotion for 
 the humanity outside themselves. The average man 
 in all times and all nations up to the eighteenth and 
 
THE DRAMATIC MOMENT 139 
 
 nineteenth centuries led an extremely limited life. 
 Of his own motion, he seldom stirred from his own 
 domain or farm or village. War alone drew him 
 out to teach him that there was a world beyond his 
 horizon, that there were other men with other i-deas 
 not only among his own people but among stranger 
 clans. War made a tremendous contribution to hu- 
 man experience, to collective human consciousness. 
 That was its use, its larger reason for being. 
 
 Now, modern invention has changed all that. 
 We no longer need a process so essentially wasteful 
 to transmit the results of progress. When Wright 
 proved to Europe that a man can fly through the 
 air, the news was flashed that very night to every 
 corner of the globe; three-quarters of the civilized 
 world read it next morning. Within a month, such 
 remote points as Shanghai, Cape Town and Buenos 
 Aires had European publications with technical re- 
 ports; any good mechanic who wished could go 
 about building an aeroplane. The remote parts of 
 the globe were by now coming fast into the circle of 
 communication. Before the Great War, all the in- 
 accessible places had been explored — even Thibet 
 and the two poles. The world had no more secrets 
 and mysteries. From end to end of Africa, the 
 infant continent, ran a railroad; Africa was spotted 
 with European settlements, in touch with civilization 
 by telegraph-lines. The printing-press, the railroad, 
 the automobile, the electric telegraph have all given 
 
140 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 their part toward the intensity of modern war; yet 
 at the same time they have removed one of its su- 
 preme necessities for being. As for its other use — 
 instilling into men the sense of a duty toward his 
 country or his group — that work also is done. In 
 fact, when one considers the conceited, excessive, 
 Jingo patriotism of most races and nations, it be- 
 comes a question whether it is not too well done. 
 
 We cannot say at what precise moment in history 
 monarchism and slavery proved themselves out- 
 worn, past their usefulness; became not benevolent 
 organs but dangerous rudiments — like a vermiform 
 appendix — in the body politic. But war, always 
 picturesque, died its spiritual death dramatically. 
 We may say with certainty I think that it proved 
 itself outworn during that little moment of history 
 between 1914-18. It was of no more use in spread- 
 ing progress, of little more use in building up the 
 sense of collective djuty. And in itself it suddenly 
 became dangerous, sordid, disturbing beyond the 
 imagination of devils. 
 
 Two great tasks lie before humanity in the rest 
 of the twentieth century. One is to put under 
 control of true morals and of democracy the great 
 power of human production which came in the 
 nineteenth century. The other is to check, to 
 limit and finally to eliminate the institution of war. 
 This last is the more important. We may stagger 
 on, and make progress even, though the industrial 
 and financial structure remains as it is — we were 
 
THE DRAMATIC MOMENT 141 
 
 doing very well, on the whole, before 19 14. But 
 if war goes on unchecked, following its present 
 tendencies, it means the elimination of whole races 
 — always the best races — and the downfall of civ- 
 ilization. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 
 
 Perhaps we cannot eliminate war. It seems so 
 deeply rooted in human institutions! It is so easy 
 to stir up hate, so hard to create understandings 1 
 Thus, in the late eighteenth century, the republican 
 must have felt about the elimination of kings. The 
 institution of monarchy appeared unassailable — the 
 task seemed at times hopeless. And surely we 
 cannot, unless we work up the zeal of those early 
 republicans, make reasonable pacifism a governing 
 motive in our political thinking and action. 
 
 Yet this reasonable pacifism had made progress, 
 even before the late war. Peace, all the reference 
 books will tell you, had in the nineteenth century 
 cast off its old negative meaning and taken on a 
 positive meaning. It was no longer regarded simply 
 as the rest between wars; it was an end in itself. 
 The Hague Conferences, powerless as they were to 
 prevent either the great war or its barbarities, still 
 showed that a great part of humanity wanted peace, 
 would take much trouble to get it. We, by our 
 relations with Latin America, proved how two conti- 
 nents might live in practical harmony. When Secre- 
 
 142 
 
PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 143 
 
 tary of State Blaine called the first conference with 
 Latin America, he set up a milestone on the road to 
 permanent peace. 
 
 So strong indeed had become this desire and hope 
 among most Western European nations that the 
 very militarists among the Allies were forced dur- 
 ing the late war to use the phrase "the war against 
 war" in order to keep up the fighting spirit among 
 their people. And when the war was over, the at- 
 tempt to form a League of Nations afforded still 
 another proof. I shall not enter into the late con- 
 troversy. But the League was the work, of politi- 
 cians, all responsible to democracies for their jobs. 
 They would never have made the attempt had they 
 not believed that it would be popular. 
 
 The Peace of Versailles, imperfect though it may 
 have been, proved in other ways how far we had 
 moved beyond old conceptions of national glory. 
 After former wars, the conquerors usually took over 
 without shame the territory of the conquered, no 
 matter how the inhabitants felt. Even as late as 
 1 87 1, the neutrals did not protest officially and but 
 very little unofficially when Germany seized the un- 
 willing Alsace-Lorraine. But in the Peace of Ver- 
 sailles, European statesmen had to give at least 
 lip-service to the principle that no nation or no part 
 of a nation may permanently be held by a conqueror 
 against the will of the inhabitants. Again: they did 
 this because they were politicians, and had satisfied 
 themselves that a new moral consciousness in man- 
 
144 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 kind demanded a new conception of national rights 
 and methods. 
 
 Back from the war came the plain men of the 
 democracies old and new — thirty or forty millions 
 of them. The greater part of them, and especially 
 the thinking part, had been quarreling in their 
 thoughts with the institution of war. If our re- 
 turned soldiers felt this less than their European 
 comrades, it was because they had borne a shorter 
 strain and had needed less of the propaganda of 
 peace through war to keep up their morale. The 
 Societe des Anciens Combatants in France corre- 
 sponds to our American Legion. Lodge after lodge 
 of that society in 1919 passed a resolution saying 
 that their real object now is "la guerre a la guerre" 
 (war against war). The rumor, spread by gov- 
 ernments as a feeler, that the British and French 
 armies were going to Russia to fight the Bolsheviki 
 produced instant riots and mutinies. I witnessed 
 the Ruhr Rebellion of April, 1920, in Germany. 
 Now while this revolt was stirred up by the Com- 
 munists, the average Ruhr insurgent, I found, was 
 out primarily to end militarism. "If those soldiers 
 have their own way," said the men of the Ruhr, 
 "we'll be fighting the French again in two years. 
 We don't want any more wars." 
 
 Yet so strange are these times that governments, 
 supposed to be the expression of peoples, emerged 
 from the Peace of Versailles more nationalistic, 
 perhaps more belligerent, than ever before. Na- 
 
PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 145 
 
 tionalism, the denial of peace, is running riot. Those 
 returned soldiers, with all their pacifist sentiment, 
 find themselves like the rest of humanity caught in 
 a wheel. Jean the Frenchman does not want any 
 more war. But the North lies devastated ; until the 
 fields of the Somme are bearing again, the chimneys 
 of Picardy smoking, his shop will never do good 
 business. Hans the miner of the Ruhr district got 
 out his army Mauser last year and tried to shoot 
 a reactionary officer in order to show that he wanted 
 no more war. But Hans believes that the indemnity 
 which France wants is excessive; he knows that if 
 Germany pays it, he himself will have lower wages 
 and higher taxes all his life. So Jean and Hans put 
 their interests into the hands of the strong men of 
 Europe — men with the old ideas, men whose con- 
 ception of statesmanship is force unlimited. "His 
 only scheme of politics," said an American diplomat 
 of an eminent European confrere, "is 'send a di- 
 vision.' " 
 
 The pacifism of the returned European soldier, of 
 the disgusted but submerged European civilian, is a 
 somewhat abnormal state of mind. It resembles a 
 little the psychology of a religious revival. Not 
 even the most enthusiastic revivalist expects that 
 his people will maintain permanently all those 
 heights of fervor and virtue to which he has raised 
 them. The wise church is the one which consoli- 
 dates its gains; makes the revival or mission yield 
 permanent fruit in sober, day-by-day piety, unselfish- 
 
146 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 ness and good living. If we let this moment pass, 
 the nations will forget. The memories of the hor- 
 rors, the destructions, the follies of Armageddon will 
 die out as its debts are paid off, as the new gener- 
 ation grows up; and, as in old wars, only the sou- 
 venirs of its glories will remain. 
 
 Now, I repeat, is the appointed time to consoli- 
 date what Armageddon won for peace, and we, both 
 actually and potentially the strongest nation of the 
 world, are the appointed people. 
 
 Along what practical lines may we proceed? 
 
 Doubtless accumulated experience, translated into 
 policies and action by men of genius, and leadership 
 will find us new ways. But here are the courses of 
 possible action on which many are thinking at pres- 
 ent and a few working: 
 
 First and most drastically, we may create a real 
 law, not a mere set of gentlemen's agreements be- 
 tween nation and nation. That is the kernel of the 
 matter. 
 
 Law is the set of agreements, backed up by some 
 kind of force, to prevent murder and theft and in- 
 justice between the individuals of a tribe or a state. 
 In the savage beginning of things, men probably 
 killed whomsoever they wished, took whatsoever 
 they desired. But people could not get along and 
 make progress on that plan. An individual with the 
 fighting endowments of a Jack Dempsey had it all 
 his own way. Before long, men got together and 
 drew up primary rules of the human game. You 
 
PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 147 
 
 kept, we will say, the stone knife which you had 
 chipped for yourself. No one might take it from 
 you except he give an equivalent; no one might kill 
 you except with certain definite excuses. It was fur- 
 ther agreed that whoever broke this rule should be 
 punished by the collective action of all the rest. No 
 one man could thrash the Jack Dempsey of the tribe ; 
 but two or three men could, much more the whole 
 tribe. That was the beginning of law and order — 
 an understanding as to the rules of the game, an 
 agreement to punish whoever broke those rules. 
 Wise old David Lubin used to say that he believed 
 this was also the beginning of morals. And indeed, 
 even if there was in primitive man some inbred sense 
 of kindness and of property right, that feeling never 
 expressed itself in action until men drew up rules 
 and agreed to back them by force. 
 
 Nearly everyone who thinks must have wondered 
 at times why it is supremely wrong to kill a fellow 
 citizen in time of peace, supremely right to kill a 
 foreigner in time of war; why lying and deceit, 
 despicable when used against your fellow-country- 
 man, become noble when used against your national 
 enemy. I have explained the reason. As soon as 
 we organized states and tribes, we began to endow 
 them with a personality, to give them a being. And 
 between these beings the law did not run. They 
 had never got together, to draw up rules of the 
 game and provide penalties against the violators of 
 this code of morals. Consequently, there were real- 
 
148 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 ly no morals between states. If in times of peace 
 nations refrained from murdering the citizens of 
 other nations, from seizing their property, that was 
 because they feared the disagreeable consequences 
 involved in these acts. It was, again, like the state 
 of primitive society before men made laws and or- 
 ganized a police force. When one primitive man 
 respected his neighbor's property, it was because he 
 did not care to get into a fight. The process was 
 too disagreeable; it was not worth while. But 
 when his desire grew greater than his fears or when 
 his blood was heated, he took or killed with at best 
 only a vague sense of moral wrong. 
 
 But finally, when the law within nations became 
 so perfectly established that murder, theft and arson 
 grew uncommon, sporadic, it was as though the 
 reservoir of morals filled up and began to flow over 
 the dams dividing nations. Diplomats and others 
 who represented sovereign states went on lying, de- 
 ceiving, committing daily in peace or war acts which, 
 performed by one citizen of a state against another, 
 would have been punished by ostracism, jail or the 
 gallows. And they justified themselves to them- 
 selves and their fellow-citizens because it was done 
 for the flag, the Patrie, the Fatherland. The cause 
 sweetened any method. But public opinion concern- 
 ing some of these methods grew so strong as to force 
 these gentlemen at least to hypocrisy. Since the 
 state knows no morals in its relation with other 
 states, a treaty used to be a sort of temporary agree- 
 
PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 149 
 
 ment for temporary advantage. You kept it be- 
 cause it did not suit your convenience to break, it. 
 If a treaty became no longer convenient to one 
 party or the other — well, kings used to tear up 
 treaties and feel very little necessity for apology or 
 explanation. When Germany violated one of her 
 most solemn treaties and invaded Belgium, she 
 broke, really, no moral law. Do not believe that 
 the cynical diplomats of the Entente Allies blamed 
 her in their hearts. But peoples did blame her. 
 The moral sense of individuals the world over rose 
 against such an act; a man who behaved in this way 
 counted himself out of society; why not a nation, 
 too? The one fact which German propaganda could 
 never explain away was the invasion of Belgium; it 
 is perhaps the spiritual reason why Germany lost 
 the war. 
 
 So we have already the moral basis for law be- 
 tween nations; at present, however, it is a force, not 
 a power, because it has no machinery to make it 
 useful. It is like the potential electricity going to 
 waste in a mountain river. This force will not be- 
 come power, will not turn wheels, run railroads and 
 light cities, until you harness it — create for it some 
 machinery. 
 
 We shall not strike at the root of wars until we 
 organize fifty or sixty sovereign nations and self- 
 governing colonies of the world somewhat as we or- 
 ganize individuals in a tribe or state or nation. In 
 plain, human terms, they must get together, pass 
 
150 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 laws to define and forbid national murder and na- 
 tional burglary, and agree to punish, with their col- 
 lective force, any violator of that law. 
 
 The punishment need not wholly, need not mainly, 
 consist in physical force. The discussions preced- 
 ing the League of Nations showed, theoretically at 
 least, that a general economic boycott might be as 
 effective as military action. This follows a rule of 
 progress in human society. Once, law knew only 
 one kind of penalty for crime — physical action. 
 The criminal was killed or mutilated or flogged. In 
 the eighteenth century, the English would hang a 
 man for stealing six shillings. We have done away 
 with flogging and mutilation, have abolished hang- 
 ing except for the gravest crimes. We have substi- 
 tuted imprisonment and fine. Think it out and you 
 will see that imprisonment is mostly an economic 
 penalty, as a fine is wholly an economic penalty. 
 
 This book, I repeat, is not a plea for or against 
 the existing League of Nations. Call your organi- 
 zation a League of Nations, an association of na- 
 tions, a Hague Tribunal "with teeth in it" — call it 
 what you will, organize it how you will. This is the 
 specific for the disease of war. But while we wait 
 for this inevitable organization to form and to be- 
 come effective, we may use a few pain-killers and 
 poultices. 
 
 Among these, the most important is disarmament 
 — a pressing, vital question of the moment. Behind 
 the present agitation lies a compelling economic 
 
PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 151 
 
 motive. Europe cannot recover if she goes on with 
 the old race for armaments. She will collapse under 
 the double burden. The world is so interlocked 
 that if Europe blows up in anarchy we, though we 
 hold together, must suffer terribly. An agreement 
 to limit armies and navies to the point where they 
 cannot be used aggressively can probably be en- 
 forced. We have no formal law between nations, 
 it is true; but that uncharted moral opinion of 
 democracies is perhaps powerful enough to secure 
 a rough working agreement until we get something 
 better. It cannot be done without the consent — 
 indeed without the leadership — of the United States. 
 We have as much economic and industrial power to 
 manufacture navies and munitions as any three 
 European nations, more population to furnish sol- 
 diers than any two Western European nations. If 
 we arm to the teeth, the rest must follow through 
 fear. 
 
 Such partial disarmament will serve not only as 
 temporary alleviation; it will be also in the nature 
 of a remedy. Whatever movement sets the nations 
 thinking positively about peace, whatever forces 
 them into co-operation instead of competition, 
 makes toward their final, complete understanding. 
 Finally, it will prevent the psychological drift to- 
 ward war which comes with perfected armaments. 
 
 If I have anywhere made it appear that the term 
 "militarist" is equivalent to the term "professional 
 soldier," I have done the military clan a wrong. 
 
152 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 Only lately our two most eminent soldiers, Bliss and 
 Pershing, have come out flatly for a disarmament 
 program. They admit that it will not be easy; and 
 no more will it. You cannot complete the job 
 with a Congressional resolution and a flourish of 
 the pen. Too many eminent gentlemen in all na- 
 tions have something to gain by the race of arma- 
 ments. But it is a first necessary step. 
 
 Then, even before we have a league, association 
 or effective High Court of Nations, we may get at 
 some of the economic causes for war. 
 
 The "financial imperialism" which brought on the 
 Great War had three wholly commercial objects — 
 trade, raw materials, export of capital. The strug- 
 gle for trade — for profitable foreign markets — is, 
 in the opinion of many economists, the least danger- 
 ous of the three. For while it is a cause of friction, 
 it has also a pacific tendency. When two nations 
 begin to trade with each other, there follow personal 
 acquaintance and a community of interest. We 
 saw that at the beginning of the Great War, when 
 many Americans in the exporting business sincerely 
 took sides either with Germany or England because 
 they had with Germans or Englishman business rela- 
 tions and personal acquaintance. The most danger- 
 ous factor in national trade is tariffs. I am not 
 preaching for or against tariffs. But they can be 
 so drawn as to take unfair advantage, to work in- 
 justice against some given nation. The tariff is no 
 longer purely a domestic question. We must draw 
 
PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 153 
 
 our schedules no longer with an eye solely on imme- 
 diate national prosperity; we must consider them 
 also in the light of good and just international re- 
 lations. 
 
 Some kind of international agreement concerning 
 the distribution of raw materials seems necessary to 
 permanent peace. If any great nation should in 
 this year corner the international supply of flax, for 
 example, the great linen industry of Belgium would 
 be ruined; for Belgium raises only a little domestic 
 flax. Italy has most expert and intelligent work- 
 men, together with certain other manufacturing ad- 
 vantages; she has no coal nor iron ore. Shut off 
 coal and iron from Italy and the Valley of the Po 
 knows acute distress. No longer should any nation 
 or combinations of nations be allowed to monopo- 
 lize any imported raw material. 
 
 Finally: the advantageous export of capital was 
 perhaps the main object of financial imperialism and 
 so one of the main causes for the late war. In the 
 intense struggle at home, your capital would yield 
 you only three or four or five per cent. Put into a 
 new, undeveloped country, it might yield you — any- 
 thing. Only it would not return its big interest- 
 rate for long if other capitalists in other nations 
 themselves saw the chance, came in, and competed. 
 The game of the international flotation houses 
 which represented national surplus capital was to 
 keep their "sphere of influence" exclusive. This 
 was the chief commercial object of the huge arma- 
 
154 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 merits, the rattling of swords when diplomacy ran 
 into a deadlock. Before the Great War that proc- 
 ess was running a dangerous course in China. 
 Here, you were in a British "sphere of influence"; 
 in general non-British capital was not wanted, could 
 not get a foothold. Here, the influence was Ger- 
 man; here, French. And the nations were jockey- 
 ing to extend their sphere further and further into 
 China — without regard of course for the feelings of 
 the inhabitants. 
 
 Some internationalization of export capital seems 
 necessary to permanent peace. This may come 
 through an association of nations; it may come be- 
 fore that association is effective through action of 
 the great flotation houses. Most banking men 
 want peace; war is too disturbing, armaments are 
 too costly. But in strategic control of the world's 
 financial interests before the war were too many 
 ruthless adventurers allied with the military and 
 financial adventurers. Banking also was caught 
 in a wheel. There are the signs that sober sense 
 is coming into this business. The "Chinese con- 
 sortium" is an association of the capital of many 
 nations for investment in China. It may be open 
 to criticism on some grounds; but let us give credit 
 where credit is earned. Such an arrangement tends 
 to do away with "spheres of influence," with the 
 seeming necessity for keeping up armament and a 
 state of passive warfare in order to protect export 
 
PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 155 
 
 capital. It squares with the international finance 
 of the future. 
 
 Last but not least, we Americans have it in our 
 power to abolish that secret diplomacy which, every- 
 one agrees, makes toward wars. We cannot have 
 much secret diplomacy ourselves, since all our inter- 
 national agreements must be thrashed out and rati- 
 fied in the Senate, and so published. The trend of 
 the period, fortunately, is against the gum-shoe 
 method of arriving at national understandings which 
 become in due time misunderstandings. Really, 
 monarchs before the great war had not nearly so 
 much irresponsible power as diplomats; and the 
 right to conceal their agreements from their people 
 was their best tool. That is changing. Great 
 Britain, once as much a sinner as the rest, has but 
 lately registered and published with the League of 
 Nations the twenty-one treaties and agreements 
 which she has made since the war, has given her 
 national word of honor that she is holding nothing 
 back. Even before we enter some kind of associa- 
 tion of nations, we have probably the power to end 
 much of the secret diplomacy. We need merely 
 announce that we will not recognize any treaty which 
 has not been published to the world. 
 
 Yet — returning to the kernel of the matter — we, 
 the citizens of the world, shall not find that the or- 
 ganization of law between nations is enough in itself 
 
156 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 to keep peace; just as within the nations of the 
 world law alone is not enough to prevent crime and 
 establish order. You may happen to see this morn- 
 ing a beautiful automobile which you would like to 
 own, standing unlocked and unguarded. Why don't 
 you jump in and drive away? First, because you 
 fear disagreeable consequences from the law. The 
 police will chase you, probably catch you, eventually 
 put you in jail. But is that the only reason? No; 
 you are restrained by an instinct first implanted in 
 your little, savage bosom at your mother's knee, and 
 intensified by your whole education — the feeling 
 that it is wrong to steal. In order to keep society 
 together, we need both these forces. 
 
 So it goes with this question of order and morality 
 among nations. We need the law; we need also 
 personal ethics — international morality. By the 
 forces of light which we have — churches, schools, 
 all associations of men for spiritual and intellectual 
 ends — we need to strengthen the belief that a state, 
 including your own, can do wrong, that between 
 nations there is such a thing as live and let live, that 
 humanity is greater than mere race. 
 
 This does not mean abolishing the sentiment of 
 patriotism. There are two conceptions of that 
 noble old emotion. One ends at the mental condi- 
 tion of Germany in 1914 — the state for the state's 
 sake, your hand ever on your sword to protect her 
 honor and her interests, though every person in the 
 state be rendered less happy by the process. The 
 
PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 157 
 
 other regards the nation as an agency for the great- 
 est good of the greatest number. He who follows 
 this conception takes his pride not in his nation's 
 hollow victories of arms but in her achievements of 
 order, common prosperity, art, science, industry. 
 The one is the old-fashioned patriotism, grown in 
 the twentieth century to a world-menace; the other 
 is the patriotism of the future. 
 
 Again let me make a human comparison. In all 
 times poets have sung of the nation as the Mother, 
 of its citizens as her sons and daughters. Now you 
 may interpret your love for your mother in two 
 ways, one sane, the other a little insane. You may 
 work peacefully to keep her happy and well-housed 
 and well-fed. This, I suppose, states the attitude 
 of most of us toward our mothers. But of course 
 you may go round with a pistol in your pocket, al- 
 ways ready to start a fight with anyone who may 
 say that she is not the best of mothers, or watching 
 for an opportunity to hold up a shop and steal the 
 fur coat which she happens to want. So, I suppose, 
 the savage expressed his love for his mother in the 
 days before the law; in recent ages we have had 
 less and less patience with this form of filial de- 
 votion. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE TEMPTER 
 
 Now, my America, I will take you to an exceed- 
 ing high mountain; I will show you all the kingdoms 
 of the world and the glory of them. 
 
 What an opportunity we have in this year 1921 ! 
 Here we sit in the midst of our Continent, great and 
 rich as all Western Europe. Almost are we un- 
 scathed by the war, while the others which were 
 Powers but six years ago struggle now with an- 
 archy and bankruptcy. The power of Powers has 
 been given into our hands. 
 
 The British navy once held mastership of the 
 seas. We can now take mastership ourselves. 
 Ships are made of steel; the great steel-producing 
 nation may if it wishes be the great naval nation. And 
 steel is made of coal and iron. While the British 
 coal measures ever shrink, we have only begun to 
 tap ours; while the British struggle for imported 
 iron ore, we mine more than we need. And so 
 clever are we at mass-production that we make more 
 steel to the man and to the furnace than any other 
 people of the world. Great Britain kept her navy 
 stronger than that of any two other powers; we, 
 
 158 
 
THE TEMPTER 159 
 
 with less effort, may keep ours stronger than that 
 of all the other powers. 
 
 Think, too, of our military potentiality! We 
 may, if we will, summon to the colors more soldiers 
 than France, Germany and Belgium put together. 
 And what soldiers! Beside our stalwart divisions, 
 their comrades on the European battlefields looked 
 scrawny. We have learned war, now; the Ameri- 
 can army has been brought up to date. We have 
 at this instant more munitions, lying greased and 
 ready in storage, than any other nation on earth. 
 We have more manufacturing power for new mu- 
 nitions than any other two nations. Back of 
 it all, we have the American ingenuity which gave 
 the world so many of its industrial inventions in the 
 nineteenth century. We, of all, will know best 
 how to keep ahead of the new warfare. Did we 
 not invent Lewisite gas? Did we not show how 
 aeroplane engines, hitherto manufactured painfully 
 by hand, could be poured out by machine processes, 
 like Ford cars? 
 
 South from our borders to the isthmus runs a suc- 
 cession of undeveloped countries, as rich and nearly 
 as large as our own national domain. They need 
 capital; we are exporting capital faster and faster. 
 Here lies much profit for us all — if we can keep the 
 field exclusive. Our diplomacy, if backed by the 
 unprecedented military power we have at command, 
 can keep it exclusive. Then, some day when we 
 hold a tight financial grip on Mexico, Guatemala 
 
160 THE NEXT WAR 
 
 and the rest, there may follow — incidents. We may 
 find it necessary to go down and take these countries 
 over — as a means of defending Americans and 
 American capital abroad. Why not? Is not our 
 civilization better than that of Mexico and Guate- 
 mala? Will not the inhabitants be higher and bet- 
 ter if we take over their responsibilities and make 
 them Americans? 
 
 Canada lies to our North; very rich in resources, 
 less developed than we are; inhabited by people 
 with the same language as ours, of very much the 
 same habits of thought. When we have the domi- 
 nant navy, perhaps the British Empire may break 
 up; perhaps Canada may wish to throw in her lot 
 with us, either as a member of our Confederation 
 or as a close ally. West of us lies the Pacific; with 
 our dominant fleet, we may make it an American 
 lake. 
 
 What national greatness, what glory! "Domin- 
 ion over palm and pine" — why, we shall hold do- 
 minion over Arctic tundra and tropical jungle. No 
 empire, whether it be Rome of the second century 
 or Spain of the sixteenth or Great Britain of the 
 nineteenth, ever held complete, undisputed mastery 
 of its own continent. But we shall. The old Spain 
 of the Philips called the Mediterranean "Mare 
 Nostrum" — our sea — the little Mediterranean 1 
 Our sea will be the Pacific, mightiest of all oceans. 
 With what a thrill may the schoolboy of 1950 sa- 
 
THE TEMPTER 161 
 
 lute our flag, symbol of such power and glory as 
 never was since history began ! 
 
 So was Germany led to an exceeding high moun- 
 tain. Germany listened to the tempter and chose 
 the kingdoms of the world. And Germany in 
 1921 . . . 
 
 Ah, but the tempter never lets you read to the 
 end of the chapter; never shows you the whole 
 picture. Behind these gorgeous visions floating in 
 rosy mist lurk death . . . poverty . . . starva- 
 tion . . . despair ... a civilization become offal 
 and ashes. He does not show you these; he knows 
 that he is at war with the purposes of eternity. 
 
 THE END 
 
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