# The Next War: An Appeal to Common Sense/Chapter 5

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 aeroplane—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 category of fair game. We need but combine these three factors in our imaginations, and we have a probability of “the next war” between civilized and prepared 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 themselves 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 1918, “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 ​want.” Upon such sentiments the Allied world looked with some horror—then. Even the Germans somewhat withheld their hands. I cannot find that gas-bombardment was ever used on the cities behind the lines. Yet the Germans were preparing in 1918 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 aeroplanes 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 furnished by this general fire, the Germans proposed to send second and third waves of aeroplanes loaded with the heaviest bombs; they could pick their objectives 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 1919 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 elimination 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 capitals and great towns is not only a possibility but a strong probability—almost a certainty. Military ​stafis 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 metropolis to a necroplis. If any military man hesitates 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 prepared 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 appropriations for more defensive aeroplanes, said that “a few planes could visit New York as the central point of a territory 100 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 ​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 possible for this country to manufacture several thousand 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 simultaneously, there is no reason why he should not release 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 British army, said in discussing Colonel Fuller’s paper:
“It has been rather our tendency up to the ​present to look upon warfare from the retail point of view—of killing men by fifties or hundreds or thousands. 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 Government. 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 matter 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 unstimulated civilians to invent new machines or methods 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 ​toward discovering new ways of killing. And virtually, that improvement in warfare is already begun. 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 racing for victory, the savants of Europe had not the leisure to reach out toward the unknown. They worked with poison gas; that was already discovered, 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 alone, but will employ every force of nature that we can; and there is a tendency at present for progress in the development of the different forms of rays that can be turned to lethal purposes. We have 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. . . . prepare now . . . we must envisage these new forms of ​warfare, and as far as possible expend energy, time and money in encouraging our inventors and scientists to study the waging of war on a wholesale scale instead of . . . thinking so much about methods 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.
So much for civilian lives in “the next war.” What about soldier lives, when we come to kill by wholesale 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 contributed that improvement, as Germany contributed gas. It involved the combination of one device almost as old as warfare—armor—with two devices borrowed from the arts of peace—the gasolene engine and the caterpillar wheel. It was an instrument of the offensive in that it gave men and guns greater mobility; it was defensive in that it protected 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 1916 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 ​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. However, 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-projecting artillery will either be encased in tanks or, when it takes the open, generally mounted on the caterpillar wheel, which gives it far greater mobility, even over rough country, than the swiftest horse-drawn artillery. Designers of tanks and modern gun-carriages are of course studying to increase their speed. We may reasonably expect that even the heavy ​artillery 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 caterpillar 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-prepared France.
The attackers will probably dispense with a declaration of hostilities, following the precedent established 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 ​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 comparatively 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 remained; 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 ​bodies of armed men. These soldiers to whom I have talked believe that this old, basic rule of warfare 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 unmanned 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 defenders will fight these fleets with their own aeroplanes; 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 attacking aeroplanes get through to their objective, ​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 belligerents 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.
PROPOSED AIRCRAFT CARRIER
Estimated to cost $26,000,000
The amount of money two such ships will cost would provide an increase of $800 per year for five years in the salaries of 13,000 school teachers.
It is possible we shall have to do without properly paid teachers in order to prepare adequately for the next war.
But when you consider these methods of defence for civilian populations, you encounter special diffculties. In the next European war, shall we have all the inhabitants of Parts living in a coating of protective ointment, the mask ready to hand? Every line officer knows how hard it was to make disciplined soldiers keep on their masks in time of danger. ​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 military 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 provision 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 perfect defence. Colonel Fuller imagines “centres of defence”—fortresses, or something like them, rendered 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 “centres 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 these 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 ​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 preparing 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 people 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 manufactured 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 aeroplanes, 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 ​few days, you will have a sick enemy, easily conquered. 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 valorous 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 ministering 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, mysterious, 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 ​Germans, 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 begun the war with as many submarines as they manned in 1917, 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 1914 were as slow as a tub freighter; they could make only short dashes from their bases; they depended almost entirely on their torpedoes. Those of 1918 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 ​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. Germans 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 undoubtedly accomplish what Germany failed to accomplish in 1917 and 1918—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 unquestionably 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 ​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 discipline 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 gospel, the Germans did not cut off children’s hands.
​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, generous, 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.