Honolulu star-bulletin. [volume] (Honolulu [Oahu, Hawaii]) 1912-2010, 1917-09-19
War as a Mechanical Operation
dallas CTe1.) Morning News.I

is under the conditions that obtain the western
front is cogently suggested by the comment of Gen
eral Maurice, chief director of military operations
at the British war Office on the battle Of Flanders
To the lay mind, what has been accomplished by
two days fighting seems little and indefinite. But
General Maurice tells that this little nevertheless
attained "a definite line Of Objectivcs." The next
move he explained, is Ito determine anot,er objec-
tive, and then, after the customary process Of
preparation, to proceed similarly to achieve it,
The customary process of preparation is to
blast the enemy out of the lines into which he
has been driven. This is artillery task. 1t
means outlay of explosives that, in one day will
probably exceed the total required to win a ten
or twenty years ago. And then, with the enemy
blasted out, demOralized and more or less broken,
the infantry will move forward to possess itself
Iof the new position won by the artillery.
Mr.. Roger Babson, one of this countrv's foremost
statisticians, presented surprising figures the
other day the casualties of modern warfare as
it is carried IN on the western front. They were
surprising because of the low rate of mortality that
they disclosed. He showed. for example, that for
every man killed so far twenty nine have escaped
Even the chance of being wounded is made to APP
pear very much less in the cold light of statistics
than it under the lurid light with which the
reportorial descriptions of battle invest the opera
ton. Fourteen men out of every fifteen, Mr.. Bah
son says shave been safe so far" which must mean
that only one in fifteen of the engaged in the
war during the three years it has have been
wounded seriously.
These surprising figures are made less incredible
if the mechanical character of military operations
is duly impressed on the imagination. They aid
one in trying to appreciate what has been so often
observed that modern warfare or at least such war
fare is being carried the western front,
calls for more labor than fighting, more endurance
to the pains of toll than to those of wounds Orators
and rhetoricians will probably never be persuaded
to cease measuring the magnitude of war in terms
of blood, but the coldblooded statisicians apt
to prefer sweat as the individual uman cOntribu-
ton that most accurately expresses the fact. And
of course only small part of this oblation is made
on the battlefield. Far the greater part of it is
made hundreds and even thousands of miles from
the points where its force is exerted. There was a
noteworthy but probably unremarked circumstance
in the address which the kaiser issued the other day
on the occasion of the wars third anniversary. 1T
was his exhortation to the men and women and
children in the fields and shops of Germany, an
hortation which rivaled in length and fervor that
which he addressed to the soldiers the trenches.
parenthetical alluson was the utmost recognition
the workers have received in any of the preceding
imperial allocutions. Now they are commended
and besought sedulously and fervently are the
men in the trenches. Perhaps political consdera-
lions may have had something to do in moving the
kaiser to this unwonted degree of graciousness to-
ward the shop workers and the fe d workers But
they can hardly have been the only motives. That
the kaiser for the first time felt the expedence and
fitness of appraising their contribution at value
so nearly equal to that of the fighting men must
evidence in him growing sense of the fact that
bead Of sweat is not to be much less cherished by
war lord than is a drop of blood.
When this preeminent war lord the man who, if
his reputation does not belle him, makes war the
highest proof and exhibition of human heroism,
thus exats the effort of the obscure and begrimed
aborer to plane so little if any lower than that
of the bedecked and helmeted fighter, we should
seem to have come within visible distance of goal
marked by dreamers; to have come, in other words,
TO the eve Of establishment which will perpe-
tuate peace by stripping of most of the glories
with which it has been invested by imagination.
One need not disparage the heroism of the men at
the battlefront to shrink warfare to the proportions
of huge mechanical operation, whose outcome
fixes as much superiority of the sordid forces of
finance and industry as it does of courage and for
titude. Perhaps war will lose it's popularity, its
vogue when it comes to be stripped of the mask and
gaudy habiliments with which it has been decked
by the imagination of orators and poets who rhap-
sodize it in terms of blood. Once the world comes
to envisage war as so largely mere mechanical
operation whose cost is to be calculated in terms
of productive energy it may set itself prosily to
some computations from which it will get fixed
determination to have no more of it.
Sweden can hardly relish the discovery that her