The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1922-1965, 1933-10-07
THE NEXT WAR


York City, the convention assembled in
Washington by the National Council for the
Prevention of War, the coming of Henry Bar
busse to the United States to promote anti
war sentiments and the dangerous situation in
Europe all combine to call attention to the
possibility of war and to the necessity of
arousing public sentiment to oppose it,
Nothing is likely to be more effective in
awakening people to the menace Of war than
to consider rather candidly and realistically
the probable character Of another World war.
To help in this matter we now have at our
disposal the magnificent effort along this line
made by H. G. Wells in his latest book, THE
Shape of Things to Come" Here he portrays
the next great World war which occupies the
decade from 1910 to 1850. For this task I
think almost any one will concede that no one
else living matches Mr. Wells, with his combi-
nation of relevant knowledge and prophetic
powers.
We do not have space here to describe in
detail the military episodes of the war The
powder magazine is touched off when one of
Hitler's followers shoots Polish Jew whom he
believes is insulting him but actually is ad-
justing an ill-ftting set of false teeth Poland
and Germany make war upon each other and
then Italy attacks Yugoslavia Three years
later Russia attacks Poland France attacks
central Europe, and all of eastern and
southern Europe is drawn into the conflict
Great Britain and the northern states remain
neutral.
There is no decisive conflict because in
the air conditions do not exist which make
possible final and annihilating battle After
1913 the struggle settles down into war of
attriton
''The attacks on social order increased in
malignancy as the impossibility of any mill
tary decision became manifest. Crops and
forests were deliberately fired, entertainments
smashed low-lying regions flooded, gas and
water supplies destroyed. The aviators would
start off to look for a crowd and bomb it. It
became as cruel as the fighting of ferrets"
Every able-bodied adult not engaged in
fighting or making munitions is pressed into
forced labor on the excavations for bomb shell
tiers and in the reconstruction of buildings to
withstand gas and high explosives. Chain
gangs on such work are very common and
Sinking is summarily punished
The air raids themselves bring terrible
havoc in their wake:
THE big air raids seem to have been alto
gether horrible. They we're much more dread
full than the air raids of the World war. They
began with a nightmare of warning maroons,
sirens hooters and the shrill whistles of cyclist
scouts, then swarms of frantic people running
to and fro all pride and dignity gone, seeking
the nearest shelter and aid and they ended
for most of their victims in an extremity of
physical suffering"
Descriptions of these air raids and its re-
suits vigorously are excluded from the news
papers as pacifist propaganda and destructive
of the morale of the combatants. But in a
letter of Sinclair Lewis, who is in Berlin as a
war reporter, there appears graphic passage
describing the immediate aftermath of an air
raid:
I'VE went down Inter den Linden and
along the Sieges Alice, and the bodies of poo
pie we're lying everywhere, men, women and
children, not scattered evenly, but punched
together very curiousy in heaps, as though
their last effort had been to climb on to each
other for help.
This attempt to get close up to some one
seems to be characteristic of death by this
particular gas. Something must happen in
the mind. Every one was crumpled up in the
same fashion and nearly all had vomitted
blood. The stencil was dreadful, although all
this multitude had been alive twenty-four
hours ago. The body corrupts at once. The
archway into the park was almost impass-
able :.
The morale of the armies becomes pro-
gressively lower and characterized more and
more by running away, desertion, apathy,
drunkenness, raping, plundering and malignant
cruelty
In due time mutinies, assertions and Com
munistic uprisings force the authorities to
end the tragic farce
In the spring of 1949 under the leadership
of President Benes, hostilitieS are brought to
an end. Each power remains in possession of
the territory it was occupying and there never
is formal treaty. The war has so reduced
the resistance of Europeans that the continent
is swept by series of postwar epidemics
which destroy more people than the horrible
warfare which had preceded
All in ALL this section of Mr. Wells work
may be recommended heartily to those who
want another good war to boost the price of