There is a certain mournful irony to be found in the fact that the wholesale breakdown of the last of the innumerable Limitation of Armaments discussions was promptly followed by the Lisbon Conference, assembled to try and give some sort of reality and cohesion to the concept of a European Army. To pretend that the collapse of these particular pourparlers was unprecedented or even unanticipated would be ingenuous. But the reason why every disarmament, or limitation of armaments, convention has invariably ended in failure, is the concern of everyone, and not least of the Service-man. For, as the active guardian rather than the lurking enemy of peace, the Service-man has a vested interest in anything that would contribute to the preservation of international harmony.
War was defined by Clausewitz as the extension of policy by other means. But in these days the term policy, when it is not employed to euphuize what, in plain terms, is nothing less than ruthless imperialistic expansionism, is little more than a synonym for unrelenting competition carried to the point of open strife. “For man is unwise and curiously planned”; and there are few people who are not unconsciously or openly influenced by recollection of Bismarck’s grim comment, “You cannot afford to be a carp in a pond where there are pike about.”
It is the systole of man’s innate longing for peace alternating with the diastole of his urge to enrich or aggrandize himself at the expense of his neighbor which renders the search for a satisfactory method of bringing about disarmament, or even the limitation of armaments, such a failure- haunted quest.
Even the most cursory examination of past history makes it immediately apparent that this reciprocal rhythm has furnished the perennial trouble-making paradox at each stage of mankind’s progression from the Dark Ages to the present day.
Following classical precedent, mediaeval thought, with its robust, uncompromising acceptance of the fact that strife is endemic in fallible human nature, only anticipated Bismarck’s candid admission that war lies in the logic of history. But mediaeval morality no less sought, by every means available, including the widespread and immensely powerful influence of the contemporary Church, to minimize conflict’s worst barbarities and ensure for the injured, the captive, and the innocent non-combatant the maximum of protection. The sanctity of consecrated buildings and their immunity from pillage, the inviolability of women from assault and of private property from plunder, even the privilege of scholars, under bond of good behavior, to attend seats of learning in an enemy country in time of war, were all the subject of legislation in those “Ordonnances of War” by which the leaders of the western European nations swore to abide.
There were many infractions of the statutes, as, of course, was only to be expected; for mankind invariably professes more than it can consistently accomplish. But whenever backsliders were detected and brought to notice, they were punished with exemplary speed and severity. All in all, Lecky was guilty of little exaggeration when he wrote that the mediaeval aim was “to transform the brutalised Pagan fighting-man into the idealised, chivalrous Christian man-at- arms, uniting all the force and fire of the ancient warrior with something of the tenderness and humility of the Christian Saint.”
It was a lofty and exalted aspiration, which not only entailed regulation of the manner in which war was conducted, but sought to exercise control over the actual weapons with which it was fought.1 These for the most part were the elementary tools of sword, lance, dagger, and mace; although the English were rapidly attaining a dread reputation for their proficiency with the first real “weapon of precision”—the long-bow.
With the early days of the 12th century, however, the news rapidly spread of a new and deadly implement, brought back from Crete by returning Crusaders and known as the arbalest or cross-bow. The first hand- weapon to employ mechanism for its discharge, its appearance was greeted with every symptom of resentment and alarm. Indeed it is no exaggeration to affirm that the general fear and indignation its use aroused fully anticipated the outcry excited by the Germans’ introduction of poison gas into warfare in the April of 1915.2
In due course, the Second Lateran Council, assembled in Rome in 1139, took the matter into serious consideration. Eventually they promulgated an edict which sternly forbade the employment of the cross-bow in war—except against infidels!—in any circumstances whatsoever; solemnly denouncing it as “a weapon hateful to God and too murderous for Christian men to employ against one another.” Confident that this ecclesiastical “pragmatic sanction” would be sufficient to banish the cross-bow from the battlefield forthwith, the world in general heaved a profound sigh of relief, and praise for the Churchmen’s ruling was widespread. Inspired by the same lofty desire to spare conflict the barbarity this novel and deadly weapon threatened to involve, Magna Carta even went so far as to embody a clause expressly forbidding the English King’s engagement of alien cross-bowmen—there were virtually no native practitioners—in any campaign in which he might be engaged. For a fleeting moment it really seemed as though this solemn and awe-inspiring attempt to bring about a limitation of armaments would prove successful.
For with all its vast powers of intimidation marshalled in support of its pronunciamento, the ban of the Church was not one lightly to be disregarded.
But even in the days wherein the liability to incur the dire penalties of anathema and excommunication acted as a real and powerful deterrent, the reluctance of military leaders to abandon an instrument of war of demonstrable usefulness is perfectly comprehensible. In the outcome, the cross-bow continued to be made use of on the widest scale, even by the otherwise devout. Nor is it easy to justify censorious criticism of such heterodox but courageous defiance of spiritual authority. The weapon existed; the advantages attaching to its employment were believed, however erroneously, to be enormous.3 Above all, it was impossible to ensure that, whatever his previous promises and protestations, some untrustworthy antagonist would not produce it suddenly at a crucial moment.
Moreover, it is to be borne in mind that the Church’s inconsistency of attitude—in blessing the banners for one war while placing another under interdict; in actually encouraging the use of the anathematised cross-bow against the infidel occupants of the Holy Land,4 while sternly forbidding its appearance elsewhere—had gone far towards undermining its hitherto paramount authority.
With its ban on the use of the arbalest in European warfare almost universally ignored, the Church was ultimately driven to compromise—always a dangerous procedure for an authority with pretensions to omnipotence.
The Synod of Elne, at its meeting in 1027, by advocating a Treva Dei (Truce of God) had already sought to suspend all warlike activities from noon on Saturday until dawn on Monday. Cowering under the dread shadow of the cross-bow, the ecclesiastical authorities now sought to extend the “breathing space” so that no martial activity should be undertaken between the Wednesday morning and the following Monday morning. By this measure the Church, having failed to bring about an actual limitation of armaments, sought to minimize the injury they might cause by curtailing the period during which they could be employed. But, like most face-saving formulas, this proposal simply begged the question.
For a speedy end to operations was amongst the first of a mediaeval commander’s aims. For the first forty days of a campaign—a span subsequently extended to three months—were fought by troops entirely responsible for their own upkeep and subsistence. With the expiration of this period, however, the whole force became a direct charge upon its leader’s personal resources, which for the most part were slender in the extreme. In these circumstances the obvious inducement to get the business over as speedily as possible hardly calls for emphasis. It followed that strict compliance with the terms of the extended Treva Dei recommended by the Church was very seldom observed. Even when it was, the “cooling off” interval, instead of diminishing ferocity, enabled hostilities to be recommenced by well- fed, well-rested, and thoroughly reinvigorated fighting-men, who had at each other with redoubled ardor, strenuously wielding any and every lethal weapon upon which they could lay their hands.
And so men continued to fall with the cross-bow’s steel quarrel in their vitals, on every battlefield of Europe. A well-intentioned attempt at the limitation of armaments had gone down in a losing fight with the twin adversaries of mistrust and determination to outdo the other fellow, if and when it came to blows. The Lateran Council had obviously overplayed its hand; a tendency at all times common to international bodies in which a soaring idealism, combined with a gratifying sense of power, tends to numb the workaday sense of reality.
As might only be expected, the next innovation in warfare, in the form of gunpowder, provoked immediate and vociferous protest, far exceeding that which, in more modern times, greeted the appearance of the atom bomb. For, after all, however shattering and awe-inspiring in its effect, the atom bomb was only the latest and most powerful of a whole array of missiles, the ultimate extension of artillery. But gunpowder burst upon the world with all the terrorizing effect of something hitherto unexperienced and unparalleled, something for which there was no yardstick of comparison; and denunciation of the “hell’s brew” knew no bounds.
The grounds for complaint, however, varied widely. On the one hand, fierce indignation was expressed by those who perceived in the introduction of weapons of percussion, that could be fired as well by “simple folk” as by “gentle folk,” a levelling tendency that was bound to end in war’s dangerous proletarianization. For as Carlyle was to put it, “gunpowder made all men alike tall.” In other directions there were many to deplore, with Shakespeare, the added carnage that the use of “this villainous saltpetre, . . . digg’d out of the bowels of the harmless earth” would inevitably entail. In some quarters, indeed, resentment at the introduction of this new element in warfare took drastic and ferocious form. Bayard, the “chevalier sans peur el sans raproche,” shot captured arquebusiers (or musketeers) out of hand. The great 15th century condottieri, Gian Paolo Vitelli, blinded them, when taken prisoner, and cut off their hands. The French Marshal, Blaise de Monluc, roundly denounced the arquebus as “the Devil’s own invention to make us murther one another.” Cervantes, whose satirical Don Quixote is said to have “smiled chivalry away,” could still find it in himself to denounce so unromantic if essentially practical an innovation; while Milton, pausing in his labors on Paradise Lost, joined with Ariosto5 in attributing the appearance of the sinister black powder, and the weapons that employed it, to the direct agency of his Satanic Majesty. But despite draconic reprisals and shrill public outcry, to forswear gunpowder’s use was a form of delimiting armaments to which no one was seriously prepared to subscribe. So gunpowder-charged weapons soon came to dominate the battlefield; and the glistening ebon grains continued as the primary constituent of victory until superseded by the far more potent propellants of the immediate past.
But still the urge at least for the limitation of armaments, if not for disarmament in toto, persisted undiscouraged. The Council of Trent, which assembled in solemn conclave in 1524, devoted much of its time to consideration of the problem. But lofty and well-intentioned as were its recommendations, the Church’s old pre-Reformation powers of intimidation had lost their force, and its humanitarian counsel was ignored with something not far removed from unanimity. Certainly they exercised remarkably scant restraint over the conduct of the Thirty Years’ War, wherein every lethal device known to man was employed with the utmost ruthlessness; while every suggestion that victory should be tempered with magnanimity was openly laughed to scorn. “Do you think my men are nuns?” demanded the iron-fisted Tilly, when reproached for having put to the sword some thirty thousand of the hapless inhabitants of Magdeburg. With central Europe reduced to an arid wasteland, whose death roll was close on 12,000,000; with the population of Bohemia reduced from just under 2,000,000 to a mere 700,000; with one district of Thuringia able to show no more than 627 tottering, smoke-blackened ruins out of the 1,717 snug homes originally making up its nineteen smiling villages, it was clear that “ideological” wars—and in this category wars of religion unquestionably fall—give little heed to the councils of restraint arrived at around a conference table.
If further proof of this desideratum were needed, it was furnished on a lamentably unstinted scale during the “ideological” conflict between Charles I and the English Parliamentary forces under Fairfax and Cromwell. For the capture of Drogheda in 1649 was characterized by a ruthlessness and sadistic ferocity, entirely without mercy for man, woman, or child, that remained unmatched until the massacre of their Circassian dependents by the Russians between 1860 and 1864—when a miserable remnant of professing Christians were forced to seek refuge with the infidel Turk.6
Ironically enough, responsibility for warfare’s perennial recurrence is found, time and again, to rest squarely on the shoulders of the very “do-gooders” and “uplifters” to whom even the thought of strife is convulsively abhorrent. For the one thing they refuse obstinately to recognize is that the tendency throughout all history has been for man’s ingenuity to outstrip his morals. And although the drastic post-hostilities scaling down of personnel and armaments is largely motivated by an unwise and suspect theory of retrenchment, the process is too often given added impetus out of deference to those self-styled humanists who, from the days of the Peloponnesian War onwards, have feverishly insisted that each new outbreak of conflict should be hailed as “the war to end war.” With all the messianic fervor characteristic of single-track minds, they remain completely oblivious of the fact that the formulation of peace treaties is the traditional way by which renewed strife is fomented. They are equally incapable of realizing that the twin enemies of peace are excessive disarmament and a too stringent military economy. It is in vain that they are reminded that, while a strong man may lay aside his arms, he does not cast them away— nor let them rust. Quite obviously, disarmament itself can never promote peace, it can only be the outcome of it.
This fact is frequently lost sight of; but it was never obscured more completely than during the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat and exile in 1814. For the whole course of the discussions conducted by the Conference of Vienna was bedevilled by the intrusion of Tsar Alexander’s projected Holy Alliance. Fond child of the crack-brained Julie Krüdener and the despot of all the Russias, the grandiose project’s fixed determination to maintain the principle of imperial expansion—solely for the benefit of Holy Russia, bien entendu—hardly squared with its pious recommendation for an all-round limitation of armaments. Small wonder that the whole pretentious, gimcrack conception was rejected by Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, as “a loud-sounding nothing,” and dismissed by Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary, as “a mixture of sublime mysticism and arrant absurdity.” As it so happened, Napoleon’s startling reappearance on the scene called for a hurried expansion, rather than a progressive scaling down, of armaments; although reductions in the British forces in post-Waterloo days were on such drastic lines as seriously to affect the whole structure of the Army, with consequences only too painfully apparent in the subsequent campaign in the Crimea.7
In the general atmosphere of warweariness and disillusionment with all things military that followed on the world conflict of 1914-18, the assembly of a Disarmament Conference at Geneva, under the auspices of that monument of impotence, the League of Nations, was in the general philosophy of the times. Once it was in session, febrile hopes arose that some modus operandi might be evolved whereby the victor nations would be relieved, at least in part, of the crushing burden of armaments which in the prevailing circumstances they felt it incumbent on them to maintain. But, as the Kremlin had designed, the bland proposal of the Russian delegate, Litvinov, for the universal abolishment of all armed forces, proved such a cause of bewildered embarrassment to the assembled Powers as to throw them into a state of hopeless confusion from which they never fully recovered. Even a reduction in armaments, on examination, was found to be impracticable, since no one could agree about who was to disarm with what. Thus Britain, at this moment,8 could see no valid reason for scrapping a lot of useful hulls the better to scale-down to parity with the United States in the particular class of secondary vessel under discussion. For at this particular juncture the needs of Empire defencepmposed a far greater burden on the British Navy than that borne by the contemporary fleets wearing the Stars and Stripes.
Even so, as the outcome of the Washington Conference and subsequent pourparlers, culminating in the London Naval Agreements of 1930, the British Navy was so denuded of escort vessels for convoy protection that the 1939-45 conflict witnessed the loss of approximately 15,000,000 tons of allied shipping, carrying cargoes worth something like £2,000,000,000; not to mention the needless sacrifice of the lives of thousands of devoted merchant seamen. All this owing to virtually unimpeded action by those enemy submarines which in 1937—a mere two years before the outbreak of war—Sir Samuel Hoare, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had airily dismissed as “no longer a danger to the British Empire.”9
Were the lessons of this easily predictable outcome to their myopic utopianism ever assimilated and stored away for future reference in the “do-gooders’ ” and “uplifters’ ” yeasty minds? On current evidence, apparently not. Did it ever occur to them that but for Roosevelt’s bold “destroyers-for- bases” deal, the costs occasioned by the gap between the initial inadequacy of the forces at disposal and their subsequent expansion, would have been immeasurably higher? Again, the answer would appear to be in the negative.
So far as the genesis of the disastrous process, the Geneva Disarmament Conference itself, was concerned, the snarling refusal of the French to demobilize their very considerable forces and their argument that they were maintained purely for defensive purposes, was called into painful ridicule by the discovery that their most recent “tank” had been dubbed a char d’assaut!
In the outcome, British military weakness and political pusillanimity combined with a Gallic hesitation indistinguishable from sheer timidity permitted Hitler not only to march into the Rhineland unopposed but to remain there unmolested. At the same time the professional pacifists yelled and fulminated for that military action by the British Army which they had rendered impossible by reducing it to virtual impotence.
At Geneva, it was not the bewildered chairman of the Disarmament Conference, Arthur Henderson, but the Spanish delegate, Senor de Madariaga, who neatly exposed the Kremlin representative’s secret design, when he sought and obtained the conclave’s permission to regale them with a little parable.
“The story is told,” the Spaniard suavely informed his listeners, “of a conference of beasts that once discussed the question of disarmament. The lion spoke first and, looking at the eagle, suggested the abolition of wings. The eagle, turning to the bull, suggested the abolition of horns. The bull, in his turn, regarded the tiger and demanded the elimination of claws. It remained for the bear to speak, and he proposed the total abolition of every means of attack and defence, so that he might take them all in his loving embrace.”
With this refreshing breath of reality to clear the mists of counterfeit utopianism in which the conference table had been enshrouded, there was nothing left but for M. Litvinov to pack his bags and depart whence he had come. In the event, all that emerged from the protracted disarmament wrangle at Geneva was the progressive military enfeeblement of Britain and France and the wholesale rearmament of Russia and Germany.
The plain truth of the matter is, you cannot tinker with the question of disarmament; for partial disarmament, on whatever scale, simply begs the question. Disarmament is indivisible, or it is nothing. For even in the highly unlikely event of all the Powers agreeing to eliminate, say, all atomic weapons from their armory, and, even more unlikely, faithfully abiding by the compact, the outcome would simply be a more concentrated attempt to increase the lethal power of such instruments of destruction as had not come under ban. All that came out of the temporary suppression of the cross-bow, for example, was the assiduous cultivation of what proved to be the far more deadly weapon of the long-bow, which gave the archer—such as fought at Creçy and Agincourt—a dominance over the battlefield which persisted until the introduction of missile weapons whose propellant was gunpowder.
Moreover, any agreement to disarm, or even to impose a limitation on armaments, must presuppose subsequent bilateral inspection, to ensure that the terms of the contract are not being surreptitiously abrogated. But where this sort of inspection is concerned, evasion has been proved to have been only too easy. For that matter, too thorough a probing would be furiously resented alike by a nation that genuinely had nothing to hide as by one guilty of the concealment of an illicit store of arms. Even with the conquered Germany of the days following the 1914-18 conflict, it will be recalled, the Inter-Allied Control Commission entirely failed to unearth some 4,000,000 rifles, 39,000 field guns, and a comparable number of machine guns. Even such conspicuous objects as the huge railway gun which had shelled Paris at a range of eighty miles, and the famous “Big Bertha,” the 15-inch naval gun that “told Dunkirk the time,” contrived to elude discovery and dismantlement. With a nation determined on concealment, inspection can be nothing more than a source of exacerbation on the one side and infuriating frustration on the other.
Sweeping aside foolish pretence, actually, of course, there can be no such thing as disarmament. For even in the phantasmagorically unlikely event of a world-wide effort at the destruction of all military weapons, actual or potential, down to the very last walking stick, the last shovel, pick, pitch- fork, scythe-blade, and kitchen knife, man would still have his fists. And sooner or later someone would snatch a club from a hedge or resort to the heap of stones at the roadside. And there would follow an immediate endeavor to contrive something more effective, more lethal, ,than “natural” weapons, leading, albeit from scratch, to yet another fiercely competitive arms race. And in the long run it can matter little to the dead whether they are slaughtered with half a brick or by some highly-complicated product of man’s misguided sense of inventiveness.
There is another consideration of which Service leaders are acutely conscious, however much it may be lost on synthetic humanitarians.
In warfare, the fighting-man’s morale is very largely based upon his belief in the superiority of his own weapons over those of his opponent. Deliberately, through partial disarmament, to deny him the best and latest tools of his trade, to abandon to enemy use, on over-scrupulous conscientious grounds, some instrument of war of proven usefulness, would be to surrender the initiative in the vital matter of morale, with consequences which might very well prove fatal.10 Courage is not enough. Even the fanatic intrepidity of the Sudanese fuzzi-wuzzy, with his spear and broadsword, and the reckless pluck of the Filipino ladrone, with his two-foot bolo, were not proof against the shattering effect of rapid-fire weapons of precision; with the result that their morale1 wilted and their fighting value diminished appreciably in quality.
What proved to be David’s master- weapon of the sling would have been of little use to him had Goliath been armed with a Thompson sub-machine gun. Cunning and brawn by themselves will not suffice. The “factory” war which science has imposed upon the world has been, and will continue to be, won by the side with the best and latest weapons—nothing barred.
Nations are armed because they differ; they do not differ because they are armed. This hard, uncompromising fact should be self-evident, but it is too often obscured by woolly-minded and all-too-successful attempts to make things appear other than as they are. For as Professor Leopold Schwarzschild has been at pains to emphasize, “In international politics there is a fatal tendency to consider things only from the point of view of a moralizing, preaching, censuring ‘it should not be’, instead of from the point of view of a realistic ‘it is so’.” Too many, self- hypnotized by an obstinate habit of thought, persuade themselves to starry-eyed agreement with the poet’s highfalutin’ “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?” Unfortunately, experience has shown that the man who starts reaching out for heaven invariably ends by raising hell. There was more cold truth in disillusioned old Clemenceau’s assertion that “essentially, human nature is always the same,” than in President Wilson’s soaring affirmation that “human nature has entered a new phase of its development”—pronounced just twenty years before the outbreak of yet another world war.
A little reflection makes it abundantly clear that it is not so much armaments as inequality of armaments that puts a premium on war. So long as there is anything like parity between the armories of the major Powers, war becomes too great a risk for any to embark upon other than the imbecile or the irresponsibly desperate. In effect, an even-spread of armaments throughout the world permits that “maintenance of a just equilibrium between the members of the family of nations as should prevent any one of them becoming sufficiently strong to impose its will on the rest,” which was Castlereagh’s definition of what constituted a reliable balance of power.
For while it is conceivable that the leading World States could be equally strong, it is entirely inconceivable that they could be equally weak.
It is the obligation of a nation’s leaders to legislate for things as they are, not as they may be in some hypothetically more enlightened future; always remembering that,
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blest.”
For a government to give official countenance to disarmament, or limitation of armaments proposals, is for it to encourage what will inevitably turn out to be nothing but a snare and delusion. “So long as people are talking about disarmament,” declared one of the more myopic of our professional peace- mongers recently, “the chances of war are lessened.” The exact contrary is far nearer the truth. For the immediate effect of “talking about disarmament” is that slackening of effort towards rearmament which plays straight into the hands of those who are only biding their time to take unbridled advantage of another’s weakness. To the predatory, the opportunist, and the conscienceless, a country disarmed is not so much a shining example as an irresistible temptation.
Disarmament, or even the limitation of armaments, can never be anything but a dangerous pipe-dream until the root cause of war has been removed. And the root cause of war is to be found in sheer unqualified greed, no matter what form it assumes by way of disguise. Nationally as well as individually, the “have-not” who becomes a “have” all too quickly turns into a “have-not- enough.” The grievance of today is swiftly transmogrified into the covetousness of tomorrow. And avarice, in whatever form it may develop, and no matter by what specious economic top-dressing it is euphuized, leads straight to conflict.
Equally cogent is the desideratum that the constant factor in warfare is the perpetual search for that improvement in weapon-power which will lessen the risk of failure for one side while increasing it for the other. For so sedulously has modern science been harnessed to carnage that as Major- General J. F. C. Fuller has said, “tools, or weapons, if only the right ones can be discovered, form ninety per cent of victory.”
From this the conclusion is inescapable, that conferences for the suppression or limitation of armaments are pernicious in themselves, since they raise false hopes foredoomed to degenerate in a welter of sour frustration. They are equally disastrous in their consequences, since by encouraging weakness they pave the way for the very warfare—predatory, unscrupulous, and opportunist—they so earnestly but maladroitly seek to avert.
Wellington was fully aware of this grim fact when, in 1820, surfeited with victory as he was wearied with war, he yet possessed the integrity to raise his voice in warning. “There is nothing so necessary,” he wrote, “as to look forward to future wars and to our early preparation for them. Our wars have always been long and ruinous in expense, because we made no effort to prepare for operations which would have brought them to a close, for years after they had commenced.”
It is almost needless to add that the Duke’s words of wisdom, sent forth with all the authority of his immense experience, fell on ears whose deafness was as wilful as it was inconsequent.
It is not, of course, the business of Service leaders to animadvert about peace, but to bend their energies to the prevention of war. They can best fulfil this obligation—if not thwarted by political skulduggery or hysterical public opinion—by rendering their forces too strong for anyone but a fool or a desperado to attack them.
Planned weakness has been tried with results that redound little to the credit of its proponents. The alternative of organized strength is one in which all experience demonstrates that far greater confidence can be reposed. For even if strength cannot be guaranteed to prevent war, at least it can be relied upon to ensure victory should strife break out.
However exalted his sense of moral rectitude, the rabbit is in poor case in an argument with a stoat.
Peace cannot emerge from the deliberations of politicians; it can only germinate in the hearts of men. If there are to be disarmament conferences at all, they should aim, not at the delimination of mere weapons of war, but at the restraint of men’s bitter rivalries and competing greeds.
As things are, there is nothing but virtue to be found in Washington’s warning cry, “The best method of preserving peace is to be prepared for war.”
1. Many of these humanitarian provisions were codified in what was known as the “Peace of God” (Pax Dei), to which all nations owing allegiance to the Church of Rome nominally guaranteed their adherence.
2. A gas attack, of sorts, by sulphur fumes, was a feature of the siege of Delium (424 B.C.); while in the investment of Ambracia (189 B.C.) the Aetolians are said to have smoked out the besieging Romans by burning feathers in their countermines. But the Germans were the first belligerents to put gas-warfare on an organized footing. The British War Office’s rejection of Lord Cochrane’s specification for poison gas, at the time of the Crimea, was a concession to humanitarianism.
3. Actually, the cross-bow was painfully slow in action, while its quarrel, or bolt, was amazingly erratic in flight. Once its “surprise” value had been dissipated, it was recognized for the indifferent tool it was.
4. Rather as the late Ramsay Macdonald, as Premier, sought to prohibit aerial bombing—except against the rebellious tribes of the North-West Frontier Province of India!
5. Ariosto, one of the greatest of Italian writers, fairly let himself go on the subject of gunpowder:
“Oh, curs’d device! base implement of death!
Fram’d from the black Tartarean realms beneath!
By Beelzebub’s malicious art designed
To ruin all the race of human kind.”
It is interesting to speculate what he would have had to say about the atomic bomb!
6. The Anglo-Portuguese campaign of 1589, against the Spanish would-be usurper of Portugal's throne, was about the last military enterprise governed by the traditional “Ordonnances of War.”
7. American readers will scarcely need reminding that when a member of the convention assembled to formulate the Constitution of the United States solemnly suggested that the Standing Army should be restricted to “five thousand at any time,” Washington’s dry comment was, that the motion should be amended so as to provide that “no foreign enemy should invade the United States at any time with more than three thousand troops”!
8. Britain had already reduced her Standing Army by Cavalry Regiments, 61 batteries and companies of Artillery, 20 companies of Engineers, and 21 battalions of Infantry; while by 1922 the Navy had lost some 300,000 Officers and men; with comparable reductions in the Air Force.
9. In 1942, for every U-boat sunk the Allies lost 60,000 tons of shipping.
10. On this point, a small but illuminating example occurred in the early days of the 1914-18 war. The men of the Canadian Expeditionary Force were armed with the Ross rifle. An excellent weapon for match shooting, the Canadians soon discovered that it could not compare with the British Lee-Enfield for the rough work of active service. But it was only in the teeth of obstinate political opposition that the Canadians succeeded in getting themselves re-equipped with the weapon with which, as a secret vote disclosed, 96% of them were anxious to take into action. Their morale after re-equipment was a very different thing to what it had been while they were still armed with the distrusted Ross.