Evening Star Newspaper, July 5, 1936, Page 65

Magazine Section The world is feverishly rearming, and peace crusaders shudder. HE whole world is feverishly rearming on a gigantic scale, as never before in peacetime. The English-speaking peo- ples, at least, contemplate the spectacle with shuddering dismay. The American and British publics are virtually unanimous in a profound horror of war. It seems to them — they have been told it over and over again by the peace crusaders — that these prepara- tions must and do bring the catastrophe nearer. It has indeed become a pacifist axiom that armaments create war. Personally, believing as I do that war is an insane anchronism in our present interde- pendent civilization, I think it a monstrous idio¢y that mankind should still waste so large a proportion of its resources on prepar- ing to destroy what it. has so painfully achieved. I think that humanity’s most urgent affair is to free itself forever from the atavistic curse of war. I think also that the only sure prophy- lactic against war is a greater and greater prevalence of cool logical reason, of starkly realistic thinking. Glib catchwords merely ob- scure thought. And it appears to me that pacifism, not less than militarism, has its all too common catchwords. Is the popular belief that armaments create war indeed well founded? Is it even true that modern armaments make war more inhumane and deadly? To most people, the answers to those two questions will seem self-evident. And yet —! Socrates, who largely taught our western world how to think, long ago demon- strated to his disciples the value of examining an apparent paradox. I am no champion of the arms industry. The potentates thereof seem to me, as they do to most of us, immorally wealthy men battening on the primitive, blind instincts of their fellows. But everything that exists, even the wilfully noxious, surely fulfills a purpose, transcending its conscious purpose, in the complex symphony of life. The perversion of science to more and more potent instruments of destruction is doubtless consciously moti- vated merely by the desire for bigger profits. But quite unconsciously — as unconsciously as the profit-seeking builders of automobiles and radios have transformed society in the past generation — the hateful ‘‘merchants of death’” may in fact be subserving a greater purpose hidden in the brooding profundities of the Zeitgeist. 1 should like to submit, boldly, that from the beginning of history progress in armaments has not only made warsprogressively less frequent, butlessdeadly in proportion to the numbers engaged. There was no altruism in this. It was automatic. THIS WEEK WEAPONS of PEACE? by F. BRITTEN AUSTIN Let us think. In the good old days, before the arms industry was invented, all a po- tential soldier had to do was to take down the family axe, bow and spear from the hut-wall, and go forth to battle. (In the earliest times, all he had to do was to pick up a chunk of rock.) The axe, spear and bow were the nor- mal implements of his daily life in a world full of wild beasts. War was cheap and easy. It was accordingly almost continuous, settle- ment against settlement, tribe against tribe — with real profits in the shape of loot and slaves. Africa, up to a generation ago, is an example. M With every improvement in weapons — bronze, iron and steel, the introduction of body-armor and the invention of powerful war-machines such as the catapult and bal- _ lista — the communities acquiring these im- provements, more and more requiring trained specialists to use them, irresistibly extended their conquests over the less-efficiently armed savages around them until they became na- tions, empires. Each such extension lessened the area where savage warfare was perpetual, made any sort of war less frequent. The great empires of antiquity — Babylon, Egypt, the Roman Em- pire, comprising all Western Europe and stretching from Morocco to the Euphrates — for centuries enjoyed almost complete peace within their boundaries. Thanks to the su- periority of armameat possessed by the state, it could with equal ease crush any insurrec- tion at home or repel barbarian invasion from without. It may indeed happen that world peace will never be attained by a universality of en- lightened reason, but will ultimately be simi- larly imposed by some group or nation pos- sessing such overwhelming superiority of armament as H. G. Wells postulates to his World State technicians in ‘‘The Shape of Things to Come.” That is a surmise for the future. What is demonstrably certain is that in the past, as war required more and more specialist equip- ment — and correspondingly became less fa- cile and more expensive to the individual and the community — so war has become less and less the universal occupation. Perhaps the greatest stride toward peace was, paradoxi- cally, the detested invention of gunpowder. It was gunpowder which ended the inter- necine anarchy of the Middle Ages. Only the king could afford to possess a train of artillery. The castles of the nobles ceased to be im- pregnable. The hand-gun of the plebeian foot- soldier became startlingly fatal to the aristo- cratic brigand in plate-armor. The privileged classes lost their pleasant immunity from seri- ous damage to themselves. The erstwhile serf and peasant became the king's artilleryman or arquebusier — and the nobles took off their warlike panoply and went to flatter Henry VIII at Hampton Court and Louis X1V at Versailles. A new era opened, in which war was waged only between kings and dynasties. It was bad enough — but it was character- ized by unprecedentedly long intervals of peace. That was not due to any improvement in human nature.’ The financial factor was coming into play. The new warfare, with ar- Drawing by Maijor Felten Yet — do armaments create war? A noted British authority answers tillery and muskets and an ever-growing ex- penditure on munitions, was — for the period — terribly expensive. In the 17th and 18th centuries a state of war might continue for years, but actual campaigning was an affair of relatively small bodies of men maneuvering against each other for a few summer months. It needed the social cataclysm of the French Revolution to produce the twenty years of continuous war which terminated with Waterloo. Europe was utterly ruined for the next thirty years there- after. It made local wars, but it did not start another universal conflict until 1914 — when the lesson was forgotten, to be'relearned at a then unimaginable expense. : That factor of expense is the greatest de- terrent to war today. Thanks to the arma- ment inventors, war has become a fabulously costly game. In old days it cost very little to shoot an arrow at a man, and nothing to hit him with a club. In the Napoleonic wars a gun could be cast for a few hundred dollars; it lasted for years and its projectiles could be and often were collected and used again. Today a big gun may cost a quarter of a million dollars and it can fire, at a thousand dollars a time, only a score or so of rounds before it needs relining. The German Paris- gun began seriously to deteriorate almost from the first round. The modern field-gun itself has a very short life, and it uses an enormous quantity of ammunition, mostly wasted. The artillery bommbardments on the ‘Western Front cost many millions a day. The next war will plainly be yet more expensive, thanks to all the ‘‘improved” weapons our scientists have devised for us and munition trusts sell impartially to ourselves and our various possible enemies. War of course could be waged quite as ef- fectively, and as decisive results achieved, with the comparatively cheap weapons of former times. For their purpose, Nelson’s wooden ships at Trafalgar, costing only $250,- 000 each, were at least as effective as the mass of $50,000,000 ultra-precious battleships with which Jellicoe did not attain a decision at Jutland. But the progress of science — the Zeitgeist — will not have it so. If we want to fight, we must now do so at a fantastically ruinous cost. Inadvertently, indeed, our modern scien- tific ‘‘merchants of death’” have put an enor- mous premium on peace. It is probable that if war could be waged with the cheap and simple implements of a century ago, the fear- obsessed, hate-crazed Continent of Europe would now be in conflagration. But even the (Continved on page 10)