then, and not till then, does he attack and murder
the slumbering civilians of Scarborough and Dunkirk, and lies in wait
for and sinks the Lusitania. If war by the rules will not bring
success, then harsher measures must be taken; let us suddenly torture
and murder our hated enemies with poison gas, let us poison the South
African wells, let us ill-treat prisoners and assassinate civilians.
Let us abolish the noncombatant and the neutral. These are no peculiar
German iniquities, though the Germans have brought them to an
unparalleled perfection; they are the natural psychological
consequences of aggressive war heroically conceived and bitterly
thwarted; they are "fierceness"; they are the logical necessary
outcome of going to war and being disappointed and getting hit hard
and repeatedly. Any military nation in a corner will play the savage,
the wildcat at bay, in this fashion, rather than confess itself done.
And since the prophetic Bloch has been justified and the long
inconclusiveness of modern war, with its intrenchments and
entanglements, has been more than completely demonstrated, this is the
way that every war in the future is likely to go. Fair and open
conquest becoming more and more out of the question, each side will
seek to cow, dismay, and subjugate the spirit of the other, and
particularly the spirit of the noncombatant masses, by more and more
horrible proceedings. "What do you think of that?" said the German
officer, with a grin, as he was led prisoner past one of our soldiers,
dying in agonies of asphyxiation. To that point war brings men.
Probably at the beginning of the war he was quite a decent man. But
once he was committed to war the fatal logic of our new resources in
science laid hold of him. And war is war.

Now there does not appear the slightest hope of any invention that
will make war more conclusive or less destructive; there are, however,
the clearest prospects in many directions that it may be more
destructive and less conclusive. It will be dreadfuller and bitterer;
its horrors will be less and less forgivable; it will leave vast
sundering floods of hate. The submarine and the aircraft are quite
typical of the new order of things. You can sweep a visible fleet off
the seas, you can drive an invading army into its own country, but
while your enemy has a score of miles of coast line or a thousand
square miles of territory left him, you cannot, it seems, keep his
aircraft out of your borde