Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/44

 failing, to starve out Germany, the weakest civilian baby as well as the strongest soldier. From the first day of the war—in plan if not at once in action—Germany prepared in the same way to starve out the British Isles with submarines. When she applied her submarine campaign, Germany violated at once an old article of the code which provided that merchant ships, about to be sunk for carrying contraband, must be warned and searched and that their crews must be allowed to escape. She began to sink without warning. If Germany abandoned this method in 1915, it was only because the United States protested, and she feared to drag us into the war against her. She resumed her original plan in 1917, and we did enter the war.

It was provided in the code that civilians should be given warning of a bombardment. But the aeroplanes had arrived; and aeroplane tactics depend not only upon speed but upon surprise. In the first fortnight of the war and as unexpectedly as a bolt of lightning from a clear sky, a German Taube appeared over Paris, dropped a bomb which blew in the front of a shop and killed two civilian butchers peacefully wrapping up meat. Germany invaded Belgium. As part of her long-studied plan for keeping everything serene on her line of communications against France, she seized as hostages a few leading citizens of each town through which she passed, shot them if the town did not behave. And the taking of hostages had been so long abrogated