Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/51

 books, their personnel, the French army at the front must have been thrown into confusion.

By the same token the more they approximated to this end, the more the air-bombardments made toward victory. Both Parisians and Londoners have expressed to me the opinion that the Gotha raids and the Big Bertha bombardments were “worth while” for the effect they had on the business of life. “There’s no use in denying,” said an Englishman, “that we did less work than usual—at least a quarter less—on the days of air raids.”

Still further: defence against air-raids is very difficult; so the French, for example, were forced to hold back from the Front in order to defend their capital scores of aeroplanes and many batteries of guns, whereas the Germans seldom raided with more than a dozen aeroplanes. That factor alone made air raids useful for strictly military ends. When the Allies began raiding German cities in 1917 and 1918, when they prepared to raid Berlin on an unprecedented scale in that campaign of 1919 which never occurred, they were not mainly inspired by revenge, as horror-stricken German civilians and war-heated Allied civilians asserted. The General Staff were after results, not personal satisfaction. They knew that aeroplane raids on cities brought military results. Still further; they knew that armies exist and operate for the defence of peoples. The object of wars, after all, is not the destruction of armies. It is the subjugation of peoples. In