Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/52

 at the great cities they were striking, a little blindly as yet but still directly, at the heart of resistance.

Of course, when you attack and bombard a city without warning—and an air raid, to be effective must come without warning—you include in the circle of destruction every living thing in that city, the weakest non-combatant with the strongest soldier. “Baby killers” the Londoners called the Zeppelins. They were just that; for baby-killing had become incidental to military necessity.

Let me here add another departure from the “code,” less significant than the new ways of killing and the inclusion of all civilians in the circle of destruction, but still important to humanity. Under its spirit, usually under the letter, an army destroyed property only when that destruction would weaken the enemy's armed forces and his general military resistance. Sherman’s devastation during his march to the sea was ruthless and terrible, and is not yet forgotten in the South. But it had a direct military object—to render impossible the provisioning of the Confederate Army. The Germans, setting the pace, carried the logic of destruction one stage further. In their early rush they had taken and held securely the coal mines of Northern France. Those mines, yielding half of the French native coal supply, they deliberately flooded and destroyed. This had no immediate military purpose. In German hands, the mines were useless to the