Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/69

 want.” Upon such sentiments the Allied world looked with some horror—then. Even the Germans somewhat withheld their hands. I cannot find that gas-bombardment was ever used on the cities behind the lines. Yet the Germans were preparing in 1918 a step toward that method. Had the war continued, Paris would have been attacked from the air on a new plan. A first wave of aeroplanes would have dropped on the city roofs tons of small bombs which released burning phosphorus—that flame cannot be extinguished by water. It would have started a conflagration against which the Fire Department would have been almost powerless, in a hundred quarters of the city. Into the light furnished by this general fire, the Germans proposed to send second and third waves of aeroplanes loaded with the heaviest bombs; they could pick their objectives in the vital parts of the city as they could not during an ordinary moonlight raid. From that the gas-bombardment would have been but a step. I have shown what we might have done to Berlin in 1919 with giant bombs carrying Lewisite gas. The Allies, I can testify personally, did not intend to use this method “unless they had to.” But the elimination of civilians by the hundreds of thousands, perhaps by the millions, through gas bombardments, was a possibility had the war continued until 1920.

In “the next war,” this gas-bombardment of capitals and great towns is not only a possibility but a strong probabilityalmost a certainty. Military