Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/72

 to look upon warfare from the retail point of view—of killing men by fifties or hundreds or thousands. But when you speak of gas you must remember that you are discussing a weapon which must be considered from the wholesale point of view and if you use it—and I do not know of any reason why you should not—you may kill hundreds of thousands of men, or at any rate disable them.”

Here, perhaps, is the place to say that Lewisite and the gas beyond Lewisite are probably no longer the exclusive secret of the United States Government. We had allies in this war; doubtless they learned the formula. Even if not; once science knows that a formula exists, its rediscovery is only a matter of patient research, not of genius. And gas-investigation is quietly going on abroad. If they have not arrived at the same substances, the chemists of Europe have worked out others just as deadly. The scientific investigation of the killing possibilities in gas is only four years old.

Colonel Fuller says bluntly in his illuminating essay that the armies which entered the late war were antiquated human machines, that military brains had ossified. Warfare, he says, must be, will be, brought up to the standard of civilian technique. Henceforth, general staffs must not wait for unstimulated civilians to invent new machines or methods of attack and defence. They must mobilize high technicians and inventors in the “pause between wars” as well as in war, bend all their energies