Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/81

 bodies of armed men. These soldiers to whom I have talked believe that this old, basic rule of warfare will not change in the next war, any more than it changed in the late war. The infantryman may, however, abandon his rifle, and carry instead the shorter-ranged but far more deadly gas-grenade—though even the passing of the rifle, in its multiplied form of the machine-gun, seems doubtful.

There is some question whether these masses of infantry will come directly to grips with each other. But that does not mean that they will not be killed “by wholesale, not by retail.” They may be held back until the machines of war have stamped out resistance, and then brought up merely to hold the territory; but they will be constantly under attack from the air.

For even before the tank-army starts toward that belt of lethal mist which marks the frontier, the air-fleets will be on their way. I have shown how unmanned aeroplanes may be directed by wireless, and so become projectiles of unimagined range and calibre. Such fleets, and other aircraft armed with machine-guns, high explosive bombs, gas-bombs, will search out the masses of waiting infantry. The defenders will fight these fleets with their own aeroplanes; while the tanks are waging war on solid land, the aircraft will be engaged in a wholesale version of the retail air-holocausts which we knew in the late war. Whenever squadrons of these attacking aeroplanes get through to their objective,