Page:Science and the Great War.djvu/31

Rh  is only a hostage in the hands of the Power whose fleet is supreme' (p. lvi).

Now it will be admitted that these predictions have in great part been proved to be true. Think of the description of modern war given in The Times of July 31, 1915, by an officer in the Royal Engineers. Of everything that made the pomp and circumstance of war as it was wont to be he says: 'They are all gone, every one, and nothing is left but the deep and dirty trench, the immutable outlook on the immutable enemy, the maze of alley-ways in the rear, and the mole-like progress of the saps and alleys in front.' The vital question then arises: what about the rest of Bloch's anticipation? Will that, too, be fulfilled? Will the end of the war be brought about by famine, national bankruptcy, and the break-up of society? It is bitterly to be regretted that the Government did not very seriously consider this possibility at the outset, making their preparations as if this might be the end for one or both of the belligerents. If they had done so, the war, as I hope to show, would have been over long ago. The insufficiency of the food-supply of a besieged Germany would have brought it to a close.

At the very beginning of the war the scientific men of Germany knew that this was their great peril. They studied it, and in December, 1914, brought out an exhaustive memoir on their food supply, Die deutsche Volksernährung und der englische Aushungerungsplan ('Germany's Food and England's plan to starve her out'). It is written by Professor Eltzbacher with fifteen distinguished colleagues, nearly all of Berlin. The preface states that an exact study of the nation's food during war required the aid of 'the politician, the political economist, the statistician, the physiologist,