Opinion also differs as to the morality of attacking undefended towns and injuring the property of non-combatants during a war.
The late Admiral Aube, when he was head of the French Admiralty, said the proper way of bringing this country to order was to burn Brighton and Scarborough and a few other places; and Admiral Sir J. C. Dalrymple Hay, Bart., has remarked that he could not say he thought that he was wrong. According to the latter, the object of each side is to do the greatest possible destruction to the enemy, and also to make him cave in; the whole of the country is engaged in war, they pay taxes for the war, they encourage their soldiers and sailors to fight courageously, they suffer for the war in various ways and they urge it on; and they must expect to suffer accordingly.
Humanitarians affirm that in actual war soldiers and sailors of the Dalrymple Hay school would be too human to act up to their expressed opinions; the probability is that England would only resort to such measures if the enemy were determined to employ them. Vice-Admiral Bourgois, in his book “Les Torpilleurs,” made a strong protest against the doctrines of those who advocated the bombardment of undefended towns and the sinking without warning of defenceless merchant ships. He urged that the nationality of the vessel should first be verified, and then provision made for the crew and passengers.
Apart from the “Hague enthusiasts” who are for prohibiting the employment of high explosives, aerial torpedoes, and submarine torpedo boats, there is another class of humanitarians who urge the adoption of all new and deadly engines of warfare, apparently with the idea that if war is made sufficiently terrible no nation would dare fight another. “The more terrible the anticipation of naval war,” says a writer, “as fashion and science continue the contest, the less likely will be its realisation.”
The late M. Bloch, as we know, considered war to be tactically, strategically, economically, and morally impossible, but as he assured us also in his book, “Is War Impossible?” that bayonets were quite out of date, one may be forgiven for not paying much heed to his lucubrations.
Admiral Porter, of the U.S. Navy, considered that if war was made so dangerous that every combatant would to a certainty be killed, then there would be an end of the business and the Peace Society could put up their shutters.
The newspapers, especially the halfpenny ones, are constantly informing us of the discovery of new engines of warfare of terrible potency. Mr. Tesla is going to wipe out the British Fleet by simply touching a button on his waistcoat or elsewhere. Mr. Hudson Maxim has devised a method of throwing aerial torpedoes carrying each of them one ton of high explosive which is so efficacious that one cruiser lying just out of range of our guns would destroy all our battleships with the greatest ease. Dr. Barton is building an airship which will throw explosives on the enemy below, who will be powerless to retaliate, and so on.
The wars of the future, so the halfpenny journalists inform us, will be either waged under the seas or above the clouds, and we seem to be approaching the time imagined by Lord Tennyson, whose swain (in “Locksley Hall”)—
“Heard the heavens filled with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.”