Face to Face with Kaiserism

by James W. Gerard

"The future war will see the use of a great quantity of new aids to war, bicycles, pigeons, telegraph, telephones, optical instruments and photographic instruments for the purpose of mapping from a great distance the positions occupied by the enemy and means to observe the movements of the enemy such as observing ladders, balloons and so on....

"In the future war every body of troops holding itself on the defensive or found taking the offensive, when it is not the question of sudden assault, will have to fortify itself in a chosen position and the war will be confined principally to the form of a series of combats in which the possession of fortified positions will be disputed, and in which the assailant will have to meet the accessory defensives in the neighbourhood of the fortifications such as barricades, barbed wire, etc., the destruction of these objects costing many victims.... The infantry, when on the defensive, will dig itself in. The conduct of the war will depend, in a large measure, on the artillery."

According to our author, who foresaw "No Man's Land" between the two opposing forces, "there will be formed a certain zone absolutely impassable in consequence of the terrible fire with which it will be inundated from a short distance from each side." Bloch adds: "This war will last a long time and entire nations will be seen in arms or rather the flower of each nation. Germany will begin the war by throwing itself on France and then, using the many German railroads, will turn against Russia. By virtue of its military force Germany will take the initiative of operations and will make the war on the two fronts."

His prophetic eye saw even the submarine war of the future. "It will happen, possibly, that the future war will produce engines of war completely unknown and unexpected up to the present time; in any event one can foresee the advent in a short time of submarines destined to carry below even ironclads, torpedoes powerful enough to wreck the strongest ships."

He quotes the opinions of Jomini, who says that future armies will not be composed of troops recruited voluntarily but of entire nations called by a law to arms and who will not fight for a change of frontier but for their existence. Jomini states "that this state of affairs will bring us back to the third and the fourth centuries, calling to our minds those shocks of immense peoples who disputed among themselves the European continent," and "that if a new legislation and a new international law do not come to put an end to these risings of whole peoples that it is impossible to foresee where the ravages of future war will stop. It will become a scourge more terrible than ever, because the population of civilised nations will be cut down, while in the interior of each nation the normal economic life will be arrested, communications interrupted and if the war is prolonged financial crises will come with a fearful rise in the price of everything and famine with all its consequences."

Bloch, in depicting the future war, says that "in 1870, the struggle was between two Powers, while in the war of the future at least five great nations will take part without speaking of the intervention of Turkey and England.... The comparing of the coming war with any war of the past is impossible because the increase in the effective fighting forces has been of a rapidity so unexampled and this increase brings with it so great an augmentation of expenditures and of victims that the future war will have the character of a struggle for the existence of nations.... It is true that the war of 1870 gave us something of an example of this character. That was a war without mercy, brought on by secular hate, a war of revenge on the part of the Germans because of the ancient victories of the French, a war where volunteers were shot and villages burned and where unheard of exactions were imposed on the conquered whom the conqueror sought to wrong and weaken for a long period of time. A new war in Central Europe will be a second edition of the same struggle but by how much will it not surpass the former wars by its magnitude and by its length and by the means of destruction employed."

Does not Bloch give a better prediction of this war than the often quoted Bernhardi?

The table conversation at Hanotaux's was in French; few Frenchmen and hardly any public men in France speak English.

At this lunch, Ribot, since Premier, said to me, "In men, in fighting, we can hold out, but we must have help on the credit side."