The Next War: An Appeal to Common Sense
. New York. E. P. Dutton and Co. 1921. 12mo, viii + 161 pp. Illustrated. $1.50.
THIS is a little book upon the biggest subject now before the world. It ought to be widely read — universally read. It is addressed to everyone, can be understood by all, asks little time and labor of the reader; yet it does not trifle with its topic or study cheap sensation.
The catch title, ‘The Next War,’ somewhat masks the author’s theme. Probably that was his intention: for readers are apt to shy at an un-
baited appeal to common sense. But the book is truly a sober forecast, based upon personal observation and study of the last war, of the way the next war— if there is one — will be fought, and its effect on belligerents and neutrals — if there are neutrals. It is frankly alarmist; but for the purpose of hastening our pace in the path of peace, not in the path of military preparation.
Facts are marshaled in an appalling array — things we know but prefer to forget: death, gases snuffing out like a candle the life of whole noncombatant communities, cities shivered to dust in a night, war carried by air to the remotest recesses of broad continents; slaughter and destruction universalized. Material and moral costs are reckoned in physical wealth, race-vigor, social stability, and ethical values. In each instance the argument is carried rigidly from the last war to the next. The author tells what the next war will be, as it might be told in a staff college, but with a different purpose. His moral is war-prevention by an appeal to the world’s common sense. The book does not propose any readymade remedy or expound a theory. Its main purpose and value lie in its appeal to action.
Our dilatory minds are slow to comprehend revolutions: and the last war was the beginning of a revolution in fighting methods. We still visualize war in the forms of the nineteenth century. Mr. Irwin tries to paint it as the immeasurably more portentous thing it has become in the twentieth century. He traces the logical causes of its growing brutality, of its enforced rejection of even those pitiful palliatives which we used to call ‘the laws of civilized warfare,’There will be no exempts and no spared in the wars of the future. Women and children will be just as legitimate prey as fighting men. For all will turn the wheels of war-production, while science and mechanism have made possible wholesale methods of slaughter, which cannot discriminate between individuals, sexes, classes, or occupations. Wherever there is enemy life and property, that life and property must be destroyed.
It is interesting to note that the author follows H. G. Wells in his analysis of the biological and social function of primitive war, — down to the present century, — thus recording one of the early instances of the influence of the Outline of History on our new political thought. He draws from it a note of optimism, the passing of war through out living its functions. The book should crystallize much vague thinking upon disarmament and peace-insurance into definite convictions and precise policies.
VICTOR S. CLARK.