The Next War: An Appeal to Common Sense/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
ECONOMICS AND THE NEXT WAR
In all the major wars of the past three centuries, one traces a certain progression from armed contest between individual nations to armed contest between alliances. Sometimes indeed, two hostile nations are “isolated,” as when the rest of Europe managed to keep out of the war between France and Germany in 1870. But the tendency remains. And there is a reasonable cause for this—the increasing speed and facility of transportation, the increasing interdependence of nations. In 1914, according to an authority on transportation, any man was in terms of time eleven times nearer to any given point in the world than in 1814. There you have one explanation for the world-wide spread of the Great War.
If things in this “new world” are to go in the old manner, the chancellories of Europe will seek to keep an impermanent peace, will give themselves a “breathing-space between wars” by forming alliances. With the major nations struggling even for greater advantage, with the smaller nations in growing fear of their own defencelessness, the alliances will naturally tend to grow greater and greater. “In the next war there will be no neutrals,” some say; almost certainly, in the next European war. Spain, Switzerland, Holland, Scandinavia, Greece, will be afraid, remembering Belgium, to remain out of alliances. Indeed, Belgium has pointed the way. A recognized neutral up to the Great War, she has renounced the principle of neutrality, and allied herself with France. Probably the great European powers will draw in the Orient actively—Japan’s part, China’s part in the late war were merely passive. For the world-machine tends to become ever more complex, and nations ever more interdependent. The swift airship is here; if a man is eleven times nearer any given point than he was in 1814, soon he will be twenty times nearer.
Can we stay out of the next general war? We could not stay out of the last. We are passing from a stage where we depended for foreign trade mainly on raw materials, whose sale does not need to be “pushed,” to the industrial stage. Increasingly, our exports will consist of manufactured goods. Foreign markets will be to us not dumping-grounds for short seasons of overproduction but real factors in our national prosperity. And foreign markets for manufactured goods need cultivation, even forcing. With our unrivalled wealth, we shall store up surplus capital, which will find more attractive returns in undeveloped regions at home. That is happening already. Since the war, hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of American dollars have been invested in new, promising commercial fields abroad. So, if we play the game as we find it, we shall enter the circle of “financial imperialism” and find ourselves in some way much more closely affected by the next war than we were by the last, and correspondingly under a greater urge to enter it as belligerents.
The spread of the next war may conceivably be limited by diplomacy as was the war of 1870; even go, the next one after that probably cannot be limited; and all our “proud isolation,” our tradition against entangling alliances, will not keep us out.
The Great War, considered in terms of economies, began not in 1914 but in 1871, when the French and Germans signed the Treaty of Frankfort—when the European nations began to increase their standing armaments. In the same sense, the next war began when, after the Armistice of 1918, the great powers kept up their armies, started experiments with more efficient but more expensive ways of killing. It will be war by machinery from now on, not war by hand. And machine-work requires a much greater initial outlay of capital than hand-work. Naval warfare has always been war by machinery. It will not be necessary for me to prove by figures the greater cost of a navy, in proportion to the number of men employed, than of an army. That is going to be changed. The tank and the aeroplane have come—air-machines and land-machines, equivalent to the destroyer, the submarine and the battleship, which are sea-machines. Of course, a big tank can whip a little tank just as a big man can whip a little man. There is no more practical limit to the size of tanks than to that of naval vessels. The same rule probably holds true of aeroplanes. Consequently, as soon as the European powers begin to wriggle out of their present fix, we may expect them, with what margin they have, to begin a race of armament more expensive in proportion to their resources than the race of 1871–1914. The tank of today may be compared to a caravel. We shall have the destroyer-tank; then some nation will come along with the cruiser-tank, and the others must follow or underwrite defeat. And so on, up to the dreadnought tank—a gas-proofed fortress on caterpillar wheels, perhaps as complex and expensive as the sea-dreadnought. And if one alliance increases her fleet of land-dreadnoughts from a hundred to a hundred and twenty, from a thousand to twelve hundred, the rival alliance must let out another notch and follow. You may, if you wish, translate all this into terms of aircraft, and the economic result will be the same.
In the last war, nations learned that they must bend every resource, and especially every industrial resource, to victory. But some of them learned it rather late. Even Germany was for a long time manufacturing and exporting to the adjacent neutral countries such commodities as machinery. Later, in the fierce stress of the war, Germany turned all her machine-factories into munitions factories. England went on for nearly two years with a business-as-usual policy before she learned she had better make munitions her sole business. There can be no such dalliance in the next war. “It will not be declared; it will burst.” Upon the promptness and speed of the initial thrust may depend victory—then or later. Not only must the magazines be always full, the tanks and aeroplanes always in complete commission, the gas retorts always charged; but you must have your factories always ready for an immediate change. You must be prepared at the shortest notice to turn your dye-and-chemical works into poison gas works, your sewing-machines and type-writer factories into factories for shell-parts—and so on through a thousand industries. This requires an industrial readjustment obviously expensive, still more subtly expensive.
When the war comes, you start war-work not desultorily as in 1914, but full speed from the mark—not at a five per cent scale gradually increasing, as in 1914, but as near as possible to a one hundred per cent scale. Your whole population has been mobilized, perhaps partly trained, in advance. Your young woman knows her place in the factory and reports at once to the foreman, just as your young man knows his place in the ranks and reports at once to the sergeant. The process of turning the whole national energy from wealth to waste begins at once, full power. The next war may be shorter than the last; it can scarcely, at this intensive pace, be less costly.
Concerning the actual destruction of physical property, one may speak with less certainty. It all depends upon the larger strategy. I have suggested the elimination of all life in such a city as Paris—or New York—as a possible result. That could be accomplished by such a gas as Lewisite. Now Lewisite whirled in a lethal cloud over Paris would not greatly injure property. When at length the poison was dissipated, the Opéra would still be there and the Louvre and the great railway terminals and the factories—a little corroded perhaps, but still usable after you cleaned out the corpses and tidied up a bit. So perhaps a better way of breaking up the “resistance of the rear” would be to exterminate not the human Paris but the physical Paris. That could be done in one gigantic conflagration started by inextinguishable chemicals dropped from a few aircraft. The method is practicable even now, in the infancy of chemical warfare; and the military chemists of Europe are experimenting further along these lines. Such a campaign would of course not be confined to Paris; although Paris as a centre for the brains of war, as the most vital knot in the railway web and as a great factory city, is eminently important. It would be aimed also at Lyons and St. Etienne, great manufacturing cities, at Marseilles, Cherbourg, Havre and Bordeaux, the great ports, at a hundred little cities which do their part in making munitions.
In such a campaign of conflagrations, the loss of life would necessarily be less than in a killing attack with gas. But possibly not much. Imagine Paris suddenly become a superheated furnace in a hundred spots; imagine a swift rush of flame through every quarter; imagine the population struggling, piling up, shriveling with the heat; imagine the survivors ranging the open fields in the condition of starving animals.
Such a campaign could in a few weeks nearly equal the property-losses of the Great War; especially if the defenders, whom I have imagined to be the French, retaliated on the attackers—say the Germans—and burned Berlin and the Rhine towns.
So far as we can see now, gas will probably be the standard weapon of the next war. High explosive will still be used on an extensive scale; but it will be auxiliary to the new killing instrument. It is unlikely that there will be a locked trench-line and a steady bombardment lasting for years. Consequently—ignoring the possibility of great conflagrations—we may hope for a smaller loss in the item of buildings. On the other hand, the bill will probably show a larger item for destroyed fields—agricultural wealth. The struggle just finished was the first in history where any considerable area of land was ruined for cultivation. Now it is a property of the new poison gas that it sterilizes—not only kills cells but prevents the growth of cells. Concerning one successor of Lewisite gas an expert has said: “You burst a container carrying a minute quantity of the substance which makes the gas, at the foot of a tree. You do not see the fumes rise; it is invisible. But within a few seconds you see the leaves begin to shrivel. While we are not quite certain, we estimate that land on which this gas has fallen will grow nothing for about seven years.” In the next war,—unless we discover meantime some still more effective method of killing—clouds of such gas will sweep over hundreds of square miles, not only eliminating all unprotected life, animal and vegetable, but sterilizing the soil—“for about seven years.” What were farms, orchards and gardens will become in a breath deserts. The power of its soil to produce food is the first, vital item in the wealth of nations. It would seem that this increased loss of productive land should at least balance the decreased loss in buildings.
So modern warfare, in its economic aspect, follows the same rule as in its human aspect. Now that we have renounced all pretty rules of chivalry, now that we have put brains into the business, its destructiveness ever increases. There, perhaps, lies the best chance of eliminating it from the world. The desire to create and to conserve wealth is deeply implanted in the bosom of man. Why not? The two primary forces by which a species lives are the 
CAMPUS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
These and other buildings, thirty-eight in all, represent an investment of $8,000,000. The University has about 500 professors and instructors; 10,000 students; and graduates annually about 1000 young men and women.
At present costs, two or three such universities, each a permanent institution, could be established for the amount that one ephemeral capital ship now costs.
The United States has begun the construction of sixteen such capital ships.