important advances.... We need not trouble ourselves yet with flying destroyers or flying concrete forts, but in twenty years' time the Air Force Estimates might be the most important part of our preparations for war." He discussed the conversion of commercial flying machines to bombing and reconnaissance uses, and the need for special types of fighting machine in considerable numbers and always ready. He gave reasons for supposing that the bombers in the next war would not have the same targets near the front of the armies, and would secure better results by going further afield and bombing the centres "where stores are being manufactured and troops trained." As everyone who stayed in London or the east of England in 1917-18 knows, this means the promiscuous bombing of any and every centre of population. But, of course, the bombing of those 'prentice days would be child's play to the bombing of the "next war." There would be countless more aeroplanes, bigger and much nastier bombs....
Sir Louis, proceeding with his sketch, mentioned the "destruction of the greater part of London" as a possible incident in the coming struggle. And so on to the culminating moral, that the highest pay, the utmost importance, the freest expenditure, must be allowed to military gentlemen. "The expense entailed is in the nature of an absolutely necessary insurance." With which his particular audience warmly agreed. And a certain Major-General Stone, a little forgetful of the source of his phrases,[1] said he hoped that this lecture "may be the beginning not of trusting in the League of Nations, but in our own right hand and our stretched-out arm!"
But we will not go on with the details of this dream. For indeed no Utopia was ever so impossible as this forecast of a world in which scarcely anything but very carefully sandbagged and camouflaged G. H. Q. would be reasonably safe, in which countless bombers would bomb the belligerent lands incessantly and great armies with lines of caterpillar transport roll to and fro, churning the fields of the earth into blood-streaked mud. There is not energy enough and no will whatever left in the world for such things. Generals who cannot foresee tanks cannot be expected to foresee
- ↑ Cp. Psalm cxxxvi.
