262 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



the most terrible of all wars ! The human imagination cannot begin 

 to conceive of its magnitude. More than thirteen millions of lives 

 were lost. While the battle of the Argonne raged, fighting proceeded 

 along a front of 200 miles; seventeen allied armies were fighting 

 desperately engaged in mortal combat. Every one of those seven- 

 teen armies numbered more men than the combined strength of 

 Lee and Meade at the battle of Gettysburg. Yet if there were to 

 be another war, that war would pale into insignificance. Remember, 

 my friends, there is no such thing as noncombatants in modern 

 warfare. Remember, the goal of modern warfare is not defense, it 

 is destruction. When Germany began her hellish gas attacks at 

 Ypres, she made a tremendous blunder. If Germany had had the 

 foresight to first develqp that terrible agency and then equip her own 

 men with the gas mask, so they could have followed their own gas 

 attack, we are told that Germany could have annihilated the entire 

 allied army within a period of ten days — before America ever got 

 into the war. And yet it is true, four years ago we couldn't have 

 believed such a thing, but it is true that in the closing months of 

 that war gas was being developed in quantity, in the laboratories 

 of our own land, that was called Lewisite that was 100 times more 

 deadly than the original gas used by the Germans, and had the war 

 continued another six months, it was expected that that gas would 

 wither our enemies. What can be expected if there should be an- 

 other war? We know something about aircraft. We know it is 

 just in its infancy, and yet we know that during the period of the 

 war it developed to such a remarkable degree that it was expected 

 if there had been a campaign in 1919 that aircraft would have been 

 the deciding and overwhelming factor of the war. There never has 

 been, there never can be, an adequate defense to an attack from the 

 air. Only a few months ago the war department revealed an inven- 

 tion in wireless control that had been developed and was almost 

 ready for use when the armistice was signed. By means of that 

 invention it is possible for an aviator 20.000 feet in the air, fifty 

 miles from his objective, to launch a terrible death-dealing bomb 

 and direct it into the heart of a great city with the most deadly and 

 unerring accuracy. What may be expected from the air if there 

 were to be another war. For the past fifty years the best brains of 

 the world, scientists everywhere, have been fighting a winning battle 

 against bacilli and its death power. No scientist ever attempted to 

 cultivate the man-killing power of the disease germ, and yet were 

 there to be another war with an un.scrupulous enemy this field alone 



