LAND AND WA T E R 
Jarrnar}' 27, 1916. 
such as would have been necessary to the correction 
of fire had an aimed shot (impossible as that was) 
been intended. 
Now it is perfectly clear that when you drop 
big shell thus into an open town (full of hospitals, 
by the way) your only object can be to terrorise. 
It is a strictly political object, and on a par with 
very much else that the enemy has done. 
But more than this, you have the fact that 
the enemy had been acting in precisely the same 
way in his raids upon England. He had not 
struck at points of military importance upon the 
coast. He bombarded Scarborough, a watering- 
place. He had, in dropping bombs, dropped 
them mainly upon places where he thought they 
would have an effect upon civilians. In thus 
dropping very large shell at extreme ranges— that 
is, at random — upon Dunkirk, he was also aiming 
at affecting British civilian opinion, both because 
Dunkirk was the nearest point upon the Continent 
to England which he could reach, even at extreme 
range, by the use of his artillery, and also because 
it was packed full of English wounded and con- 
tained a considerable number of English civilians 
at the time. After an interval of many months 
he begins exactly the same trick against the 
French open town of Nancy. He has got it into 
his head that the French will be more willing to 
spare their enemy if he destroys some architectural 
monument or a certain number of civilian lives 
by such bombardment. Here also he aims at no 
restricted area of military importance for the 
simple reason that he is not aiming at all. He is 
dropping shells at extreme range with the know- 
ledge that they will fall somewhere within a very 
large inhabited district, and that is all his concern. 
We know perfectly well, from his first experiment 
against Dunkirk and indeed from the nature of 
the case, that when the gun is found by the French 
and duly destroyed, it will be found emplaced in 
such a fashion that it is incapable of movement. 
Another characteristic of this kind of action 
and a proof that the enemy believes it to be of 
great value, is the enormous expenditure con- 
nected with it. When he loses one of these guns he 
loses a very large sum of money. He similarly 
risks very large sums, and by their occasional loss 
loses those sums, in the Zeppelin raids upon 
England, the military effects of which are insignifi- 
cant and are not intended to be significant. 
If one were to prove the thesis on more general 
lines one would only have to consider the Prussian 
attitude during peace towards a population be- 
lieved to be hostile. The only method ever 
attempted is the method of terror. It requires no 
subtlety of suggestion or comprehension, it is 
suited to the most base and mechanical type of 
brain, it is first cousin to " efficiency and organ- 
isation," and it is the only method known against 
the Poles or the natives of Alsace Lorraine. Since 
the war you have had exactly the same thing in 
Belgium and in Serbia. You will have the same 
thing wherever the Prussian goes, because he is 
incapable of pennanent organic work in political 
matters. He cannot govern. This policy of 
terrorising civiUans in order to get better terms 
when he is losing is all of a piece with that very 
simple cast of mind which surely by this time is 
sufficiently famihar even to his admirers. 
Note at the same time that the German 
aeroplanes never carry out long air reconnais- 
sances behind the Allied lines, very rarely attempt 
to attack railway junctions or stores behind those 
lines, and have not risked a single Zeppelin for 
mihtary purposes of this ?ort. 
Now contrast with such a policy what the 
Allies have done and at once you perceive that while 
the Prussian policy is pivoting upon the political 
motive, the Allied policy is pivoting upon a 
military one. The shells dropped on Lille were 
dropped upon two very important specified res- 
tricted areas of military value, and only of 
military value. They were dropped at ranges of 
16,000 to 18,000 yards— that is, ranges sus- 
ceptible of correction and of aimed fire. This is 
still more true of the shells dropped on the railway 
junction at Lens, which is. of course, at a much • 
shorter range from the Allied heavy batteries 
behind the lines. The same is conspicuously 
true of the French heavy gun work in Alsace. The 
shells are aimed at the railways, particularly the 
railway junctions, at the enemy's barracks, at his 
sidings and at his stores of goods and material. 
They are never delivered at extreme ranges, but 
always at objects susceptible to correct and 
particular aim from comparatively short distances. 
Let me give an example with which I have 
personal acquaintance. The Germans dropped 
a shell into St. Die in the Vosges a little while 
before I visited that place. The shell was sent 
from extreme range, aimed at nothing in par- 
ticular save the general area of the town, fell in an 
outlying street and killed a child. The French, by 
way of reprisal, dropped an aimed shell into the gas 
works of St. Marie on the other side of the moun- 
tains and blew them up. They desired to attain 
a particular object and they attained it. They 
threw all those arrangements which depended 
upon a gas supply into disorder. If any civilian 
life was lost it was incidental to a purelv military 
operation. 
Again the allied air work is constantly pene- 
trating to great distances behind the German lines 
and undertakes reconnaissances pushed as far as 
possible eastward, and with very few exceptions 
never drops bombs with the mere object of terror- 
ising civilian populations. Those very few excep- 
tions, of which Freiburg was one, were strictly 
reprisals. The enemy was warned that on account 
of his contempt for his engagements and his breach 
of the conventions hitherto obtaining between 
belligerent white naf.ons, he. would be made to 
suffer in the same way that he had made others 
; uffer, and only after such warning was the punish- 
ment of the civilian populations in one or two 
towns upon the Rhine undertaken. It wa suc- 
cessfu' and for some time after obviously affected 
his policy. It may be necessary to undertake these 
repr sals again, and so it is to be hoped that they 
will be as thorough and decisive as possible. But 
it will still be t ue that the allied policy as a whole 
pivots upon purely mi itary considerations in w rk 
of this kind and the Prussian policy does not. And 
anyone who doubts this has only to measure ranges 
and to note the objects upon which the Allied borribs 
fall as compared with the enemy's bombs. 
When the Zeppelins reached the London 
area they knew perfectly well that they could 
not effect any milita y result there. They were 
not intending any military result. What they 
wanted was to get up a clamour against the 
authorities. They knew how weak the authorities 
had been in failing to suppress treasonable journal- 
ism and they hoped to add to our domestic con- 
fusion by some lucky shot. 
H. Belloc. 
