LAND & WATER 
April 5, 1917 
Present Policy of the War 
B,y"Hilaire BellOG 
THM destruction of evervthin;,' that could be des- 
troyed over the ver\ ' /one of the rpccnt 
enemy retirement. . ' w'th the recent 
dehberate and admitted snikin^,' of a Iiospital 
ship sufifjest a j)olitical point which iias not, 1 think, 
l>een thoroughly dealt with in our Press. It has not been 
thoroughly dealt witli even in that of the Continent, 
where there is, unhappily, a much greater acquaintjince 
with military damage m "the past. 
The point is this : The prolongation of the war, has 
imreased the necessity of an absolate victory. 
Ihis prolongation of the war tends to decrease the horror 
of, and llurefore the reaction against, barbarism. 
it familiarises the mind (by jlnillusion) with the idea of 
an insohible problem. 1 \\»mv. met plenty of men who 
thought the trenches in front of Noyon, having been 
Idled with opposing forces for two and a half years^ would 
be so filled in the end. 
It gives time for old bad habits in government and 
social organisation, which had hwwed to the blast in 1914 
and Kii.s, to raise their heads again. 
It adds strength tp reiterated assertions of those 
gernrano-phils who foster even among us a mood of 
" stalemate," and of " terms."' It e.vhausts materially 
and morall\-. 
It does all these things. But — far more Important — it 
increases the desire of the enemy to destroy a civilisation 
which he cannot attain, and increases his practice in the 
means of destruction. Therefore i\ compels that civilisation 
with every increasing month to determine more and 
more upon the absolute cliniinat^n of such a menace. 
Those who said in i()i4 that "ftie war was a matter of 
life and death w-ere accused by many of rhetorical 
exaggeration. To-day, and for this country especially, 
under the menace by sea. the fonnula is patently true. 
The enemy has, during the progress of the ' war, 
gradually proceeded step by st«|> to break, one after the 
•other, a series of conventions explicit and implicit, 
which had hitherto limited the action of the belligerents 
by sea and by land. He has )ioi reached the Hmit of this 
])rocess. Either these novel outrages (or at any rate 
some of them) will be allowed to form precedents or thej? 
will not. Whether they will form precedents or no 
depends, not upon written conventions or the verbal 
promises from governments, but upon a state of mind in 
liurope. That state of mind will be chiefly produced by 
the character and completeness of the \ictory — w-hich in 
its turn will very largely depend upon domestic oj)inion 
within the entente countries during these few last months 
which are at hand. 
That is the capital truth which we must bear in mind, 
especially here at home. 1 
Let us examine these various propositions singly'. 
First : The enemy has — under the direction of Pntssia 
— broken what were before 1914 very sacred implied 
or expressed conventions of European civilised war. 
It is sometimes suggested that these conventions as 
they existed up to the summer of IQ14, universally 
respected by Europeans, were blind mechanical products 
of armed conHict. 
The reason you did not do such and such things, though 
they might be of immediate military advantage to you, 
was that in the long ruti they produced an ultimate 
military disadvantage — for example, you did not bombard 
open towns, even though they were road centres, because 
a mutual policy of destroying them would put you 
nltimately in danger of receiving more damage of the 
same kind in the long run than the immediate military 
advantage was worth. 
This theory, stated as a uni\crsal truth, is cjuite erro- 
neous. A great many things which would distin<tly be to 
the ultimate military advantage of a belligerent were not 
done by Europeans in recent war because it wa^ felt that 
the doing of them lowered the whole standard of ci\ilisa- 
tion or, to put it more tnithfuUj-, because they were 
repugnant to the European conscience. 
For instance, it is common sense that the poisoning 
of water supplies behind a retirement would gravely 
weaken the military ])ower of the ijursuit if the retire- 
ment was absolute, and no recovery of the territory 
adanduned was contemplated. Nc\-ettheless, men of 
European civilisation did not poisoif ' water supplies, 
primarily because such an action was thotight unchivalrous 
and therefore unmilitary, but also perhaps because this 
sentiment was connected with a subconscious feeling that ' 
making war horrible beyond a certain point would weaken 
the whole texture of our c ivilisation. 
Or again, it is obx-iously of immediate military ad- 
vantage to \ioIate neutral territory when strategic 
superiority is gained thereby. Neve'riheless, neutral 
territory was never violated, and so profound was the 
feeling, upon this subject that Najmleon's single action 
of the .5<^rt, the sending of troops into neutral territory 
to arrest the Duke of Enghien, struck the Europe of thait 
time with greater moral horror than anjiihing else 
the revolutionary wars had produced. 
It is to be remembered at the outset^of this enquiry — 
never to be lost sight of as it proceeds — that if one loses 
a point in the chivalry of war, the old limits are never 
^to be recovered. No mutual mechanical pressure or a 
mere balance of military advantage restores it. These 
hmits must therefore be protected by a maintenance of 
themoral standard : That is. by a state of mind. We 
cannot trust their maintenance to the mere necessary 
give and take of the belligerent forces. 
I'xirther, the successive violation of the.se conventions 
has been directly due to the will and action of Prussia. 
It h Prussia alone among European States which has, 
for a Ipng time past, affirmed, and wWch first began to 
put into practice, the doctrine that the rftilitary advantage 
of a ©articular State permitted the violation of European 
standards, and it is in proportion as Pifussia has become 
more and more completely the master of the great enemy 
combination against us these violations have increased 
in number and kind. 
Second . The advance in outrage lender the direction 
of Prussia has been made step by st^ and is still con- 
tinuing. 
In former wars Prussia had already violated two main 
conventions which other European States continued to 
respect : 
(i) She had, ever since Frederick the dreat, taken 
the military advantage of initiating military action 
without declaration of wai^. 
(2) She had seized involuntary hostages : that is, 
non-belligerents, not responsible for military action, 
but in some way prominent or respected in the locahties 
affected. She had held them as hostages against any 
thing done in their neighbourhood which might disturb 
her military plans. She had put to death during her 
last war of 1870-71 hostages of this kind in order to strike 
terror and to prevent interference with her communica- 
tions, etc. 
Both these acts she proceeded to repeat as a matter 
of course in the origins of the present campaign : for 
Europe had very foolishly allowed her to establish the 
precedent. But she gradually added, point by point 
during the campaign, ijuite new breaches of convention. 
They may be thus summarised in their order : 
(a) She violated neutral territory, at first admitting 
it was a novel breach of law. 
(b) She next organised considerable massacres of 
civilians in order to terrorise the civil population ; and 
she accompanied these massacres by the destruction of 
civilian property. 
(c) She dropped explosives upon the civilian population 
of oj)en towns, also in order to obtain the militarj^ advan- 
tage of throwing confusion into civilian affairs. 
All these first three things she did quite at the opening 
of the war and did them for the first time in modern 
European warfare. She did them long before any similar 
actions had been forced upon her opponents by her 
example. 
(d) She next proceeded, about six months later, to 
