TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE AIR RAIDS.
AFEW newspapers have played a most undignified and mischievous part with regard to the raids which have occurred in the calm and bright nights of the past week. In professing to allay panic they have done their best— we can only hope unconsciously—to create it. On the most charitable construction, these newspapers wanted to provide their readers with new material for what is naturally a staple subject of conversation. But in these times every organ of opinion, as every person, ought to place itself under extremely severe restrictions. In a sense it may not pay to do so ; but what would pay even an irresponsible newspaper lees in the long run than to allow the Germans to believe that they were succeeding in their schemes for disturbing the current of London life and undermining the determination of the people ? The picture of London which might be painted by inference from the amount of space given to details of the air raids is known to be grotesquely untrue by any one who is acquainted with the facts. Not one of the recent bombings of London has been in itself a terrifying affair. What has been terrifying to some people is the atmosphere of apprehension that has been created by mischievous writers and the physical circumstances of each raid—we mean the roar of guns and the whistle and clatter of bursting shells. It is to be remembered that a large number of people are gun-shy, and if not a single German aeroplane were over London, but salvoes of artillery were fired into the sky over the houses, they would find no less and no more cause for alarm than during actual raids.
It has been pointed out over and over again that the actuarial losses from air raids have been so small as to be quite insignificant. They are considerably less than people suffer from the ordinary accidents of London traffic, and very much less than people are exposed to in normal times when journeying by sea even in the most seaworthy and best-handled ships. Let us take an illustration. Suppose a man travelling to Australia in one of our best-known liners. Ordinarily he cats, sleeps, and lives the light-hearted, if somewhat monotonous, life of a long voyage without ever allowing his mind for a moment to dwell upon such a remote event as shipwreck. But suppose he had started on a voyage with such a false atmosphere of apprehension as has been recently created for us by some of our newspapers. Day and night he would let his mind dwell upon the percentage of deaths caused at sea by collision, fogs, running aground, total disappearance without assignable cause, and so on and so forth. If while he was reading some of the more discouraging figures the ship ran into a thick fog, and his studies were carried out to the accompaniment of the ineessant booming of the fog-horn (which may be hold to correspond to the noise of guns in London), he would probably come to the conclusion, in his unfortunate state of mind, that very little hope was left for him except in the buoyancy of a pneumatic waistcoat. Yet, as a matter of fast, his chances of death would have been increased by only an infinitesimal degree after the fog closed in upon the ship. In London the chances of being killed by a direct hit from a bomb are indeed not worth worrying about when they are put in the scale of all the other changes and chances of this mortal life. Of course the danger from bits of shell is fairly great, but the protection from these afforded by quite ordinary dwelling-houses is almost complete. No one could watch unmoved the spectacle of those, chiefly the mothers of young families, who are not satisfied with the protection of small ramshackle houses, and are unwilling —no blame to them—to accept even the slight deli we have described; but even the danger of accidents from the crowding together of these people to snake use of the absolutely certain safety provided by cellars and corridors in the bowels of the earth has been greatly exaggerated. Except in one case, whore an accident occurred owing to unforeseen circumstances, the queues of people have been just as manageable as those which daily wait in the most ordinary times to enter the theatres. It has also been said, and the present writer is fully able to bear out the statement from his own observation, that the great majority of those who go out of their way to seek the most secure shelters belong to the foreign population of Landon. It is most satisfactory and reassuring to know that the Londoner who bears that title by right -of birth or regular association shows the unconcern for which the name is proverbial.
The true view is that the people of London should, and as we believe do, accept the small risks of aerial bomhartl- ment quietly as a point of pride and honour. It is a comman- place of the war that the front" has been indefinitely extended backwards .until the people of London find them- selves almost in the fighting-line. We think, as we have often said, that the Government would have done better to lay stress on the feet, as Mr. Lloyd George might have done with all his great persuasiveness and power of speech, that people at home are not only at war but in the war. When' people have made up their minds to a simple fact like that, they accept all its corollaries and sequels with a perfectly placid mind. We are thinking now not only of air raids but of many other matters in which the Government have en- couraged people to believe that things are not what they are. The simple truth resides in the French saying : A in guerre comme a la guerre. There must be sacrifices ; there must be dangers. To try to smooth everything away, instead of appealing to the nation to accept hardships, inconveniences, and even risks in the greatest of all causes, s to strike a blow at both honour and idealism. Possibly any one who is unduly annoyed at the disturbance of his regular life by means of an air raid might bring himself back to a sounder point of view by remembering that the very best weather for a raid on London is also the very best weather for progress at the front. If the Germans imagine, as we suppose they do, that the more or less incessant dropping of bombs will act like dripping water on a stone and gradually wear away the deter- mination of civilians, they are making one of the most stupid of the many blunders they have committed in diplomacy and in their treatment of human beings during the war. The feeling of the ordinary Englishman is that he will never make peace with the authors of these methods of warfare except on terms which he may choose to impose. His determination becomes much greater, not less. This of course is an advan- tage to the whole nation in carrying on the war, and we cannot affect to despise its value. Indeed, we find consider- able satisfaction in it. The answer of the ordinary man to the suggestion that his spirit might break under the strain of air raids might be expressed in Shakespeare's words, in Julius Caesar, with the change of a single word :—
"I had rather be a dog, and bay the moon,
Than such an Englishman."
Some of the newspapers which have rendered us the signal disservice which we have described above are also clamouring for immediate reprisals on the civilian populations of German towns. Let us make quite clear what we think about this proposal. Surely the first thing to remember is that air polity, like every other military or naval question in the war, is a purely military matter. Every decision that is not come to on purely military grounds will be a wrong decision. What astonishes us is that the class of mind which customarily demands that Governments should be in the hands of "busi- ness men," and military and naval affairs in the hands of experts, now treats us to a wild innovation—not so much of an innovation, after all, if we know our man—and tries to make its will override that of the expert advisers. So far as we have been able to deduce the opinion of our experts from published statements, they think that our aeroplanes, which of course are not yet nearly numerous enough for all purposes, are better employed in bombing aerodromes, depots, railway stations, munition dumps, and so on than in attacking non-combatants in accessible cities in Germany. If the case for attacking German civilian populations were presented to us as a purely military argument, we should not feel justified in resisting it, much though we might dislike. it. In that event we should only be led into adopting a COUThe which our enemy had forced upon us. Again and again, as in the employment of gas, drifting mines, liquid fire, and so on, the Germans have broken the rules and forced us to follow suit lest we should be at a very great military disadvantage. It is out of the question when the stake is so great, and the whole future of peace and civilization is involved, that we should allow the war to be lost on a point of punetilio. The responsibility belongs to the Germans, not to us. If our military advisers firmly believed that it had become necesSary, in answer to repeated German provocations, to treat German towns in the same way as English towns have been treated, because by these means and these means alone the Germans would be compelled to withdraw large numbers of guns and aeroplanes from their front in order to protect their ruffled populations, we should certainly have to consider the arement with respect. If our experts came to this conclusion, it would also mean that after careful thought they had decided that from a strictly military point of view indiscriminate attacks upon German towns paid them better than the present policy of bombing aerodromes, railways, munition dumps, and so on already mentioned. So far, with the number of aeroplanes now at our disposal, we have seen no sign that this is the considered opinion of our advisers. We hope and believe that so long as they think this conclusion unnecessary, they will not dream of yielding to strategic direction from newspapers, and consenting to what in the circumstances they would think a fatal misuse of their aeroplanes, merely because the Germans have descended to this misuse of their air forces owing to an entire mis- judgment of our national character. A great deal of mis- understanding is caused by the very word "reprisal." The whole war is a reprisal. All we want to do is to hit the Germans as hard as possible in the most effectual way. Every one is agreed about that. But no good will come of direction by newspaper. We hope Mr. Lloyd George may find an opportunity to tell some of the newspapers that they ought to he ashamed of themselves, and to invite them to profit by the example of the ordinary Londoner.
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