Union Labor Bulletin

PREVENT THIS HORROR!

Colonel D. P. Bloch, of the French army, paints a picture of the "next war" calculated to give one the horrors. Yet he is writing in the coldest technical terms, and much of what he sees for future conflicts would have been witnessed in the last one had it lasted a few months longer.

The first thing to realize is that in the "next war" there will be no "fronts." Attacks will be delivered by airplane hundreds of miles behind the frontier. Next, there will be no non-combatants; every one will be swept into the war machine, and every one will be in danger.

If the World War had lasted till the spring of 1919, the German trenches would have been drenched with "lewisite," a deadlier gas than any yet used, and one defying all then known forms of protection. This gas was the invention of an American college professor, and its manufacture would have been on a quantity basis of several thousand tons per week by March 1919.

On the other hand, Ludendorff had all plans laid to destroy Paris and London by a rain of "electron bombs," chemical fire makers which will start a blaze in anything burnable.

Colonel Bloch sees the American and German inventions combined in the next war; fire bombs used to drive people into the streets and gas bombs to overcome or kill them when in the open.

It would be totally impossible to fit out a whole population with gas masks and train them in the use of such devices. Even if defense is found against one gas, another may be invented, and a week or a day of its free use before the defense against it is found, may be sufficient to wipe out all resistance to it and win the war.