Note 527 — BOOK VIII THE AGE OF THE GREAT POWERS (continued 8)

Here is another glimpse of the agreeable dreams that fill the contemporary military mind. It is from Fuller’s recently published Tanks in the Great War. Colonel Fuller does not share that hostility to tanks characteristic of the older type of soldier. In the next war, he tells us: “Fast-moving tanks, equipped with tons of liquid gas ... will cross the frontier and obliterate every living thing in the fields and farms, the villages, and cities of the enemy’s country. Whilst life is being swept away around the frontier, fleets of aeroplanes will attack the enemy’s great industrial and governing centres. All these attacks will be made, at first, not against the enemy’s army ... but against the civil population, in order to compel it to accept the will of the attacker.”

For a good, well-balanced account of what modern war really means, see Philip Gibbs, Realities of War, already cited in two footnotes to § 8.