ASPECTS OF WAR.• A DISTINGUISHED South American diplomatist, Setior Santiago
Perez Triana, who was at one time Colombian Minister in London, has collected under the appropriate title of Aspectos de is Guerra' a number of articles on the present war which he contributed to Hispania, a Spanish monthly review published in London. We are grateful to him for this able endeavour to place the British case clearly and cogently before Spanish-speaking people on both sides of the Atlantic. As a specimen of his attitude, we may translate his powerful indictment of Prussian militarism :— " Prussia, and under Prussia all Germany, have lived solely for war, with a bellicose ardour which has steadily increased since the days of Jena and Waterloo. They have modelled their standard of life on military science, suppressing the moral conception of justice and replacing it by regarding victory as the supreme law and final justification. They have placed their soldiers as a privileged caste above the civil law, and have made the military uniform a sacred garb which covers not only arbitrariness, but even crime—the worst feature of which is not what has actually been done, but what might have been done. They have thrown seide every precept or commandment that curbs greedy appetite; they have destroyed the faith of mankind in given word or • (1) Aspecies de Its Guerra. For Santiago Peres Triana. Londree: Hispania, 7 Sicilian Avenue, W.C.—(2) La Guerra Vue dune Ambulance. Par "'Abbe Felix Klein. Paris : Armand Colin. [3 fr. 50 e.]—(5) A Burgeon fa Belgians. By H. S. Souttar. London : Edward Arnold. [Ss. Sd. net.]— (4) Aircraft in the Great War. By Claude Grahame-White and Harry Harper. • don : T. Fisher Unwin. [7s. 6d. net.]—(5) The British Army. By W. G. Clifford. London : A. and C. Black. [la 6d. net.]—(6) Britain's Territorials in Peace and War. By F. A. M. Webster. Loudon : Sidgwick and Jackson. Da. net.]—(7) Things to Know about the War. London: C. A. P•sion. [Is. net] pledged honour, and have turned the songs of their poets and the thoughts of their philosophers to merely academic utterances which have no bearing upon actual life. They have directed their national conscience by the ludicrous and devilish belief in the vast superiority of the German to all other races, fascinating the popular will by the piratical corollary ' Since we are superior to all other men, it is our right to take whatever pleases us of their possessions. Those who refuse to abandon their goods quietly are thieves, and it is our duty to exterminate them.' It is thus that Germany lays claim to the colonies of other nations—her 'place in the sun '—to part of France and all Belgium, and Holland next, and soon, very soon, American territories."
The Abbe Felix Klein' has published a most interesting account of the war as seen from an ambulance—the American Hospital at Neuilly, to which he was attached in his clerical capacity, where he received many thrilling tales from the lips of men newly broken by the wheels of battle, and where though he is too modest to say so—his devoted services have been of the greatest comfort and assistance to many of his co-religionists. Few who take up his book will be able to lay it aside until they have finished it; it is charmingly written, and a veracious record of a most striking experience. We may quote, as a pendant to the extract given above, what the Abbe Klein notes in his diary, under date of August 7th, about the action of England. It is probably representative of the view taken at the time by the most enlightened Frenchmen :— "I learnt yesterday evening that the English—though nothing has been said about it—have been landing for two days. General French—it was a happy fate which chose his Gallic name—will be able to bring over all the more soldiers because the sovereign island has no need to keep them at home, Lord Kitchener having yesterday proposed to enlist 500,000 men. With such a War Minister at London, such a General on the Continent, and all arrangements made in advance with our General Staff, Great Britain does more than bring us absolute security by sea ; she gives us also assistance on land which will grow increasingly valuable as time goes on. Long live the land of my affection! 'Hurrah for old England ! ' " "England has done her utmost to ward off the catastrophe, as Sir Edward Gray has proved by documentary evidence with a frankness which cautious Germany cannot smile at. . . . England wished for peace because the evils of war horrified her. Now that honour and interest have driven her into war she will go on to the end ; she will not desist till she has conquered, and her victory will be united with ours. She will not yield to William IL any more than she yielded to Napoleon; and this time, as Mr. Asquith has said, there is no Napoleon in the field."
Mr. Souttar,3 who was Surgeon-in-Chief to the Belgian Field Hospital during the first three months of the war, has made of his experiences a book which will be of great interest to his colleagues. He clearly brings out the remarkable novelty of this war—from a medical standpoint—in the fact that well-equipped hospitals were so close to the firing line that many lives were saved by prompt operations which must almost certainly have been lost if it had been necessary to transport severely wounded men for any considerable distance. To the layman the most remarkable fact given in Mr. Souttar's book relates to the " open-air " treatment of septic wounds. It is well known that the greatest danger to the wounded man—apart from the immediate shock and loss of blood—arises from the bacteria which hasten to infest his wounds before they come under the surgeon's hands :— "There is one way," says Mr. Souttar, "in which all such in- fections may be defeated—by plenty of fresh air, or, better still, by oxygen. We had some very striking proofs of this, for in several cases the wounds were so horribly foul that it was impossible to tolerate their presence in the wards ; and in these cases we made it a practice to put the patient in the open air, of course suitably protected, and to leave the wound exposed to the winds of heaven, with only a thin piece of gauze to protect it The results were almost magical, for in two or three days the wounds lost their odour and began to look clean, whilst the patients lost all signs of the poisoning which had been so marked before. It may be partly to this that we owe the fact that we never bad a case of tetanus. In all cases we treated our wounds with solutions of oxygen, and we avoided covering them up with heavy dress- ings; and we found that this plan was successful as well as economical.,, No feature of the present war is more striking than the use of aircraft, which represent an altogether novel development in military science, and have in some degree revolutionized the art of strategy by largely eliminating the element of surprise. Messrs. Grahame-White and Harper' have produced a most readable work on this subject, incorporating practically all that has been authoritatively published about the feats of the Allied airmen, and adding to this information popular but accurate descriptions of the problems and instruments of
flight. We can strongly recommend this volume to all who wish to understand the work which aeroplanes are now doing at the front. Not the least interesting chapter is that devoted to the " flechette " which the French aerial service introduced to notice. This silent and deadly weapon is a small steel arrow, about seven inches long and one-third of an inch in diameter, sharply pointed at one end, whilst the other end is hollowed out on four sides so as to be cruciform in section and to ensure the arrow falling vertically. These arrows are packed in boxes of fifty, made so as to release them simultaneously on the pulling of a string, when the arrows descend in an irregular stream, acquiring sufficient velocity to bury themselves in the body of any man whom they strike. A single discharge of these arrows on a squadron of German cavalry is stated to have killed and wounded no less than thirteen men, besides horses. This new weapon, which comes out of the air without warning, and is heralded by no sound or visible discharge, is said to have proved quite demoralizing to bodies of troops against whom it was employed —so demoralizing, indeed, that its use has been stigmatized as unfair by the Germans, though we cannot ourselves see why it should be considered less sportsmanlike than shrapnel, Black Manias, petrol-sprayers, or poison-gases.
The last three books on our list do not call for extended notice. Mr. Clifford's book, The British Army,6 belongs to what is oddly called "The Peeps Series," and is a popular history with brightly coloured illustrations. We are glad to be able to praise Mr. Webster's sympathetic and well-written account of the Territorial Forces.6 We should add that Things to Know about the War7 contains many inexcusable errors in facts which are easy to ascertain from the official manuals, whilst the author's extraordinary description of a "land mine" on p. 40 can only have been evolved from his imagination.
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