29 SEPTEMBER 1917, Page 2

Some of the newspapers which seem to do their best

to create panic while professing to allay it have suggested that these raids can be prevented only by bombing the populations of German towns. If what is generally meant by " reprisals " promised to have any military effect in the strict sense, we do not know that we should have anything to say against it. What we do dislike is the pretension of some writers to endow their arguments with a military validity which they do not possess. The time to talk of reprisals will come when we have aeroplane@ to spare. As it is, the only thing worth doing is to bomb the German aerodromes and keep the German air- men so bwy on their lines in Flanders that they will not have machines or men to spare for superfluous adventures: