It is not my intention to attack Lord Kitchener; that the war could be carried on at all under such a system proves that he was a great man. But if he had managed to delegate some of his powers he would have proved himself a greater. As the result of all this delay, a great many of the first respirators had to be made in France. Convalescent soldiers and the nuns in a convent on the Mont des Cats were conscripted to make respirators which, if inelegant, were fairly efficient. Unfortunately, consignments of 'Women of England' and other home-made respirators were continually appearing in France, and every now and then led to a battalion or so being wiped out. I am able to give these details because at this time I, who before and after was an honest infantry bombing officer, made my brief incursion into chemical warfare. I arrived at Saint-Omer from my comfortable trench as being a person accustomed to poisonous gases in civil life. In a large school, converted into a hospital, there was a small glassfronted room like a miniature greenhouse, into which known volumes of chlorine were liberated. We had to compare the effects on ourselves of various quantities with and without respirators. It stung the eyes and produced a tendency to gasp and cough when breathed. For this reason trained physiologists had to be employed. An ordinary soldier would probably restrain his tendency to gasp, cough, and throw himself about if he were working a machine-gun in a battle, but could not do so in a laboratory experiment with nothing to take his mind off his own feelings. An experienced physiologist has more selfcontrol. It was also necessary to see if one could run or work hard in the res pirators, so we had a wheel of some kind to turn by hand in the gas chamber, not to mention doing fiftyyard sprints in respirators outside. As each of us got sufficiently affected by gas to render his lungs unduly irritable, another would take his place. None of us were much the worse for the gas, or in any real danger, as we knew where to stop, but some had to go to bed for a few days; I was very short of breath and incapable of running for a month or so. This work, which was mainly done by civilians, was rewarded by the grant of the Military Cross to the brilliant young officer who used to open the door of the motor-car of the medical general who occasionally visited the experiments. The soldiers who took part in them could, however, for some time be distinguished by the peculiar green color of their brass buttons, due to the action of the gas. Even when arrangements had been made for the manufacture of respirators in England the supply suddenly dried up. It was found that the girls who made them were working as best they could with raw and bleeding fingers, and London was being scoured for rubber gloves. Someone had altered the formula of the mixture in which the respirators were dipped, by substituting for carbonate of soda caustic soda, which has the property of dissolving the human skin. His name, needless to say, does not appear in the official history. Such were some of the difficulties which we incurred in our anti-gas work, through the ignorance of highly placed persons. As, however, our defensive-though not our offensive measures were ultimately better than those of any other nation, things must have been still worse elsewhere. The success of our respirators was largely due to one man, Harrison, whose name is insufficiently known to his countrymen. He was an analytical chemist, and author of that admirable, too little read work, Secret Remedies, published by the British Medical Association, in which it is shown, for. example, that although Beecham's pills are worth a guinea a box the actual cost of the ingredients of the said box falls short of a penny. He enlisted as a private, but was a lieutenant-colonel when he died of influenza and overwork in 1918. Naturally the ignorance of our private soldiers was of an even more abysmal character. In the early days they often removed the respirators from their faces and tied them round their chests, as it was there that they felt the effects of the gas. Again, in 1917, eighty per cent of the mustardgas cases vomited, while this symptom was rare in 1918. Apparently it took five months for the British Army to realize that gas poisoning did not necessarily mean poisoning through the stomach. VIII If, then, in future wars we are to avoid gross mismanagement in high places and panic and stupidity among the masses, it is essential that everyone should learn a little elementary science, that politicians and soldiers should not be proud of their ignorance of it, that ordinary men and women should not be ashamed or afraid of knowing something of the working of their own bodies. If we persist in the belief that we can be saved by patriotism or social reforms, or by military preparation of the type which would have sufficed in former struggles, we shall go down before some nation of more realistic views. We do not know what type of scientific knowledge will be needed; we may be certain that some type will be. The British are a tired people; they like to rest in breathless quiet after all their ills, and to pin their faith to the promises of leaders whose eyes are fixed on the past. It has all happened before. Ganz vergessener Völker Müdigkeiten (I cannot lift from my eyelids the wearinesses of quite forgotten peoples, nor hold away from my terrified soul the dumb downfall of far stars.) The Roman and Spanish empires appear to have perished largely from intellectual torpor. Are we to go the same way? We have to get over our distaste for scientific thought and scientific method. To take an example from the war. The physiologists at the experimental ground at Porton, in Hampshire, had considerable difficulty in working with a good many soldiers, because the latter objected so strongly to experiments on animals, and did not conceal their contempt for people who performed them. And yet these soldiers would have had no hesitation in shelling the horses of hostile gunteams, and the vast majority of them were in the habit of shooting animals for sport. I have never known a physiologist who went in for shooting animals; physiologists know too much of the processes which occur in a wounded beast or bird that creeps away to die. And though I have seen a good many scientific experiments on animals, I have never seen one which, so far as concerns the pain given, I should object to having performed on myself. That this attitude is not unusual would appear from the following experiment described by the director of the Porton experimental ground, in which he wished to compare the effects of hydrocyanic or prussic-acid gas on himself and a dog. They both entered a chamber containing one part in 2000 of the gas. 'In order,' he writes, 'that the experiment might be as fair as possible, and that my respiration should be relatively as active as that of the dog, I remained standing and took a few steps from time to time while I was in the chamber. In about thirty seconds the dog began to get unsteady, and in fifty-five seconds it dropped on the floor and commenced the characteristic distressing respiration which heralds death from cyanide poisoning. One minute thirty-five seconds after the commencement the animal's body was carried out, respiration having ceased and the dog being apparently dead. I then left the chamber. As regards the result upon myself, the only real effect was a momentary giddiness when I turned my head quickly. This lasted about a year and then vanished. For some time it was difficult to concentrate on anything for any length of time. It is hard to say to what extent this was due to the experiment.' As the result of this work, hydrocyanic acid was given up for use in the field, as phosgene is effective at fifty times this dilution, and mustard gas at one thousand times. One of the grounds given for objection to science is that science is responsible for such horrors as those of the late war. 'You scientific men,' we are told, 'never think of the possible application of your discoveries. You do not mind whether they are used to kill or to cure. Your method of thinking, doubtless satisfactory when dealing with molecules and atoms, renders you insensible to the difference between right and wrong. And so you devise the means of universal destruction, and sell them into the hands of unrighteous and bloody-minded men.' VOL. 135-NO. 1 I note that the people who make these remarks do not refuse to travel by railway or motor-car, to use electric light, or to read mechanically printed newspapers. Nor do they install a well in their back-gardens to enjoy drinking the richer water of a prescientific age with its interesting and variegated fauna. But it is quite easy to show that the destructive and horrible nature of modern warfare is due, not to the weapons used, but largely to the other applications of science, which constitute the material basis of our civilization. Let us imagine the Great War fought with all our means of transport, and preventive medicine, but no weapons more complicated than swords, spears, and possibly a few bows. With fewer munitions the armies could have been mobilized even more rapidly, and more men put in the fighting line. The Germans would probably have tried, as they tried in 1914, to bring about a Schlacht ohne Morgen, a battle on reversed fronts modeled on Cannæ. The fighting would probably have been about as severe as at Cannæ, and men would have been fighting in close order ten or twenty deep along a hundredmile front. No doubt it would have been over sooner, but the losses would probably have been just as great. The French and Germans would no doubt both have gone on fighting until at least half their armies became casualties and, with four years' fighting compressed into as many weeks, it would have been impossible to tend more than a fraction of the wounded. The chief difference might have been that the Russians would have been victorious by mere weight of numbers and the French defeated. In former wars, slaughter was limited by the fact that large armies could not be fed, and they developed epidemic diseases. They also moved very slowly. So it took twenty-three years, from 1792 to 1815, to wear down the resistance of the French nation. Moreover, the Great War was the first since the Second Punic War, of the third century B.C., between two great civilized nations, each fully prepared for war, and fighting with all its might. This fact accounts for its ferocity. Modern transport and hygiene made its scale possible; the weapons used merely served to prolong it. one The objection to scientific weapons, such as the gases of the late war and such new devices as may be employed in the next, is essentially an objection to the unknown. Fighting with lances or guns, one can calculate, or thinks can calculate, one's chances. But with gas, or rays, or microbes, one has an altogether different state of affairs. Poisonous gas had a great moral effect just because it was new and incomprehensible. As long as we permit ourselves to be afraid of the novel and unknown, there will be a very great temptation to use novel and unknown weapons against us. Now terror of the unknown is thoroughly right and rational so long as we believe that the prince of this world is a malignant being. But it is not justifiable if we believe that the world is the expression of a power friendly to our aspirations, or if we are atheists and hold that it is neutral and indifferent to human ideals. It will by now have become clear to you that I am writing somewhat parabolically. What I have said about mustard gas might be applied, mutatis mutandis, to most other applications of science to human life. They can all, I think, be abused, but none perhaps is always evil; and many, like mustard gas, when we have got over our first not very rational objection to them, turn out to be on the whole good. If it is right for me to fight my enemy with a sword, it is right for me to fight him with mustard gas; if the one is wrong, so is the other. But I have no sympathy whatever for Mr. Facing-bothways, when he says that though he is prepared on occasion to fight he will not use those nasty newfangled weapons. Of course, I am not suggesting that we should violate or prepare to violate the Washington agreement on this subject. I do, however, believe that we ought to denounce it at the earliest possible opportunity. Such are the facts about chemical warfare. They will not be believed because a belief in them would do violence to the sentiments of most people. They will not be promulgated as there is no money to be made out of them. (Chemical manufacturers make both high explosives and mustard gas, and the former more easily.) The views that I have expressed do not coexist in the mind of any party leader or newspaper proprietor and must therefore be those of a crank. But, until some stronger argument can be waged against them than that they are unusual and unpleasant, there remains the possibility that they are true. WHEN IS A CITIZEN NOT A CITIZEN? BY IMOGEN B. OAKLEY WHILE war clouds were hovering over Italy and Greece, an Italian-born gardener said to his American employer: 'I hope there will be no war between Italy and Greece, for if there is I'll be called and I'll have to leave you.' 'Why should you be called?' asked his employer. 'You are a naturalized American citizen and have voted here for ten years.' 'Yes,' assented the naturalized citizen, but Italy never gives up her children.' That a man should be a voter in an American community and at the same time subject to call from a foreign Power seemed a subject worth inquiring into, and after learning more about the gardener and his understanding of the situation I wrote to the State Department for information concerning the rights and the immunities of naturalized citizens. I found the gardener was right. He was subject to call from his native country. There is no treaty between the United States and Italy defining the status of Italianborn subjects who have become American citizens. Natives of Italy are subject to military service between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine, and naturalization in a foreign country without the formal consent of the Italian Government does not interfere with the necessity of that service. An Italian who has left Italy without fulfilling his military service and has become naturalized in the United States I is subject to arrest and forced military service should he return between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine. After thirty-nine he is not liable to service, but may be punished for desertion. In a special notice to American citizens formerly subjects of Italy who contemplate returning to that country, the State Department advises that in case such American citizens have not performed their military service in Italy it would be well before returning to that country to send a petition for pardon for the offense of desertion or evasion of military service to the Italian Government direct, since 'the State Department of the United States does not act as intermediary in any such matter.' That is to say, a naturalized Italian, who is a voter in an American community, must send a petition for pardon for desertion to the 'king and potentate' he has formally renounced in his oath of naturalization before he can safely return for a visit - and the United States has nothing to say. The Italian-born naturalized citizen is not alone in having two allegiances, with the one to his native country holding precedence. There is no treaty on the subject of naturalization between the United States and Greece. A former Greek who has not completed his military service is liable to arrest should he return to Greece. The Greek Government has stated that none of its subjects who have been naturalized as |