The German war manual affirms that 'revery means may be employed to overcome the enany, without whith the object of the war cannot be attained . . . all means which modern inventions afford, including the most perfect, the most dangerous and those which destroy most quickly the adversary en maw; and since these latter result most promptly in the attain ment of the object of the war they must tie considered, as indispensable, and, all things con sidered, they are the most humane.° Neverthe less, it admits that ((chivalrous and Christian spirit, the progress of civilization and espe cially the lcnowledge of one's own interest have led to voluntary relaxations the necessity of which has received the tacit assent of all states and of all armies.° Von MoltIce from whom the General Staff draws so many of its ideas, laid down the inadmissible principle that °the great benefit in war is that it should be termi nated as soon as possible.* For this purpose it is permissible to °employ all means except those which are positively condemned° (clam miissen alle, nicht geradezu verwerfliche mittel frei stehen). In short, 'the test of the legitimacy of an instrument or measure is not so much its humanity but its effectiveness in enabling a belligerent to bring the war to a speed); and successful termination. This view has recently found advocates in Generals Bernhardi, von Hindenburg, von Bissing and other German militarists and it is apparently the view on which the German government proceeded during the late war. Thus the Imperial Chancellor said in the Reichstag in March 1916: °Every means that is calculated to shorten the war constitutes the most humane policy to follow. When the most ruthless methods are considered best calculated to lead us to victory and a swift victory, then they must be employed.° Again in a note of 31 Jan. 1917, handed to the Secre tary of State of the United States, the German Ambassador at Washington justifying Ger many's repudiation of the pledges given to the American government regarding the sink ing of merchant vessels (see SUBMARINE WAR FARE) and defending the resumption of unre stricted submarine warfare, said: °The Ger man government is now conipelled to continue the fight for existence, forced upon it, with the full employment of all the weapons which are at its disposal.) The employment of new and powerful agencies of destruction or of new methods of attack is, of course, not to be condemned merely because they are new or because they are more effective than those formerly The true test of their lawfuhiess is whether they are humane, whether they can be em ployed without inflicting superfluous injury upon those against whom *they are use whether in the language of the Declaration of Saint Petersburg the effect is to •Ituselessly aggravate the sufferings of disabled men.* The doctrine of the German tnilitarists that the test is effectiveness, that is, it is permissible to employ any instrument the use of which will contribute to the attairunent of the object of the war and especially the shortenina of its duration, cannot be accepted. It is in fact re jected by nearly all military codes and is con demned by The Hague Conventions, and by practically all text writers outside Germairf. Turning now to the practice during the late war, we find that nearly every instrument, agency or method of destruction forbidden by The Hague Conventions and the customs of war was employed by one or the other of the belligerents, and that Germany has the un enviable distinction of having made use of them all. Each belligerent accused the other during the early months of the war of tnaldng use of both dumdum and explosive bullets and eac.h vigorously denied the charge. Each claims to have captured on the field of battle large quantities especially of dumdum aminunition, and the French admitted that the Germans may have found such ammunition at Longwy, but asserted that it had been stored there be fore the war for target practice and that none of it was ever used against the Germans. The German emperor addressed a protest to the President of the United States against the alleged use by the English and Frencli of lml lets forbidden by The Hague Convention, and the President of France in a telegram to Mr. Wilson denied the charge and stated that the emperor's protest was designed to deceive the people of the United States. The French gov ernment also stigmatized as °the grossest for geris" what purported to be facsimiles of labels found on French ammunition boxes showing the presence of dumdum bullet& Count von Bernstorff, German Ambassador at Washington, filed a complaint with the De partment of State, charging that bullets for bidden by The Hague Convention were being manufactured in the United States for ship ment to England for use by the British forces. The department made an investigation of the charge and informed Count von Bernstorff that no evidence could be found in support of his charge. Nevertheless, it added, that if evidence could be furnished that any firm or individual in the United States was engaged in the marm facture of such ammunition for shipment to England or France, it would be glad to have the proof. None was ever furnished. While prac
tically every belfigerent accused the other of using forbidden bullets the evidence at hand does not indicate that any general use was made by any belligerent of the particular type of bullet prohibited by The Hague Convention, although there may have been occasional uses of it with or without the authority of the government whose troops were guilty of it.
A substance which, however, was used by all belligerents on an extensive scale and the. law fulness of which was questioned in many quarters was asphyxiating and even poisonous gases. This new agency of attack appears to have been first employed by the Germans on 22 April 1915, at the second battle of Ypres. The Germans charged that it had already been used by the British troops but there is no evi dence in support of the charge. Several tnethods were employed in generating the gases thus used, the most common of which was to ignite the substance in the first line trenches and permit the wind to blow the fumes toward the enemy. The opinions of chemists regard ing the composition of the gases first used dif fered but there was a general agreement that one of the ingredients was chlorine. During the same month what was described in the press dispatches as *poisonous') gases was used bv the Germans against the Russians on the Eastern front, the gases being generated, as on the Western front, by means of steel cylinders placed in the trenches. The MItish, French and Russian troops naturally considered that retaliation in Icind was legitimate and accord ingly they very early organized "gas detach ments* and before the end of the year 1915 ap parently all belligerents were resorting to this new mode of attack. Whether such mode of warfare is a violation of The Hague Conven tion would seem to depend mainly on the character of the gases employed and the effect which they produced on the men against whom they were launched. According to the reports of British and French military commanders, medical experts and newspaper correspondents who saw the victims of these attacks the effect was to produce agonizing and prolonged suffer ing; that the result was not merely to disable the men who inhaled it but to inflict permanent injury upon those who did not succumb on the field or cause them to die a painful and linger ing death. Alexander Powell, an Amencan newspaper corre9ondent who saw many of the victims on the Western front, stated that the inhalation of the gases produced painful and agonizing strangulation accompanied by black ened and distorted features. Stanley Wash burn, a London newspaper correspondent who saw hundreds of the victims in the hospitals on the Eastern front, stated that the gas caused blood congestion and the formation of clots not only in the lungs but in the blood vessels and arteries and that those who lingered on and finally succumbed suffered a torture which the days of the Inquisition could harcUy parallel.
The Germans, however, at first denied that such effects were produced by the use of gas and asserted that the suffocation of the enemy in this method was no more cruel or inhuman than the bombardment of trenches or the flood ing of the enemy's camps with water as the Belgians had done at Nieuport. The evidence, however. was so strongly to the contrary that the Germans later preferred to rest their de fense on the ground of reprisal against the enemy for having first resorted to tlus rnethod ot attack., As stated above, however, no evi dence has been produced in support of their charge that the English were the first to make use of this agency of attack. The Germans might have argued that what The Hague Con vention prohibited was projectiles and not gen erating tanks or cylinders; and that it pro hibited only poisoned weapons and not the use of noxious or poisonous fumes generated by apparatus in the trenches and which reach the enemy by being blown against him by means of the wind. But to this argument it might be replied that The Hague Convention forbids the use of poison in any form and it also for bids not only the employment of arms and pro jectiles but also of material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering. At the time, the Con ference did not foresee the invention of other agencies than bombs or projectiles for the dif fusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases and consequently the language employed in the Convention was directed only against the in struments then in use. It is hardly probable that had the Conference foreseen the inven tion of other instruments than bombs or pro jectiles for diffusing such gases it would have failed to formulate its prohibition in such lan guage as to embrace the methods of attack devised by the Germans and subsequently adopted by the other belligerents as a measure ot reprisal and defense.