AMAZING WAR BOOK.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 263, 4 October 1933, Page 8

AMAZING WAR BOOK.

GAS AND DISEASE GERMS MAY BE DISTRIBUTED. CHILD’S GUIDE TO WARFARE. War is the finest test of will and ability. It is not criminal and it is not extraordinary. The Government should not support the Church unless it strengthens the soldier’s mind. The dying warrior dies easier if he knows that his blood ebbs for a national god. These astonishing assertions are contained in a handbook of military science for use in the schools of Germany and entitled, “The Child’s Guide to Warfare." Its author, Professor Ewakl Banse, who favours the spread of typhus arid plague, contends that war is inevitable, and therefore the national mind from childhood must be impregnated with military psychology. The handbook shows how lakes and other physical configurations are destined to influence the movement of troops, and illustrates how even birds, animals, climate, and vegetation have military significance. Banse refuses to paint war in rose colours and admits that it is a question of gas, plague, hunger, poverty, baseness and falsehood, which means that only a nation convinced that every member’s life belongs to the State can endure it. lie suggests that military science should be interwoven in all forms of instruction for children of tender years, forming a separate part of the curriculum. Children over 12 should practise field exercises, war games and musketry, and the Government must give warlike individuals the most favourable conditions in which to live and procreate. The book describes bacteriological warfare as undoubtedly the weapon of a nation disarmed and rendered defenceless. The main methods are the infection of water with typhus, the introduction of typhus by means of fleas, and of plague by means of artificially infected rats. The League of Nations had sanctimoniously forbidden such warfare, but it could not complain if the disarmed nation used it to destroy its oppressors. Every method was permissible to resist and vanquish a superior enemy.