But there is still much of interest. Hovering in the background of The Final Count is the threat of warfare, especially aero-chemical warfare. George Simmers noted some time back that this novel seems to present an unusually early example of the feeling that the Great War had been futile. That's my impression too, from a slightly different angle. The events described in the novel take place in 1927 (i.e. the near future of the time of publication in 1926), and Europe seems to be on the brink of war again. That's at odds with my impression of the mid-1920s, certainly after the Locarno treaties of 1925; it's not that there were no tensions between nations, but there was little feeling that war was likely any time soon. Perhaps Sapper needed to exaggerate the possibility of conflict in order to find employment for Drummond and his band of merry vigilantes, preferably against the Bolshevik menace.

The poison mentioned above was originally developed near the end of the Great War by Robin Gaunt, a British chemist serving in the British army. It's actually a liquid (as was mustard 'gas') which causes instantaneous (and very painful) death if applied under the skin. This made it impractical as a battlefield weapon, because the intended victims would need to already have some minor cuts to allow the poison to get in. There is also the problem of how to spray a liquid over a large area. The plan put forward was to use tanks for this purpose (a la J. F. C. Fuller in The Reformation of War).

The Armistice fortunately made this unnecessary. But by 1924 the world is on the edge of ruin again:

Six years later found Europe an armed camp with every nation snarling at every other nation. Scientific soldiers gave lectures in which they stated their ideas of the next war: civilised human beings talked glibly of raining down myriads of germs on huge cities. It was horrible -- incredible: man had called in science to aid him in destroying his fellowmen, and science had obeyed him -- at a price. It was a price which had not been contemplated: it was a case of another Frankenstein's monster. Man had now to obey science, not science man: he had created a thing which he could not control.¹

Gaunt comes up with the idea of 'inventing a weapon so frightful that its mere existence would control the situation. The bare fact that it was there would act as the presence of a headmaster in a room full of small boys'.² The intention is that a world policeman would threaten its use against potential or actual aggressors. He meets an Australian (!) millionaire who also hates war, having lost two sons at Gallipoli, and who agrees to fund his researches. Gaunt manages to improve his gas by combining it with a blister agent which will rupture the skin and allow the poison to penetrate it. Only a few drops are needed to kill. The problem of deployment is also solved:

The tank scheme, however effective it might have been when a war was actually raging, was clearly an impossibility in such circumstances as I contemplated [wrote Gaunt]. Something far more sudden, far more mobile was essential.

Aeroplanes had great disadvantages. Their lifting power was limited: they were unable to hover: they were noisy.

And then there came to my mind the so-called silent raid on London during the war when a fleet of Zeppelins drifted down-wind over the capital with their engines shut off. Was that the solution?

There were disadvantages there too. First and foremost -- vulnerability. Silent raids by night were not my idea of the function of a world policeman. But by day an airship is a comparatively easy thing to hit; and once hit she comes down in flames.

The solution to that was obvious: helium. Instead of hydrogen she would be filled with the non-inflammable gas helium.³

Gaunt's benefactor buys an airship from Germany; the idea is to present the completed weapons system to the War Office (no mention of the Air Ministry!) and spring the whole scheme on the world as a fait accompli. But Bulldog Drummond's arch-nemesis Carl Peterson intervenes, and the airship is diverted from its noble purpose ...

The idea of a 'world policeman' here might relate to proposals for an international air force which were beginning to percolate at the time. But there's an important distinction: in Gaunt's vision, the death-dealing airships would not be at the service of the international community (the League of Nations is pointedly labelled useless) but instead would be wielded a great power which could be trusted to use them responsibly, i.e. Britain (possibly in concert with the United States and the other English-speaking nations). So this is more a revived pax Britannica, air-based rather than sea-based. The idea of scientists developing a terrible new weapon in order to end war is also suggestive of such novels as W. Holt-White's The Man Who Stole the Earth (1909).

The prospective use of airships as an offensive weapon (and the parallel denigration of aeroplanes for the same purpose) is unusual for a story written after the First World War. Sapper gives their combustibility as the main reason for their unsuitability, which is why he fills his with helium. (Also for important plot reasons.) This strikes me as both backwards and, er, forwards. The combustibility of hydrogen was certainly a problem, as the Hindenburg discovered in 1937. And helium was starting to be used in airships: the USS Shenandoah, built in 1923, was the first to use it. But inflammability was hardly the only reason why airships were no longer thought of as bombers. Being filled with helium didn't stop the Shenandoah from being ripped apart in a storm.

Similarly, Sapper misunderstands the nature of the so-called 'silent raid' of the night of 19 October 1917. This was a big Zeppelin raid which encountered heavy winds when the eleven airships crossed England's east coast. They were driven hard by the wind across the country and even into France; in all five were destroyed, four due to the weather, one by anti-aircraft fire. Accounts differ as to why the raid was 'silent': it may have been because the high wind dispersed the sound of the Zeppelin engines, or it might have been because London's AA defences held fire as L45 flew overhead, figuring that fog hid the city's location and that there was no need to let the Germans know where they were. According to Sapper, however, the silent raid was an intentional tactic in which the Zeppelins switched their engines off, effectively sneaking up on their target. Before radar, when sound location was one of the primary means of detecting enemy bombers, this was indeed a worrying possibility (which the Italians were later accused of making a reality over Barcelona). But Sapper seems not to have realised that the silent raid was an utter disaster for the airship raiders. He might at that have shared in a popular misconception, but accurate accounts of the silent raid were already available, for example in Joseph Morris' The German Air Raids on Britain, 1914-1918 (1925).

So Sapper -- real name H. C. McNeile, a decorated ex-Royal Engineer -- was not particularly well-informed about aerial warfare. He probably picked up his ideas about airships from incomplete reports of the Great War air raids and reading about the Burney and Imperial Airship Schemes in the mid-1920s. Well, not everyone could be an aviation expert. But equally, few readers would have noticed or cared -- his books certainly sold well enough, and The Final Count perhaps helped to sustain the image of the airship as a bomber. But if so, it left few traces that I can find.

1. Sapper, The Final Count (London and Melbourne: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1985 [1926]), 148.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 149.

Watching this:

made me think of this:

and this:

and this:

and, because I happen to be marking my students' essays about it, this:

Sometimes it would be nice to be able to switch off and forget.

'To-day and To-morrow' was a series of over a hundred essays on 'the future' of a diverse range of subjects, which were published in pamphlet form by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. between 1924 and 1931. The authors are equally varied: some were acknowledged experts in their fields, others seem to have been chosen for their ability to provoke. Some of the 'To-day and To-morrow' essays have since attained classic status; most have been forgotten. But as a whole they are an impressive testimony to a vibrant, wideranging (and idiosyncratic) kind of British futurism, and I think they deserve more attention. Some of them have been reprinted from time to time, and if you're rich you can both nearly all of them in collected volumes through Routledge, but otherwise there are so many they are are hard to track down. So I've tried to compile a definitive list of the series' titles (which are mostly classical allusions) with links to online sources for the texts and some sort of author biography, where available. Google Books has many of them, but only snippets or previews, so I've linked to other sources where possible. Additions and corrections are welcome.

Physically, they were very small books (pott octavo, to be precise), easy to slip into a pocket, and numbered only a hundred pages or so, in large type and generous margins. Their price was 2/6, about the same price as a cheap novel, but five times the price of the later, hugely successful Penguins. So they did not attract a mass readership, but do seem to have been much read by the chattering classes. (See Peter J. Bowler, Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2009), 139.) Many of the titles went through multiple impressions. And at least one was discussed in the House of Commons.

As I said, some of the essays are still well-known, at least to historians of science: for example the first two in the series, Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924) by chemist J. B. S. Haldane, and Icarus, or the Future of Science (1924) by Bertrand Russell, the philosopher. Daedalus was Haldane's first book. His prediction in it of universal ectogenesis (i.e. the artificial creation of life, true test-tube babies) was its most startling feature, but he also discussed eugenics, the problems of peak oil and peak coal (Haldane's answer is, in part, wind power: he foresaw a Britain 'covered with rows of metallic windmills working electric motors which in their turn supply current at a very high voltage to great electric mains'), the creation of food from coal and atmospheric nitrogen, and so on. Russell was already famous (hence another book by him in the series, What I Believe, published 1925). Icarus was a bit more glum than Daedalus, as the titles perhaps suggest; he spoke of race suicide (of the white races, that is, due to birth control), the end of liberal ideas such as a free press, a despotic world state (though he thinks it would become more benevolent as time passed), the control of personality through hormones (possibly to create a compliant underclass). The apparent dominance of biological themes in many of the books is interesting. The 1920s were the great days of physics -- Einstein was a worldwide celebrity because of his theory of general relativity; the cornerstones of quantum mechanics were being laid in Germany; in the United States, Hubble was showing that the Universe was far bigger than anyone had imagined. But judging from 'To-day and To-morrow', it was evolution and its implications which gripped the imagination of the reading public. It's true that there are books on physics (Archimedes), chemistry (Hermes) and cosmology (Eos). But there are a number on aspects of biology (e.g., evolutionary psychology, Down's syndrome, the body of the future, Darwinism itself), and evolution seems to feature in many of the books, even when they ostensibly have nothing to with it. For example, Gerald Heard's Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes (1924) apparently makes the argument that fashion is evolution at work, that 'evolution is going on no longer in but around the man, and the faster because working in a less resistant medium'.

Another example of futurology from the series which is remembered today is J. D. Bernal's The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929), particularly for its discussion of space travel. Rockets, solar sails, hollowing out asteroids to make space colonies -- Bernal spheres -- and ultimately interstellar colonisation. That's pretty heady stuff, and its not the sort of discourse we would usually associate with early twentieth-century Britain. But how unusual was it? Not that unusual, it can be argued. Olaf Stapledon published the wonderful Last and First Men the following year, which makes The World, the Flesh, and the Devil look stodgy and unimaginative by comparison. The British Interplanetary Society was founded in 1933. H. G. Wells had his Space Gun on screen in 1936; and much earlier, his First Men in the Moon. The British Empire even expanded into interstellar space in 1900. There was also (at least one) earlier example of spacemindedness in 'To-day and to-morrow', Hanno, or the Future of Exploration (1928), by J. Leslie Mitchell. I'm not sure what Mitchell's qualifications to discuss exploration were: later he was a key novelist in the Scottish Renaissance (again, as with Bernal, Haldane and Heard, this was his first book -- which says something for the judgment of Kegan Paul's editors). He served in various bits of the Empire in the Army and the RAF so perhaps that's it. I haven't read Hanno, and it's only available online in Google Books's snippet view, but judging from the word cloud it doesn't just talk about darkest Africa and Antarctica. Some of the most common phrases are 'extraterrestrial', 'Martian', 'lunar', and the names of several lunar craters and mares. So why haven't I heard of Mitchell before? (Not to mention André Maurois's 1927 parody of what sounds like a 'lunar panic' and subsequent war against the Moon, The Next Chapter.)

Some entries are important in the history of military strategy, or at least the airpower parts of it: Basil Liddell Hart's Paris, or the Future of War (1925), and Haldane's Callinicus: A Defence of Chemical Warfare (1925). Paris falls pretty squarely into knock-out blow territory, a position Liddell Hart had mostly retreated from by 1939. Callinicus was infamous for its argument that poison gas was actually a humane weapon, since during the last war it had a low mortality and high recovery rate, compared with explosive and bullets. Haldane also the favoured knock-out blow line of thinking, though it wasn't his main concern. (He did downplay the risk of gas attacks on cities.) But again, there are other relevant titles which are less well-known. For example, Aeolus, or the Future of the Flying Machine (1927), by Oliver Stewart. While he didn't discount the possibility of a knock-out blow, Stewart did believe that air defence was possible (and he was a Great War fighter ace as well as an aviation correspondent). Or what about Janus: the Conquest of War (1927), by William McDougall? As a psychologist, maybe McDougall doesn't seem likely to have had a lot to say about aerial warfare. But as I've argued, he was perhaps the first person to propose a fully-fledged international air force. So there are interesting things here, when you look beyond the well-known titles. (Sadly for me, one title was advertised but seems not to have been published: Mercurius, or the World on Wings by C. Thompson Walker, billed as 'A picture of the air-vehicle and the air-port of to-morrow, and the influence aircraft will have on our lives'. Sigh.)

But I don't want to leave the impression that 'To-day and to-morrow' is just about science and technology. The future is presented as being much more than that. There are books on the future of Canada, of music, of Shakespeare, marriage, crime (and miscreant youth), Oxford and Cambridge (and another just on Oxford), humour, swearing (both by Robert Graves), psychical research. There's one on the future of Futurism (the kind with the manifesto) and another on the future of prophecy. There's C. E. M. Joad on the future of morals (Thrasymachus) and Sylvia Pankhurst on the future of international language (Delphos). Vera Brittain wrote on the future of monogamy (Halycon), J. F. C. Fuller on transport and on America (Pegasus, Atlantis). Arthur Keith on 'the problem of race' (Ethnos). An expatriate Scot who left for New Zealand some sixty years before was recruited to write about his former homeland, but another key member of the Scottish Renaissance was given the chance to respond in another volume. Anthony Ludovici wrote Lysistrata (1924), which one reviewer described as an anti-feminist but pro-feminine tract; Dora Russell provided a counterblast in Hypatia (1925), though her feminist credentials may have been undermined by being listed in the publisher's catalogue as 'Mrs Bertrand Russell'. So broad was the range of subjects that some don't seem to fit at all with the rest at all: dragons? aid for the best-seller? Then there's what isn't discussed. A decade later, you might expect such a series to be dominated by international affairs: the future of the League, the future of Germany, the future of dictatorships (which is the sort of thing the Penguin Specials were about, pretty much). There's not much of this here. It was a more peaceful time. There was plenty of anxiety but it was caused by problems seen on the horizon. And as for authors, the most famous British futurist of them all is missing -- no H. G. Wells! (Though an early biographer of his, Geoffrey West, is there, writing on the future of literary criticism.)

After more than a hundred volumes (I have 103 listed, though I may have missed some), 'To-day and to-morrow' came to an end. Interestingly, despite the very British flavour of many of the books, they were simultaneously published in New York by E. P. Dutton (which seems to have added a couple of its own), which perhaps suggests an even greater appetite for speculation about the future in America than in Britain. Certainly, the writing, publication and reading of these books tells us something about the way the future was constructed in those countries in the early 20th century. Max Saunders, who is in the English department at King's College London, has a research project going on 'To-day and to-morrow'; a conference was held a couple of years ago. Even in putting this post together, I can see there's a lot potential there, and I'll be looking out for any resultant publications!

• Harry Delacombe, 1907-1910. Obituary: 21 January 1959.
• Hubert Walter, at least 1915-1916, perhaps 1914-1917. Obituary: 22 December 1933.
• Colin Cooper, 1919? Obituary: 30 March 1938.
• Ronald Carton, c.1919-1923. Obituary: 11 July 1960.
• C.G. Colebrook, 1923-1930. Obituary: 30 August 1930.
• E. Colston Shepherd, 1929-1939. Obituary: 2 August 1976.
• [Edit: Oliver Stewart, 1939-1940. Obituary: 23 December 1976. See below.]
• Arthur Narracott, 1940-1967. Obituary: 17 May 1967.

There are some gaps and contradictions here. There could be a gap between Shepherd and Narracott of a year or two, enough for somebody else to do the job. Colebrook was air correspondent until 1930, but Shepherd started in 1929. That may be because Colebrook was ill towards the end and died in harness, so perhaps Shepherd started to take over some of the workload before then. Cooper seems to have been air correspondent for only a short time, as he resigned from the RAF in 1919, when Northcliffe gave him the job, but Ronald Carton (better known as the crossword compiler!) did the job for four years from 1919 (he covered Alcock and Brown). The job was said to be vacant when Colebrook started, so there may be another short gap there. All I know of Walter (a scion of the family which founded The Times) is that he there in 1915-6. He was in Berlin until (perhaps) 1914 and went overseas again in 1917, so presumably those years represent the endpoints of his occupancy. And I don't know who held the job in the crucial years between 1910 and 1914. Oddly, according to their obituaries, three men had the honour of being the first aeronautical correspondent of The Times: Walter, Cooper and Carton. Which is odd, since Delacombe predated all of them!

My main reason for doing this to work out whether P. R. C. Groves was ever The Times's aeronautical correspondent, as both Barry Powers and Uri Bialer have written (without giving any more information). As far as I can tell, he was not. There's no mention of this in his personal archive or publications, and as the above shows, no gap for him to fit into. He didn't retire from the RAF until 1922, and there was no vacancy until 1923. Groves did write some articles for The Times in 1922 and 1923, but they appeared under his own name - except for one article early in 1922, which used a phrase which was highly characteristic of Groves and appeared only days before the first of his official articles. But it wasn't bylined 'Our aeronautical correspondent' as would be usual, but 'An aeronautical correspondent'. It was an anonymous, freelance contribution, not from somebody on staff. So I can't see how Groves could have been the aeronautical correspondent for The Times.

Edit: thanks to Rose Wild of the Times Archive Blog, who picked up my post on Twitter, I can now fill in one of the gaps: Oliver Stewart, previously a long-serving air correspondent for the Morning Post, helped out at The Times in 1939-1940.

Actually, the phrase 'Anglo-American imagination' is misleading, because I think the British and the American imaginations were significantly different, at least when it comes to technology and war. And the difference is this: at least in the period of the two world wars, Americans found it much easier to imagine that technology could help them win wars than the British, who were more pessimistic and tended to see new technologies as a threat. It's easy to get into trouble with big generalisations like this, and I definitely can't quantify it in any useful way. But I don't think it's accidental that it American journalists imagined British superweapons more readily than British journalists, or that American science magazines had superweapons on their covers, and British ones didn't.

My argument on the American side is mainly from secondary sources. The inspiration for the title is a book by H. Bruce Franklin which has the subtitle 'The Superweapon and the American Imagination'.¹ Franklin covers a broad swathe of cultural and polical history from Fulton's submarine through to SDI and shows how embedded the idea of better security through higher technology is in American culture. Complementing this is Joseph Corn's The Winged Gospel.² Here the argument is that Americans generally believed that aircraft -- and the new connections they would create between people and peoples -- would bring about a golden age of peace and prosperity. The same could not be said of the British (at least, not in general).

Having hesitantly asserted a bold generalisation, I probably ought to try and explain it. Here are some possibilities, none of them particularly compelling:

1. Time. The First World War was much more traumatic for Britain than for US. Technology didn't make things better. Artillery, gas, machine guns, barbed wire, brought stalemate on the Western front, not victory. Britain's lead in dreadnoughts didn't help much against U-boats. And so on. But America entered the war as a fresh force; and its army had only recently become seriously engaged in combat by the time of the Armistice. So even though it had its own learning curve to follow, it had no time to become embittered with the apparent fruitlessness of military technology.
2. Space. Britain is both geographically smaller than the United States, and closer to its neighbours (in terms of the distance between population centres, at least). It had less need for faster transportation internally, and as for for bringing Europe closer, this has not always been a universally cherished ideal in Britain (cf. Channel Tunnel, European Union, Napoleon, Wilhelm II, Hitler). America is far bigger and more dispersed; it's easy to see why it would embrace aviation.
3. Power. When you're on top, every direction is down. Britain was a status quo power: it had everything it wanted, pretty much. So why embrace change? This is why there were some dissenting voices when HMS Dreadnought was launched: Britain's heavy investments in ironclads would be set at nought, and rival powers given a chance to catch up. America was, by contrast, a rising power, and change was to its advantage.

As I said, none of these explanations are particularly compelling. The United States didn't abandon pursuit of hi-tech weapons just because they didn't help it win in Vietnam. Who (aside from inhabitants of the Foreign Office) would internalise a concern about preserving Britain's global status quo? And different parts of Britain placed different values on better transport: the Scotsman, for example, regularly ran stories about how regional airlines were bringing rural and island Scottish communities into closer contact with civilisation. But I think the difference between British and American attitudes towards the 'superweapon' is, or was, real, so an explanation there must be!

1. H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
2. Joseph J. Corn, The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

A few days ago, a new article popped up in my RSS reader: R. M. Douglas, 'Did Britain use chemical weapons in mandatory Iraq?', Journal of Modern History, 81 (December 2009), 1-29. This was slightly odd, because it's only October and the rest of the December issue isn't online yet. The editors of JMH clearly think they've got an unusually significant paper here, one worth publishing early and with an accompanying press release. And I agree.

The question in the article's title is one I've asked before. After the First World War, Britain gained control of Iraq (or Mesopotamia) from the Ottoman Empire, not as an outright possession but under a mandate from the League of Nations. Some of Iraq's inhabitants disapproved of British rule and from 1920 rebelled. A new form of colonial policing known as air control eventually suppressed the revolt, but in the meantime the (rapidly demobilising) Army and the Royal Air Force had their hands full just containing the situation. Hence the attraction of using chemical weapons such as mustard gas against tribesmen with no experience of and no protection against this new form of warfare.

But did Britain actually use gas in Iraq? Certainly, some historians and journalists have claimed that it did, delivered by either artillery shells or aerial bombs. They have usually done so in a remarkably casual fashion, offering little or nothing in the way of primary sources. Douglas shows that the only documentary evidence available -- a 1921 letter by an Air Ministry official stating that the Army had used tear gas (then considered to be a chemical weapon, even if not a poison gas) against Iraqi rebels the previous year -- was officially contested at the time, and the claim was soon withdrawn by the Air Ministry. Inquiries on the ground in Iraq turned up no evidence that gas had been used either by artillery or aeroplane.

So much for that. Something which has confused matters (and which Douglas clears up admirably) is the role of Winston Churchill, who as War Minister (and Air Minister) in 1920 did authorise the use of gas by the Army in Iraq. Again, in late 1921, now as Colonial Minister, he authorised the transfer of gas bombs to the RAF in Iraq. In both cases he was pushing the boundaries of his authority by not consulting with his Cabinet colleagues; but nothing came of either episode. In 1920, the shells arrived in Iraq too late to be of use; in 1921-2, the disarmament negotiations in Washington DC meant that Britain had to switch to a 'no first-use' policy regarding poison gas. So once again, there is no evidence that gas was used. But what these events do show is that there were those in both government and in the military who were quite prepared to use chemical weapons against an enemy. And why not? After all, they had done so in the recent war in Europe.

Of course, public attitudes towards gas warfare were changing. As Douglas suggests, there may well have been an outcry against Churchill if his soldiers and airmen had gassed unprotected tribesmen, even if only with tear gas. That nothing like this did happen is why I've been sceptical of the gas-in-Iraq claim for a while now: as far I can tell, nobody claimed publicly at the time that British servicemen were again undertaking gas warfare. I would expect somebody like L. E. O. Charlton -- who had been the RAF's chief of staff in Iraq in 1923-4, who effectively ended his career because of his moral objections to air control, and who in the 1930s wrote a series of books warning of the danger of gas warfare to British civilians -- to have at least hinted at the practice. But he didn't, and neither did anyone else that I've come across.

Anyway, thanks to Douglas, this is one historical puzzle we seem to have solved. Now to get the message out ...

I recently attended a function in the Gryphon Gallery of the 1888 Building at the University of Melbourne, where there's a local war memorial I missed out on when I last wrote on the topic. It was dedicated in 1920 in what was then the Teachers' College, and takes the form of three stained glass windows. The central window -- seen above and below -- depicts an Australian soldier, rifle to the ready, bayonet fixed. He represents all those former students and staff members who served in the Australian Imperial Force (including at least two women).

The inscription at the bottom reads

IN HONOUR OF THOSE
OF THIS COLLEGE WHO
ANSWERED THE CALL OF COUNTRY
IN THE GREAT WAR.

The one at the top is the college Latin motto, from Horace,

NON OMNIS MORIAR

which gives the title of this post.

The windows on either side give the names of nearly all who served (a pamphlet put out by the Ian Potter Museum of Art, clearly the result of a considerable amount of historical spadework, lists some more). Those who died have a section devoted to them at the very top.

I was intrigued by one of the names, S. J. Tong Way. It stands out among all the other, Anglo-Saxon names. I thought perhaps he was descended from one of the Chinese immigrants who came to Victoria during the gold rush era. And it seems that's the case. A Samuel Tong Way is mentioned, along with his brother Hedley, on an Australian government website as an example of a Chinese Australian who joined up, in his case in the Signal Corps. But despite being an Australian citizen, he wasn't allowed to do so until after 1916, when China joined the Allies. Tong Way (or Tongway) graduated in March 1917 with a Diploma of Education, and after the war became a primary school teacher (in 1935 he appealed against a non-promotion). He served again in the Second World War as an 'instructor', and then took part in returned servicemen activities. After that I lose track of him.

And here's a picture of Private Tong Way, from another part of the memorial which has become detached from the windows shown above, a pair of tablets with ceramic portraits of the college's veterans (now in the Graduate Student Association foyer, in the west wing of the 1888 Building). This is apparently a quite unusual form of memorial, and I'm glad the tablets have been rescued from the storeroom in which they languished for several decades. The windows were also covered up for a while but have also been restored to their former glory. They're well worth a visit though you should check with the Melbourne School of Graduate Research in advance.

I suffer an even pettier annoyance when she writes: "Any review of the refined arts of war developed over the course of the century would have to dedicate a separate chapter to the aerial bombardments inaugurated by German forces over Guernica and Coventry" (51). Why not Italian forces over Ethiopia the year before Guernica, or, arguably, RAF forces over Sulaymaniyah? (and while it's tempting to suggest the Zeppelin raids of English, beginning in 1915, the difference between these and Sulaymaniyah, Ethiopia, or Guernica is that the English could defend themselves: the Kurds, Ethiopians, and Basques could not, and thus stand as better representatives of horrorism (unlike the inhabitants of Coventry)).

Firstly, my petty criticism of the sentence quoted from the book would be that Germany didn't inaugurate aerial bombardment at either Guernica or Coventry. As Steel notes, there were plenty of earlier instances; I would probably point the Bulgarian bombing of the Turkish city of Adrianople in late 1912 as the inauguration of aerial bombardment of civilians. I would also quibble with Steel, and point out that while Britain as a nation could defend itself against bombing during the First World War, on an individual level its citizens could not shoot back, send up fighters or retaliate through counterbombing. At the point in time when the bombs were actually falling, can we say that the horror experienced by Kurdish victims of British air control was greater than that of British victims of the Zeppelins and Gothas? Conversely, non-Western, non-state targets of bombing tried a surprisingly wide range of strategies, up to and including their own small air forces.

But then what would be the best example of horrorism in the case of aerial bombardment? I'd pick Dresden, February 1945. Not only was is it one of the most devastating episodes in the history of bombing in and of itself, but it was one of the few cases when the horror was so great that it was felt by the perpetrators (or at least the perpetrating culture) as well as the victims. But then that's probably missing the point of horrorism altogether.

The Tarrant Tabor, a prototype bomber designed and built in 1918-9. There were high hopes among strategic bombing advocates (including P. R. C. Groves) for this giant machine, but by the time it was ready for its maiden flight in May 1919, the war was over and its purpose now unclear. Not that this mattered much, for that first flight was abortive:

The designer of the Tabor, Walter Barling, went to the United States where he designed the similar Barling Bomber a few years later. This didn't crash, but wasn't particularly successful either: it couldn't even overfly the Appalachians. It ended up disassembled in a corner of Wright Field.

All of that is just an excuse to post the picture of the Tabor and to point at the place where I found it, x planes, a tumblr blog devoted to striking aviation images. (The crash photo is from a Russian site.)