ARMS AND THE MEN

ACCORDING to the best accountancy figures, it costs about $25,000 to kill a soldier during the World War. There is one class of Big Business Men in Europe that never rose up to denounce the extravagance of its governments in this regard -- to point out that when death is left unhampered as an enterprise for the individual initiative of gangsters the cost of a single killing seldom exceeds $100. The reason for the silence of these Big Business Men is quite simple: the killing is their business. Armaments are their stock in trade; governments are their customers; the ultimate consumers of their products are, historically, almost as often their compatriots as their enemies. That does not matter. The important point is that every time a burst shell fragment finds its way into the brain, the heart, or the intestines of a man in the front line, a great part of the $25,000, much of it profit, finds its way into the pocket of the armament maker.

The problem of European armaments is complex; if we are to get anywhere with it we must first park our emotions outside. Pacifists and militarists alike have indulged in a good deal of loose talk on the subject. Most pacifists are not sufficiently informed; their arguments and accusations frequently boil down to nothing more substantial than Sir Arthur Eddington's definition of the Quantum Theory -- i.e., "Something unknown is doing we don't know what." Most militarists are insincere.

Anyone who talks about European armaments and their makers must inevitably oversimplify. But to oversimplify is not to overgeneralize -- and we should start by ridding ourselves of one generality that will give us trouble as long as it stays in out heads.

There is nothing that could, in any strict accuracy, be called an "Armament Ring" in Europe today. There is no perfectly homologous group of single-purposed individuals that sits down before a polished table in a sound-proof room and plots new holocausts in Europe. Search through the armament makers as you will, you will find neither a Machiavelli nor a Dr. Fu Manchu. But that's all you won't find.

For without a shadow of doubt there is at the moment in Europe a huge and subversive force that Mes behind the arming and counter-arming of nations; there are mines, smelters, armament works, holding companies, and banks, entangled in an international embrace, yet working inevitably for the destruction of such little internationalism as the world has achieved so far. The control of these myriad companies vests, finally, in not more than a handful of men whose power, in some ways, reaches above the power of the State itself. Thus, French interests not only sold arms to Hungary in flat violation of the Treaty of Trianon, but when Hungary defaulted on the bill the armorers got the French government to lend Hungary the money to pay the French armorers. Thus, too, the great Czechoslovakian armament company, controlled by Frenchmen, promoted the rise of Hitler in Germany and contributed millions of marks to Hitler's campaign. These same Frenchmen own newspapers that did more than any others to enrage France against Hitler. It is time we had a dramatis personae of arms and the men.