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Foreign News: Greybeards Forward!

2 minute read
TIME

“A middle-aged man can drive a tank as well as anybody. In the next war the oldest people should drive the fastest mechanized units. Greybeards should constitute the storm troops.

“The loss of our finest young men in battle is biologically more serious than would be the loss of an equal number of middle-aged people. If the employment of young men in war were prohibited—as the employment of young people in various dangerous occupations already is prohibited—then we should be acting with race-conscious logic.

“In war youth should take control of the home front and their elders should take the danger posts. Science has made war a much more suitable occupation for middle-aged people than it was in 1914. It would not be a bad thing if men were called to the colors at the age of 40, not before.”

Thus, with tart wisdom in his spoofing, Dr. Herbert Levinstein, president of the British Institute of Chemical Engineers, addressed last week at Bristol the Royal Institute of Chemistry. As a chemist, he scoffed at “the popular fallacy that to blow combatants to bits with high explosives is less bestial, wicked and cruel than to attack them by gas.” President Levinstein strongly implied that rather than be blown to bits he would prefer to die gassed.

“Nowadays the destructive power of science in war is absurdly overrated,” wound up Scientist Levinstein, who is considered the Empire’s leading expert on war gases. “One might imagine that invention had rendered it possible to destroy a city and wipe out humanity in mass, as it were, by pressing a button. Tosh!”

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