Now as a form of destruction war is easily first. Quite apart from the obvious destruction of commodities that takes place when a country is ravaged and invaded, as in the case of Belgium and Northern France, it should be remembered that the methods of supplying an army in the field involve the sheer waste or destruction of very nearly half the food and equipment provided.[42] This is not necessarily the result, as might be expected, of official incompetence. It may on the contrary be the result of official foresight, which must allow in warfare for all the changes and chances of communication, and knows that it is better to waste a million tons of beef than to risk the starvation of a single regiment. Such waste, in other words, is a condition of warfare. Add to this the preventive destruction of stores and baggage which takes place whenever troops are compelled to retreat: in this way about a million pounds' worth of stores were carefully burned before the evacuation of Gallipoli; and not a hundred yards of trench is ever abandoned without the jettison of about a hundred pounds' worth of equipment. Add to this the fact that every shot fired, from the mere rifle bullet to the largest shell, does a proportionate amount of material damage when it finds its billet: the bursting of a six-inch shell will do, I suppose, on an average, as much damage in half a second as an ordinary fire can do in twenty-four hours. Add to this again the fact that the very force which propels every bullet and every shell is released by destroying by instantaneous combustion a certain amount of valuable chemical products. Then, besides all this direct destruction of commodities which must ultimately be replaced, or which at least some kind contractor may plausibly offer to replace, consider for a moment the increased wear and tear of every sort of equipment both civil and military, from steam-rollers and rolling-stock to boots and bandages and walking-sticks, which a state of war must involve. Or consider again that the mere mobilisation of an army implies that several hundred thousand men, whose annual income before was less than L100 a year, are now living at the rate of L400 a year.[43] Anyone who cares to examine in detail all these forms of waste and destruction, and all these forms of unnatural and feverish consumption, will begin to understand to what an extent war stimulates the demand by which alone Trade can survive. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 41: Also, of course, by the campaign for Preferential Tariffs, which, it was hoped, would have increased consumption by excluding a few foreign competitors from colonial markets.]