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War and the Future

by H. G. Wells

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Etext prepared by Morgan L. Owens, packrat@nznet.gen.nz

WAR AND THE FUTURE

Italy, France and Britain at War

by H. G. Wells

Contents

The Passing of the Effigy

The War in Italy (August, 1916)

I. The Isonzo Front

II. The Mountain War

III. Behind the Front

The Western War (September, 1916)

I. Ruins

II. The Grades of War

III. The War Landscape

IV. New Arms for Old Ones

V. Tanks

How People Think About the War

I. Do they Really Think at all?

II. The Yielding Pacifist and the Conscientious Objector

III. The Religious Revival

IV. The Riddle of the British

V. The Social Changes in Progress

VI. The Ending of the War

THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY

One of the minor peculiarities of this unprecedented war is the

Tour of the Front. After some months of suppressed information--

in which even the war correspondent was discouraged to the point

of elimination--it was discovered on both sides that this was a

struggle in which Opinion was playing a larger and more important

part than it had ever done before. This wild spreading weed was

perhaps of decisive importance; the Germans at any rate were

attempting to make it a cultivated flower. There was Opinion

flowering away at home, feeding rankly on rumour; Opinion in

neutral countries; Opinion getting into great tangles of

misunderstanding and incorrect valuation between the Allies. The

confidence and courage of the enemy; the amiability and

assistance of the neutral; the zeal, sacrifice, and serenity of

the home population; all were affected. The German cultivation

of opinion began long before the war; it is still the most

systematic and, because of the psychological ineptitude of the

Germans, it is probably the clumsiest. The French /Maison de

la Presse/ is certainly the best organisation in existence for

making things clear, counteracting hostile suggestion, the

British official organisations are comparatively ineffective; but

what is lacking officially is very largely made up for by the

good will and generous efforts of the English and American press.

An interesting monograph might be written upon these various

attempts of the belligerents to get themselves and their

proceedings explained.

Because there is perceptible in these developments, quite over

and above the desire to influence opinion, a very real effort to

get things explained. It is the most interesting and curious--

one might almost write touching--feature of these organisations

that they do not constitute a positive and defined propaganda

such as the Germans maintain. The German propaganda is simple,

because its ends are simple; assertions of the moral elevation

and loveliness of Germany; of the insuperable excellences of

German Kultur, the Kaiser, and Crown Prince, and so forth; abuse

of the "treacherous" English who allied themselves with the

"degenerate" French and the "barbaric" Russians; nonsense about

"the freedom of the seas"--the emptiest phrase in history--

childish attempts to sow suspicion between the Allies, and still

more childish attempts to induce neutrals and simple-minded

pacifists of allied nationality to save the face of Germany by

initiating peace negotiations. But apart from their steady

record and reminder of German brutalities and German aggression,

the press organisations of the Allies have none of this

definiteness in their task. The aim of the national intelligence

in each of the allied countries is not to exalt one's own nation

and confuse and divide the enemy, but to get a real understanding

with the peoples and spirits of a number of different nations, an

understanding that will increase and become a fruitful and

permanent understanding between the allied peoples. Neither the

English, the Russians, the Italians, nor the French, to name only

the bigger European allies, are concerned in setting up a legend,

as the Germans are concerned in setting up a legend of themselves

to impose upon mankind. They are reality dealers in this war,

and the Germans are effigy mongers. Practically the Allies are

saying each to one another, "Pray come to me and see for yourself

that I am very much the human stuff that you are. Come and see

that I am doing my best--and I think that is not so very bad a

best...." And with that is something else still more subtle,

something rather in the form of, "And please tell me what you

think of me--and all this."

So we have this curious byplay of the war, and one day I find Mr.

Nabokoff, the editor of the /Retch/, and Count Alexy

Tolstoy, that writer of delicate short stories, and Mr.

Chukovsky, the subtle critic, calling in upon me after braving

the wintry seas to see the British fleet; M. Joseph Reinach

follows them presently upon the same errand; and then appear

photographs of Mr. Arnold Bennett wading in the trenches of

Flanders, Mr. Noyes becomes discreetly indiscreet about what he

has seen among the submarines, and Mr. Hugh Walpole catches

things from Mr. Stephen Graham in the Dark Forest of Russia. All

this is quite over and above such writing of facts at first hand

as Mr. Patrick McGill and a dozen other real experiencing

soldiers--not to mention the soldiers' letters Mr. James Milne

has collected, or the unforgettable and immortal /Prisoner of

War/ of Mr. Arthur Green--or such admirable war

correspondents' work as Mr. Philip Gibbs or Mr. Washburne has

done. Some of us writers--I can answer for one--have made our

Tour of the Fronts with a very understandable diffidence. For my

own part I did not want to go. I evaded a suggestion that I

should go in 1915. I travel badly, I speak French and Italian

with incredible atrocity, and am an extreme Pacifist. I hate

soldiering. And also I did not want to write anything "under

instruction". It is largely owing to a certain stiffness in the

composition of General Delme-Radcliffe is resolved that

Italy shall not feel neglected by the refusal of the invitation

from the Comando Supremo by anyone who from the perspective of

Italy may seem to be a representative of British opinion. If

Herbert Spencer had been alive General Radcliffe would have

certainly made him come, travelling-hammock, ear clips and all--

and I am not above confessing that I wish that Herbert Spencer

was alive--for this purpose. I found Udine warm and gay with

memories of Mr. Belloc, Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Sidney Low, Colonel

Repington and Dr. Conan Doyle, and anticipating the arrival of

Mr. Harold Cox. So we pass, mostly in automobiles that bump

tremendously over war roads, a cloud of witnesses each testifying

after his manner. Whatever else has happened, we have all been

photographed with invincible patience and resolution under the

direction of Colonel Barberich in a sunny little court in Udine.

My own manner of testifying must be to tell what I have seen and

what I have thought during this extraordinary experience. It has

been my natural disposition to see this war as something

purposeful and epic, as it is great, as an epoch, as "the War

that will end War"--but of that last, more anon. I do not think

I am alone in this inclination to a dramatic and logical

interpretation. The caricatures in the French shops show

civilisation (and particularly Marianne) in conflict with a huge

and hugely wicked Hindenburg Ogre. Well, I come back from this

tour with something not so simple as that. If I were to be tied

down to one word for my impression of this war, I should say that

this war is /Queer./ It is not like anything in a really

waking world, but like something in a dream. It hasn't exactly

that clearness of light against darkness or of good against ill.

But it has the quality of wholesome instinct struggling under a

nightmare. The world is not really awake. This vague appeal for

explanations to all sorts of people, this desire to exhibit the

business, to get something in the way of elucidation at present

missing, is extraordinarily suggestive of the efforts of the mind

to wake up that will sometimes occur at a deep crisis. My memory

of this tour I have just made is full of puzzled-looking men. I

have seen thousands of /poilus/ sitting about in

cafes, by the roadside, in tents, in trenches, thoughtful.

I have seen Alpini sitting restfully and staring with speculative

eyes across the mountain gulfs towards unseen and unaccountable

enemies. I have seen trainloads of wounded staring out of the

ambulance train windows as we passed. I have seen these dim

intimations of questioning reflection in the strangest

juxtapositions; in Malagasy soldiers resting for a spell among

the big shells they were hoisting into trucks for the front, in a

couple of khaki-clad Maoris sitting upon the step of a horse-van

in Amiens station. It is always the same expression one catches,

rather weary, rather sullen, inturned. The shoulders droop. The

very outline is a note of interrogation. They look up as the

privileged tourist of the front, in the big automobile or the

reserved compartment, with his officer or so in charge, passes--

importantly. One meets a pair of eyes that seems to say:

"Perhaps /you/ understand....

"In which case---...?"

It is a part, I think, of this disposition to investigate what

makes everyone collect "specimens" of the war. Everywhere the

souvenir forces itself upon the attention. The homecoming

permissionaire brings with him invariably a considerable weight

of broken objects, bits of shell, cartridge clips, helmets; it is

a peripatetic museum. It is as if he hoped for a clue. It is

almost impossible, I have found, to escape these pieces in

evidence. I am the least collecting of men, but I have brought

home Italian cartridges, Austrian cartridges, the fuse of an

Austrian shell, a broken Italian bayonet, and a note that is

worth half a franc within the confines of Amiens. But a large

heavy piece of exploded shell that had been thrust very urgently

upon my attention upon the Carso I contrived to lose during the

temporary confusion of our party by the arrival and explosion of

another prospective souvenir in our close proximity. And two

really very large and almost complete specimens of some species

of /Ammonites/ unknown to me, from the hills to the east of

the Adige, partially wrapped in a back number of the /Corriere

della Sera/, that were pressed upon me by a friendly officer,

were unfortunately lost on the line between Verona and Milan

through the gross negligence of a railway porter. But I doubt if

they would have thrown any very conclusive light upon the war.

I avow myself an extreme Pacifist. I am against the man who

first takes up the weapon. I carry my pacifism far beyond the

ambiguous little group of British and foreign sentimentalists who

pretend so amusingly to be socialists in the /Labour

Leader/, whose conception of foreign policy is to give Germany

now a peace that would be no more than a breathing time for a

fresh outrage upon civilisation, and who would even make heroes

of the crazy young assassins of the Dublin crime. I do not

understand those people. I do not merely want to stop this war.

I want to nail down war in its coffin. Modern war is an

intolerable thing. It is not a thing to trifle with in this

Urban District Council way, it is a thing to end forever. I have

always hated it, so far that is as my imagination enabled me to

realise it; and now that I have been seeing it, sometimes quite

closely for a full month, I hate it more than ever. I never

imagined a quarter of its waste, its boredom, its futility, its

desolation. It is merely a destructive and dispersive instead of

a constructive and accumulative industrialism. It is a gigantic,

dusty, muddy, weedy, bloodstained silliness. It is the plain

duty of every man to give his life and all that he has if by so

doing he may help to end it. I hate Germany, which has thrust

this experience upon mankind, as I hate some horrible infectious

disease. The new war, the war on the modern level, is her

invention and her crime. I perceive that on our side and in its

broad outlines, this war is nothing more than a gigantic and

heroic effort in sanitary engineering; an effort to remove German

militarism from the life and regions it has invaded, and to bank

it in and discredit and enfeeble it so that never more will it

repeat its present preposterous and horrible efforts. All human

affairs and all great affairs have their reservations and their

complications, but that is the broad outline of the business as

it has impressed itself on my mind and as I find it conceived in

the mind of the average man of the reading class among the allied

peoples, and as I find it understood in the judgement of honest

and intelligent neutral observers.

It is my unshakeable belief that essentially the Allies fight for

a permanent world peace, that primarily they do not make war but

resist war, that has reconciled me to this not very congenial

experience of touring as a spectator all agog to see, through the

war zones. At any rate there was never any risk of my playing

Balaam and blessing the enemy. This war is tragedy and sacrifice

for most of the world, for the Germans it is simply the

catastrophic outcome of fifty years of elaborate intellectual

foolery. Militarism, Welt Politik, and here we are! What else

/could/ have happened, with Michael and his infernal War

Machine in the very centre of Europe, but this tremendous

disaster?

It is a disaster. It may be a necessary disaster; it may teach a

lesson that could be learnt in no other way; but for all that, I

insist, it remains waste, disorder, disaster.

There is a disposition, I know, in myself as well as in others,

to wriggle away from this verity, to find so much good in the

collapse that has come to the mad direction of Europe for the

past half-century as to make it on the whole almost a beneficial

thing. But at most I can find it in no greater good than the

good of a nightmare that awakens the sleeper in a dangerous place

to a realisation of the extreme danger of his sleep. Better had

he been awake--or never there. In Venetia Captain Pirelli, whose

task it was to keep me out of mischief in the war zone, was

insistent upon the way in which all Venetia was being opened up

by the new military roads; there has been scarcely a new road

made in Venetia since Napoleon drove his straight, poplar-

bordered highways through the land. M. Joseph Reinach, who was

my companion upon the French front, was equally impressed by the

stirring up and exchange of ideas in the villages due to the

movement of the war. Charles Lamb's story of the discovery of

roast pork comes into one's head with an effect of repartee.

More than ideas are exchanged in the war zone, and it is doubtful

how far the sanitary precautions of the military authorities

avails against a considerable propaganda of disease. A more

serious argument for the good of war is that it evokes heroic

qualities that it has brought out almost incredible quantities of

courage, devotion, and individual romance that did not show in

the suffocating peace time that preceded the war. The reckless

and beautiful zeal of the women in the British and French

munition factories, for example, the gaiety and fearlessness of

the common soldiers everywhere; these things have always been

there--like champagne sleeping in bottles in a cellar. But was

there any need to throw a bomb into the cellar?

I am reminded of a story, or rather of the idea for a story that

I think I must have read in that curious collection of fantasies

and observations, Hawthorne's /Note Book./ It was to be the

story of a man who found life dull and his circumstances

altogether mediocre. He had loved his wife, but now after all

she seemed to be a very ordinary human being. He had begun life

with high hopes--and life was commonplace. He was to grow

fretful and restless. His discontent was to lead to some action,

some irrevocable action; but upon the nature of that action I do

not think the /Note Book/ was very clear. It was to carry

him in such a manner that he was to forget his wife. Then, when

it was too late, he was to see her at an upper window, stripped

and firelit, a glorious thing of light and loveliness and tragic

intensity....

The elementary tales of the world are very few, and Hawthorne's

story and Lamb's story are, after all, only variations upon the

same theme. But can we poor human beings never realise our

quality without destruction?

One of the larger singularities of the great war is its failure

to produce great and imposing personalities, mighty leaders,

Napoleons, Caesars. I would indeed make that the essential

thing in my reckoning of the war. It is a drama without a hero;

without countless incidental heroes no doubt, but no star part.

Even the Germans, with a national predisposition for hero-cults

and living still in an atmosphere of Victorian humbug, can

produce nothing better than that timber image, Hindenburg.

It is not that the war has failed to produce heroes so much as

that it has produced heroism in a torrent. The great man of this

war is the common man. It becomes ridiculous to pick out

particular names. There are too many true stories of splendid

acts in the past two years ever to be properly set down. The

V.C.'s and the palms do but indicate samples. One would need an

encyclopaedia, a row of volumes, of the gloriousness of

human impulses. The acts of the small men in this war dwarf all

the pretensions of the Great Man. Imperatively these

multitudinous heroes forbid the setting up of effigies. When I

was a young man I imitated Swift and posed for cynicism; I will

confess that now at fifty and greatly helped by this war, I have

fallen in love with mankind.

But if I had to pick out a single figure to stand for the finest

quality of the Allies' war, I should I think choose the figure of

General Joffre. He is something new in history. He is

leadership without vulgar ambition. He is the extreme antithesis

to the Imperial boomster of Berlin. He is as it were the

ordinary common sense of men, incarnate. He is the antithesis of

the effigy.

By great good luck I was able to see him. I was delayed in Paris

on my way to Italy, and my friend Captain Millet arranged for a

visit to the French front at Soissons and put me in charge of

Lieutenant de Tessin, whom I had met in England studying British

social questions long before this war. Afterwards Lieutenant de

Tessin took me to the great hotel--it still proclaims

"/Restaurant/" in big black letters on the garden wall--

which shelters the General Headquarters of France, and here I was

able to see and talk to Generals Pelle and Castelnau as

well as to General Joffre. They are three very remarkable and

very different men. They have at least one thing in common; it

is clear that not one of them has spent ten minutes in all his

life in thinking of himself as a Personage or Great Man. They

all have the effect of being active and able men doing an

extremely complicated and difficult but extremely interesting job

to the very best of their ability. With me they had all one

quality in common. They thought I was interested in what they

were doing, and they were quite prepared to treat me as an

intelligent man of a different sort, and to show me as much as I

could understand....

Let me confess that de Tessin had had to persuade me to go to

Headquarters. Partly that was because I didn't want to use up

even ten minutes of the time of the French commanders, but much

more was it because I have a dread of Personages.

There is something about these encounters with personages--as if

one was dealing with an effigy, with something tremendous put up

to be seen. As one approaches they become remoter; great

unsuspected crevasses are discovered. Across these gulfs one

makes ineffective gestures. They do not meet you, they pose at

you enormously. Sometimes there is something more terrible than

dignity; there is condescension. They are affable. I had but

recently had an encounter with an imported Colonial statesman,

who was being advertised like a soap as the coming saviour of

England. I was curious to meet him. I wanted to talk to him

about all sorts of things that would have been profoundly

interesting, as for example his impressions of the Anglican

bishops. But I met a hoarding. I met a thing like a mask,

something surrounded by touts, that was dully trying--as we say

in London--to "come it" over me. He said he had heard of me. He

had read /Kipps./ I intimated that though I had written

/Kipps/ I had continued to exist--but he did not see the

point of that. I said certain things to him about the difference

in complexity between political life in Great Britain and the

colonies, that he was manifestly totally capable of

understanding. But one could as soon have talked with one of the

statesmen at Madame Tussaud's. An antiquated figure.

The effect of these French commanders upon me was quite different

from my encounter with that last belated adventurer in the effigy

line. I felt indeed that I was a rather idle and flimsy person

coming into the presence of a tremendously compact and busy

person, but I had none of that unpleasant sensation of a

conventional role, of being expected to play the minute

worshipper in the presence of the Great Image. I was so moved by

the common humanity of them all that in each case I broke away

from the discreet interpretations of de Tessin and talked to them

directly in the strange dialect which I have inadvertently made

for myself out of French, a disemvowelled speech of epicene

substantives and verbs of incalculable moods and temperaments,

"/Entente Cordiale./" The talked back as if we had met in a

club. General Pelle pulled my leg very gaily with some

quotations from an article I had written upon the conclusion of

the war. I think he found my accent and my idioms very

refreshing. I had committed myself to a statement that Bloch has

been justified in his theory that under modern conditions the

defensive wins. There were excellent reasons, and General

Pelle pointed them out, for doubting the applicability of

this to the present war.

Both he and General Castelnau were anxious that I should see a

French offensive sector as well as Soissons. Then I should

understand. And since then I have returned from Italy and I have

seen and I do understand. The Allied offensive was winning; that

is to say, it was inflicting far greater losses than it

experienced; it was steadily beating the spirit out of the German

army and shoving it back towards Germany. Only peace can, I

believe, prevent the western war ending in Germany. And it is

the Frenchmen mainly who have worked out how to do it.

But of that I will write later. My present concern is with

General Joffre as the antithesis of the Effigy. The effigy,

"Thou Prince of Peace,

Thou God of War,"

as Mr. Sylvester Viereck called him, prances on a great horse,

wears a Wagnerian cloak, sits on thrones and talks of shining

armour and "unser Gott." All Germany gloats over his Jovian

domesticities; when I was last in Berlin the postcard shops were

full of photographs of a sort of procession of himself and his

sons, all with long straight noses and sidelong eyes. It is all

dreadfully old-fashioned. General Joffre sits in a pleasant

little sitting-room in a very ordinary little villa conveniently

close to Headquarters. He sits among furniture that has no

quality of pose at all, that is neither magnificent nor

ostentatiously simple and hardy. He has dark, rather sleepy eyes

under light eyelashes, eyes that glance shyly and a little

askance at his interlocutor and then, as he talks, away--as if he

did not want to be preoccupied by your attention. He has a

broad, rather broadly modelled face, a soft voice, the sort of

persuasive reasoning voice that many Scotchmen have. I had a

feeling that if he were to talk English he would do so with a

Scotch accent. Perhaps somewhere I have met a Scotchman of his

type. He sat sideways to his table as a man might sit for a

gossip in a cafe.

He is physically a big man, and in my memory he grows bigger and

bigger. He sits now in my memory in a room like the rooms that

any decent people might occupy, like that vague room that is the

background of so many good portraits, a great blue-coated figure

with a soft voice and rather tired eyes, explaining very simply

and clearly the difficulties that this vulgar imperialism of

Germany, seizing upon modern science and modern appliances, has

created for France and the spirit of mankind.

He talked chiefly of the strangeness of this confounded war. It

was exactly like a sanitary engineer speaking of the unexpected

difficulties of some particularly nasty inundation. He made

little stiff horizontal gestures with his hands. First one had

to build a dam and stop the rush of it, so; then one had to

organise the push that would send it back. He explained the

organisation of the push. They had got an organisation now that

was working out most satisfactorily. Had I seen a sector? I had

seen the sector of Soissons. Yes, but that was not now an

offensive sector. I must see an offensive sector; see the whole

method. Lieutenant de Tessin must see that that was arranged....

Neither he nor his two colleagues spoke of the Germans with

either hostility or humanity. Germany for them is manifestly

merely an objectionable Thing. It is not a nation, not a people,

but a nuisance. One has to build up this great counter-thrust

bigger and stronger until they go back. The war must end in

Germany. The French generals have no such delusions about German

science or foresight or capacity as dominates the smart dinner

chatter of England. One knows so well that detestable type of

English folly, and its voice of despair: "They /plan/

everything. They foresee everything." This paralysing

Germanophobia is not common among the French. The war, the

French generals said, might take--well, it certainly looked like

taking longer than the winter. Next summer perhaps. Probably,

if nothing unforeseen occurred, before a full year has passed the

job might be done. Were any surprises in store? They didn't

seem to think it was probable that the Germans had any surprises

in store.... The Germans are not an inventive people; they are

merely a thorough people. One never knew for certain.

Is any greater contrast possible than between so implacable,

patient, reasonable--and above all things /capable/--a being

as General Joffre and the rhetorician of Potsdam, with his talk

of German Might, of Hammer Blows and Hacking Through? Can there

be any doubt of the ultimate issue between them?

There are stories that sound pleasantly true to me about General

Joffre's ambitions after the war. He is tired; then he will be

very tired. He will, he declares, spend his first free summer in

making a tour of the waterways of France in a barge. So I hope

it may be. One imagines him as sitting quietly on the crumpled

remains of the last and tawdriest of Imperial traditions, with a

fishing line in the placid water and a large buff umbrella

overhead, the good ordinary man who does whatever is given to him

to do--as well as he can. The power that has taken the great

effigy of German imperialism by the throat is something very

composite and complex, but if we personify it at all it is

something more like General Joffre than any other single human

figure I can think of or imagine.

If I were to set a frontispiece to a book about this War I would

make General Joffre the frontispiece.

As we swung back along the dusty road to Paris at a pace of fifty

miles an hour and upwards, driven by a helmeted driver with an

aquiline profile fit to go upon a coin, whose merits were a

little flawed by a childish and dangerous ambition to run over

every cat he saw upon the road, I talked to de Tessin about this

big blue-coated figure of Joffre, which is not so much a figure

as a great generalisation of certain hitherto rather obscured

French qualities, and of the impression he had made upon me. And

from that I went on to talk about the Super Man, for this

encounter had suddenly crystallised out a set of realisations

that had been for some time latent in my mind.

How much of what follows I said to de Tessin at the time I do not

clearly remember, but this is what I had in mind.

The idea of the superman is an idea that has been developed by

various people ignorant of biology and unaccustomed to biological

ways of thinking. It is an obvious idea that follows in the

course of half an hour or so upon one's realisation of the

significance of Darwinism. If man has evolved from something

different, he must now be evolving onward into something sur-

human. The species in the future will be different from the

species of the past. So far at least our Nietzsches and Shaws

and so on went right.

But being ignorant of the elementary biological proposition that

modification of a species means really a secular change in its

average, they jumped to a conclusion--to which the late Lord

Salisbury also jumped years ago at a very memorable British

Association meeting--that a species is modified by the sudden

appearance of eccentric individuals here and there in the general

mass who interbreed--preferentially. Helped by a streak of antic

egotism in themselves, they conceived of the superman as a

posturing personage, misunderstood by the vulgar, fantastic,

wonderful. But the antic Personage, the thing I have called the

Effigy, is not new but old, the oldest thing in history, the

departing thing. It depends not upon the advance of the species

but upon the uncritical hero-worship of the crowd. You may see

the monster drawn twenty times the size of common men upon the

oldest monuments of Egypt and Assyria. The true superman comes

not as the tremendous personal entry of a star, but in the less

dramatic form of a general increase of goodwill and skill and

common sense. A species rises not by thrusting up peaks but by

the brimming up as a flood does. The coming of the superman

means not an epidemic of personages but the disappearance of the

Personage in the universal ascent. That is the point overlooked

by the megalomaniac school of Nietzsche and Shaw.

And it is the peculiarity of this war, it is the most reassuring

evidence that a great increase in general ability and critical

ability has been going on throughout the last century, that no

isolated great personages have emerged. Never has there been so

much ability, invention, inspiration, leadership; but the very

abundance of good qualities has prevented our focusing upon those

of any one individual. We all play our part in the realisation

of God's sanity in the world, but, as the strange, dramatic end

of Lord Kitchener has served to remind us, there is no single

individual of all the allied nations whose death can materially

affect the great destinies of this war.

In the last few years I have developed a religious belief that

has become now to me as real as any commonplace fact. I think

that mankind is still as it were collectively dreaming and hardly

more awakened to reality than a very young child. It has these

dreams that we express by the flags of nationalities and by

strange loyalties and by irrational creeds and ceremonies, and

its dreams at times become such nightmares as this war. But the

time draws near when mankind will awake and the dreams will fade

away, and then there will be no nationality in all the world but

humanity, and no kind, no emperor, nor leader but the one God of

mankind. This is my faith. I am as certain of this as I was in

1900 that men would presently fly. To me it is as if it must be

so.

So that to me this extraordinary refusal of the allied nations

under conditions that have always hitherto produced a Great Man

to produce anything of the sort, anything that can be used as an

effigy and carried about for the crowd to follow, is a fact of

extreme significance and encouragement. It seems to me that the

twilight of the half gods must have come, that we have reached

the end of the age when men needed a Personal Figure about which

they could rally. The Kaiser is perhaps the last of that long

series of crowned and cloaked and semi-divine personages which

has included Caesar and Alexander and Napoleon the First--

and Third. In the light of the new time we see the emperor-god

for the guy he is. In the August of 1914 he set himself up to be

the paramount Lord of the World, and it will seem to the

historian to come, who will know our dates so well and our

feelings, our fatigues and efforts so little, it will seem a

short period from that day to this, when the great figure already

sways and staggers towards the bonfire.

I had the experience of meeting a contemporary king upon this

journey. He was the first king I had ever met. The Potsdam

figure--with perhaps some local exceptions behind the Gold Coast--

is, with its collection of uniforms and its pomps and splendours,

the purest survival of the old tradition of divine monarchy now

that the Emperor at Pekin has followed the Shogun into the

shadows. The modern type of king shows a disposition to intimate

at the outset that he cannot help it, and to justify or at any

rate utilise his exceptional position by sound hard work. It is

an age of working kings, with the manners of private gentlemen.

The King of Italy for example is far more accessible than was the

late Pierpont Morgan or the late Cecil Rhodes, and he seems to

keep a smaller court.

I went to see him from Udine. He occupied a moderate-sized

country villa about half an hour by automobile from headquarters.

I went over with General Radcliffe; we drove through the gates of

the villa past a single sentinel in an ordinary infantry uniform,

up to the door of the house, and the number of guards, servants,

attendants, officials, secretaries, ministers and the like that I

saw in that house were--I counted very carefully--four.

Downstairs were three people, a tall soldier of the bodyguard in

grey; an A.D.C., Captain Moreno, and Col. Matteoli, the minister

of the household. I went upstairs to a drawing-room of much the

same easy and generalised character as the one in which I had met

General Joffre a few days before. I gave my hat to a second

bodyguard, and as I did so a pleasantly smiling man appeared at

the door of the study whom I thought at first must be some

minister in attendance. I did not recognise him instantly

because on the stamps and coins he is always in profile. He

began to talk in excellent English about my journey, and I

replied, and so talking we went into the study from which he had

emerged. Then I realised I was talking to the king.

Addicted as I am to the cinematograph, in which the standard of

study furniture is particularly rich and high, I found something

very cooling and simple and refreshing in the sight of the king's

study furniture. He sat down with me at a little useful writing

table, and after asking me what I had seen in Italy and hearing

what I had seen and what I was to see, he went on talking, very

good talk indeed.

I suppose I did a little exceed the established tradition of

courts by asking several questions and trying to get him to talk

upon certain points as to which I was curious, but I perceived

that he had had to carry on at least so much of the regal

tradition as to control the conversation. He was, however,

entirely un-posed. His talk reminded me somehow of Maurice

Baring's books; it had just the same quick, positive

understanding. And he had just the same detachment from the war

as the French generals. He spoke of it--as one might speak of an

inundation. And of its difficulties and perplexities.

Here on the Adriatic side there were political entanglements that

by comparison made our western after-the-war problems plain

sailing. He talked of the game of spellicans among the Balkan

nationalities. How was that difficulty to be met? In Macedonia

there were Turkish villages that were Christian and Bulgarians

that were Moslem. There were families that changed the

termination of their names from /ski/ to /off/ as

Serbian or Bulgarian prevailed. I remarked that that showed a

certain passion for peace, and that much of the mischief might be

due to the propaganda of the great Powers. I have a prejudice

against that blessed Whig "principle of nationality," but the

King of Italy was not to be drawn into any statement about that.

He left the question with his admission of its extreme complexity.

He went on to talk of the strange contrasts of war, of such

things as the indifference of the birds to gunfire and

desolation. One day on the Carso he had been near the newly

captured Austrian trenches, and suddenly from amidst a scattered

mass of Austrian bodies a quail had risen. that had struck him

as odd, and so too had the sight of a pack of cards and a wine

flask on some newly-made graves. The ordinary life was a very

/obstinate/ thing....

He talked of the courage of modern men. He was astonished at the

quickness with which they came to disregard shrapnel. And they

were so quietly enduring when they were wounded. He had seen a

lot of the wounded, and he had expected much groaning and crying

out. But unless a man is hit in the head and goes mad he does

not groan or scream! They are just brave. If you ask them how

they feel it is always one of two things: either they say quietly

that they are very bad or else they say there is nothing the

matter....

He spoke as if these were mere chance observations, but everyone

tells me that nearly every day the king is at the front and often

under fire. He has taken more risks in a week than the Potsdam

War Lord has taken since the war began. He keeps himself acutely

informed upon every aspect of the war. He was a little inclined

to fatalism, he confessed. There were two stories current of two

families of four sons, in each three had been killed and in each

there was an attempt to put the fourth in a place of comparative

safety. In one case a general took the fourth son in as an

attendant and embarked upon a ship that was immediately

torpedoed; in the other the fourth son was killed by accident

while he was helping to carry dinner in a rest camp. From those

stories we came to the question whether the uneducated Italians

were more superstitious than the uneducated English; the king

thought they were much less so. That struck me as a novel idea.

But then he thought that English rural people believe in witches

and fairies.

I have given enough of this talk to show the quality of this king

of the new dispensation. It was, you see, the sort of easy talk

one might hear from fine-minded people anywhere. When we had

done talking he came to the door of the study with me and shook

hands and went back to his desk--with that gesture of return to

work which is very familiar and sympathetic to a writer, and with

no gesture of regality at all.

Just to complete this impression let me repeat a pleasant story

about this king and our Prince of Wales, who recently visited the

Italian front. The Prince is a source of anxiety on these

visits; he has a very strong and very creditable desire to share

the ordinary risks of war. He is keenly interested, and

unobtrusively bent upon getting as near the fighting as line as

possible. But the King of Italy was firm upon keeping him out of

anything more than the most incidental danger. "We don't want

any historical incidents here," he said. I think that might well

become an historical phrase. For the life of the Effigy is a

series of historical incidents.

Manifestly one might continue to multiply portraits of fine

people working upon this great task of breaking and ending the

German aggression, the German legend, the German effigy, and the

effigy business generally; the thesis being that the Allies have

no effigy. One might fill a thick volume with pictures of men up

the scale and down working loyally and devotedly upon the war, to

make this point clear that the essential king and the essential

loyalty of our side is the commonsense of mankind.

There comes into my head as a picture at the other extreme of

this series, a memory of certain trenches I visited on my last

day in France. They were trenches on an offensive front; they

were not those architectural triumphs, those homes from home,

that grow to perfection upon the less active sections of the

great line. They had been first made by men who had run rapidly

forward with spade and rifle, stooping as they ran, who had

dropped into the craters of big shells, who had organised these

chiefly at night and dug the steep ditches sideways to join up

into continuous trenches. Now they were pushing forward saps

into No Man's Land, linking them across, and so continually

creeping nearer to the enemy and a practicable jumping-off place

for an attack. (It has been made since; the village at which I

peeped was in our hands a week later.) These trenches were dug

into a sort of yellowish sandy clay; the dug-outs were mere holes

in the earth that fell in upon the clumsy; hardly any timber had

been got up the line; a storm might flood them at any time a

couple of feet deep and begin to wash the sides. Overnight they

had been "strafed" and there had been a number of casualties;

there were smashed rifles about and a smashed-up machine gun

emplacement, and the men were dog-tired and many of them sleeping

like logs, half buried in -clay. Some slept on the firing steps.

As one went along one became aware ever and again of two or three

pairs of clay-yellow feet sticking out of a clay hole, and

peering down one saw the shapes of men like rudely modelled

earthen images of soldiers, motionless in the cave.

I came round the corner upon a youngster with an intelligent face

and steady eyes sitting up on the firing step, awake and

thinking. We looked at one another. There are moments when mind

leaps to mind. It is natural for the man in the trenches

suddenly confronted by so rare a beast as a middle-aged civilian

with an enquiring expression, to feel oneself something of a

spectacle and something generalised. It is natural for the

civilian to look rather in the vein of saying, "Well, how do you

take it?" As I pushed past him we nodded slightly with an effect

of mutual understanding. And we said with our nods just exactly

what General Joffre had said with his horizontal gestures of the

hand and what the King of Italy conveyed by his friendly manner;

we said to each other that here was the trouble those Germans had

brought upon us and here was the task that had to be done.

Our guide to these trenches was a short, stocky young man, a cob;

with a rifle and a tight belt and projecting skirts and a helmet,

a queer little figure that, had you seen it in a picture a year

or so before the war, you would most certainly have pronounced

Chinese. He belonged to a Northumbrian battalion; it does not

matter exactly which. As we returned from this front line,

trudging along the winding path through the barbed wire tangles

before the smashed and captured German trench that had been taken

a fortnight before, I fell behind my guardian captain and had a

brief conversation wit this individual. He was a lad in the

early twenties, weather-bit and with bloodshot eyes. He was, he

told me, a miner. I asked my stock question in such cases,

whether he would go back to the old work after the war. He said

he would, and then added--with the events of overnight on his

mind: "If A'hm looky."

Followed a little silence. Then I tried my second stock remark

for such cases. One does not talk to soldiers at the front in

this war of Glory or the "Empire on which the sun never sets" or

"the meteor flag of England" or of King and Country or any of

those fine old headline things. On the desolate path that winds

about amidst the shell craters and the fragments and the red-

rusted wire, with the silken shiver of passing shells in the air

and the blue of the lower sky continually breaking out into

eddying white puffs, it is wonderful how tawdry such panoplies of

the effigy appear. We knew that we and our allies are upon a

greater, graver, more fundamental business than that sort of

thing now. We are very near the waking point.

"Well," I said, "it's got to be done."

"Aye," he said, easing the strap of his rifle a little; "it's got

to be done."

THE WAR IN ITALY (AUGUST, 1916)

I. THE ISONZO FRONT

My first impressions of the Italian war centre upon Udine. So

far I had had only a visit to Soissons on an exceptionally quiet

day and the sound of a Zeppelin one night in Essex for all my

experience of actual warfare. But my bedroom at the British

mission in Udine roused perhaps extravagant expectations. There

were holes in the plaster ceiling and wall, betraying splintered

laths, holes, that had been caused by a bomb that had burst and

killed several people in the little square outside. Such

excitements seem to be things of the past now in Udine. Udine

keeps itself dark nowadays, and the Austrian sea-planes, which

come raiding the Italian coast country at night very much in the

same aimless, casually malignant way in which the Zeppelins raid

England, apparently because there is nothing else for them to do,

find it easier to locate Venice.

My earlier rides in Venetia began always with the level roads of

the plain, roads frequently edged by watercourses, with plentiful

willows beside the road, vines and fields of Indian corn and

suchlike lush crops. Always quite soon one came to some old

Austrian boundary posts; almost everywhere the Italians are

fighting upon what is technically enemy territory, but nowhere

does it seem a whit less Italian than the plain of Lombardy.

When at last I motored away from Udine to the northern mountain

front I passed through Campo-Formio and saw the white-faced inn

at which Napoleon dismembered the ancient republic of Venice and

bartered away this essential part of Italy into foreign control.

It just gravitates back now--as though there had been no

Napoleon.

And upon the roads and beside them was the enormous equipment of

a modern army advancing. Everywhere I saw new roads being made,

railways pushed up, vast store dumps, hospitals; everywhere the

villages swarmed with grey soldiers; everywhere our automobile

was threading its way and taking astonishing risks among

interminable processions of motor lorries, strings of ambulances

or of mule carts, waggons with timber, waggons with wire, waggons

with men's gear, waggons with casks, waggons discreetly veiled,

columns of infantry, cavalry, batteries /en route./ Every

waggon that goes up full comes back empty, and many wounded were

coming down and prisoners and troops returning to rest. Goritzia

had been taken a week or so before my arrival; the Isonzo had

been crossed and the Austrians driven back across the Carso for

several miles; all the resources of Italy seemed to be crowding

up to make good these gains and gather strength for the next

thrust. The roads under all this traffic remained wonderful;

gangs of men were everywhere repairing the first onset of wear,

and Italy is the most fortunate land in the world for road metal;

her mountains are solid road metal, and in this Venetian plain

you need but to scrape through a yard of soil to find gravel.

One travelled through a choking dust under the blue sky, and

above the steady incessant dusty succession of lorry, lorry,

lorry, lorry that passed one by, one saw, looking up, the tree

tops, house roofs, or the solid Venetian campanile of this or

that wayside village. Once as we were coming out of the great

grey portals of that beautiful old relic of a former school of

fortification, Palmanova, the traffic became suddenly bright

yellow, and for a kilometre or so we were passing nothing but

Sicilian mule carts loaded with hay. These carts seem as strange

among the grey shapes of modern war transport as a Chinese

mandarin in painted silk would be. They are the most individual

of things, all two-wheeled, all bright yellow and the same size

it is true, but upon each there are they gayest of little

paintings, such paintings as one sees in England at times upon an

ice-cream barrow. Sometimes the picture will present a

scriptural subject, sometimes a scene of opera, sometimes a dream

landscape or a trophy of fruits or flowers, and the harness--now

much out of repair--is studded with brass. Again and again I

have passed strings of these gay carts; all Sicily must be swept

of them.

Through the dust I came to Aquileia, which is now an old

cathedral, built upon the remains of a very early basilica,

standing in a space in a scattered village. But across this

dusty space there was carried the head of the upstart Maximinus

who murdered Alexander Severus, and later Aquileia brought Attila

near to despair. Our party alighted; we inspected a very old

mosaic floor which has been uncovered since the Austrian retreat.

The Austrian priests have gone too, and their Italian successors

are already tracing out a score of Roman traces that it was the

Austrian custom to minimise. Captain Pirelli refreshed my

historical memories; it was rather like leaving a card on Gibbon

/en route/ for contemporary history.

By devious routes I went on to certain batteries of big guns

which had played their part in hammering the Austrian left above

Monfalcone across an arm of the Adriatic, and which were now

under orders to shift and move up closer. The battery was the

most unobtrusive of batteries; its one desire seemed to be to

appear a simple piece of woodland in the eye of God and the

aeroplane. I went about the network of railways and paths under

the trees that a modern battery requires, and came presently upon

a great gun that even at the first glance seemed a little less

carefully hidden than its fellows. Then I saw that it was a most

ingenious dummy made of a tree and logs and so forth. It was in

the emplacement of a real gun that had been located; it had its

painted sandbags about it just the same, and it felt itself so

entirely a part of the battery that whenever its companions fired

t burnt a flash and kicked up a dust. It was an excellent

example of the great art of camouflage which this war has

developed.

I went on through the wood to a shady observation post high in a

tree, into which I clambered with my guide. I was able from this

position to get a very good idea of the lie of the Italian

eastern front. I was in the delta of the Isonzo. Directly in

front of me were some marshes and the extreme tip of the Adriatic

Sea, at the head of which was Monfalcone, now in Italian hands.

Behind Monfalcone ran the red ridge of the Carso, of which the

Italians had just captured the eastern half. Behind this again

rose the mountains to the east of the Isonzo which the Austrians

still held. The Isonzo came towards me from out of the

mountains, in a great westward curve. Fifteen or sixteen miles

away where it emerged from the mountains lay the pleasant and

prosperous town of Goritzia, and at the westward point of the

great curve was Sagrado with its broken bridge. The battle of

Goritzia was really not fought at Goritzia at all. What happened

was the brilliant and bloody storming of Mounts Podgora and

Sabotino on the western side of the river above Goritzia, and

simultaneously a crossing at Sagrado below Goritzia and a

magnificent rush up the plateau and across the plateau of the

Carso. Goritzia itself was not organised for defence, and the

Austrians were so surprised by the rapid storm of the mountains

to the north-west of it and of the Carso to the south-east, that

they made no fight in the town itself.

As a consequence when I visited it I found it very little injured--

compared, that is, with such other towns as have been fought

through. Here and there the front of a house has been knocked in

by an Austrian shell, or a lamp-post prostrated. But the road

bridge had suffered a good deal; its iron parapet was twisted

about by shell bursts and interwoven with young trees and big

boughs designed to screen the passer-by from the observation of

the Austrian gunners upon Monte Santo. Here and there were huge

holes through which one could look down upon the blue trickles of

water in the stony river bed far below. The driver of our

automobile displayed what seemed to me an extreme confidence in

the margins of these gaps, but his confidence was justified. At

Sagrado the bridge had been much more completely demolished; no

effort had been made to restore the horizontal roadway, but one

crossed by a sort of timber switchback that followed the ups and

downs of the ruins.

It is not in these places that one must look for the real

destruction of modern war. The real fight on the left of

Goritzia went through the village of Lucinico up the hill of

Podgora. Lucinico is nothing more than a heap of grey stones;

except for a bit of the church wall and the gable end of a house

one cannot even speak of it as ruins. But in one place among the

rubble I saw the splintered top and a leg of a grand piano.

Podgora hill, which was no doubt once neatly terraced and

cultivated, is like a scrap of landscape from some airless,

treeless planet. Still more desolate was the scene upon the

Carso to the right (south) of Goritzia. Both San Martino and

Doberdo are destroyed beyond the limits of ruination. The Carso

itself is a waterless upland with but a few bushy trees; it must

always have been a desolate region, but now it is an

indescribable wilderness of shell craters, smashed-up Austrian

trenches, splintered timber, old iron, rags, and that rusty

thorny vileness of man's invention, worse than all the thorns and

thickets of nature, barbed wire. There are no dead visible; the

wounded have been cleared away; but about the trenches and

particularly near some of the dug-outs there was a faint

repulsive smell....

Yet into this wilderness the Italians are now thrusting a sort of

order. The German is a wonderful worker, they say on the Anglo-

French front that he makes his trenches by way of resting, but I

doubt if he can touch the Italian at certain forms of toil. All

the way up to San Martino and beyond, swarms of workmen were

making one of those carefully graded roads that the Italians make

better than any other people. Other swarms were laying water-

pipes. For upon the Carso there are neither roads nor water, and

before the Italians can thrust farther both must be brought up to

the front.

As we approached San Martino an Austrian aeroplane made its

presence felt overhead by dropping a bomb among the tents of some

workmen, in a little scrubby wood on the hillside near at hand.

One heard the report and turned to see the fragments flying and

the dust. Probably they got someone. And then, after a little

pause, the encampment began to spew out men; here, there and

everywhere they appeared among the tents, running like rabbits at

evening-time, down the hill. Soon after and probably in

connection with this signal, Austrian shells began to come over.

They do not use shrapnel because the rocky soil of Italy makes

that unnecessary. They fire a sort of shell that goes bang and

releases a cloud of smoke overhead, and then drops a parcel of

high explosive that bursts on the ground. The ground leaps into

red dust and smoke. But these things are now to be seen on the

cinema. Forthwith the men working on the road about us begin to

down tools and make for the shelter trenches, a long procession

going at a steady but resolute walk. Then like a blow in the

chest came the bang of a big Italian gun somewhere close at

hand....

Along about four thousand miles of the various fronts this sort

of thing was going on that morning....

This Carso front is the practicable offensive front of Italy.

From the left wing on the Isonzo along the Alpine boundary round

to the Swiss boundary there is mountain warfare like nothing else

in the world; it is warfare that pushes the boundary backward,

but it is mountain warfare that will not, for so long a period

that the war will be over first, hold out any hopeful prospects

of offensive movements on a large scale against Austria or

Germany. It is a short distance as the crow flies from Rovereto

to Munich, but not as the big gun travels. The Italians,

therefore, as their contribution to the common effort, are

thrusting rather eastwardly towards the line of the Julian Alps

through Carinthia and Carniola. From my observation post in the

tree near Monfalcone I saw Trieste away along the coast to my

right. It looked scarcely as distant as Folkestone from

Dungeness. The Italian advanced line is indeed scarcely ten

miles from Trieste. But the Italians are not, I think, going to

Trieste just yet. That is not the real game now. They are

playing loyally with the Allies for the complete defeat of the

Central Powers, and that is to be achieved striking home into

Austria. Meanwhile there is no sense in knocking Trieste to

pieces, or using Italians instead of Austrian soldiers to

garrison it.

II. THE MOUNTAIN WAR

The mountain warfare of Italy is extraordinarily unlike that upon

any other front. From the Isonzo to the Swiss frontier we are

dealing with high mountains, cut by deep valleys between which

there is usually no practicable lateral communication. Each

advance must have the nature of an unsupported shove along a

narrow channel, until the whole mountain system, that is, is won,

and the attack can begin to deploy in front of the passes.

Geographically Austria has the advantage. She had the gentler

slope of the mountain chains while Italy has the steep side, and

the foresight of old treaties has given her deep bites into what

is naturally Italian territory; she is far nearer the Italian

plain than Italy is near any practicable fighting ground for

large forces; particularly is this the case in the region of the

Adige valley and Lake Garda.

The legitimate war, so to speak, in this region is a

mountaineering war. The typical position is roughly as follows.

The Austrians occupy valley A which opens northward; the Italians

occupy valley B which opens southward. The fight is for the

crest between A and B. The side that wins that crest gains the

power of looking down into, firing into and outflanking the

positions of the enemy valley. In most cases it is the Italians

now who are pressing, and if the reader will examine a map of the

front and compare it with the official reports he will soon

realise that almost everywhere the Italians are up to the head of

the southward valleys and working over the crests so as to press

down upon the Austrian valleys. But in the Trentino the

Austrians are still well over the crest on the southward slopes.

When I was in Italy they still held Rovereto.

Now it cannot be said that under modern conditions mountains

favour either the offensive or the defensive. But they certainly

make operations far more deliberate than upon a level. An

engineered road or railway in an Alpine valley is the most

vulnerable of things; its curves and viaducts may be practically

demolished by shell fire or swept by shrapnel, although you hold

the entire valley except for one vantage point. All the

mountains round about a valley must be won before that valley is

safe for the transport of an advance. But on the other hand a

surprise capture of some single mountain crest and the hoisting

of one gun into position there may block the retreat of guns and

material from a great series of positions. Mountain surfaces are

extraordinarily various and subtle. You may understand Picardy

on a map, but mountain warfare is three-dimensional. A struggle

may go on for weeks or months consisting of apparently separate

and incidental skirmishes, and then suddenly a whole valley

organisation may crumble away in retreat or disaster. Italy is

gnawing into the Trentino day by day, and particularly around by

her right wing. At no time I shall be surprised to see a sudden

lunge forward on that front, and hear a tale of guns and

prisoners. This will not mean that she has made a sudden attack,

but that some system of Austrian positions has collapsed under

her continual pressure.

Such briefly is the /idea/ of mountain struggle. Its

realities, I should imagine, are among the strangest and most

picturesque in all this tremendous world conflict. I know

nothing of the war in the east, of course, but there are things

here that must be hard to beat. Happily they will soon get

justice done to them by an abler pen than mine. I hear that

Kipling is to follow me upon this ground; nothing can be imagined

more congenial to his extraordinary power of vivid rendering than

this struggle against cliffs, avalanches, frost and the

Austrian.

To go the Italian round needs, among other things, a good head.

Everywhere it has been necessary to make roads where hitherto

there have been only mule tracks or no tracks at all; the roads

are often still in the making, and the automobile of the war

tourist skirts precipices and takes hairpin bends upon tracks of

loose metal not an inch too broad for the operation, or it floats

for a moment over the dizzy edge while a train of mule transport

blunders by. The unruly imagination of man's heart (which is

"only evil continually") speculates upon what would be the

consequences of one good bump from the wheel of a mule cart.

Down below, the trees that one sees through a wisp of cloud look

far too small and spiky and scattered to hold out much hope for a

fallen man of letters. And at the high positions they are too

used to the vertical life to understand the secret feelings of

the visitor from the horizontal. General Bompiani, whose

writings are well known to all English students of military

matters, showed me the Gibraltar he is making of a great mountain

system east of the Adige.

"Let me show you," he said, and flung himself on to the edge of

the precipice into exactly the position of a lady riding side-

saddle. "You will find it more comfortable to sit down."

But anxious as I am abroad not to discredit my country by

unseemly exhibitions I felt unequal to such gymnastics without a

proper rehearsal at a lower level. I seated myself carefully at

a yard (perhaps it was a couple of yards) from the edge, advanced

on my trousers without dignity to the verge, and so with an

effort thrust my legs over to dangle in the crystalline

air.

"That," proceeded General Bompiani, pointing with a giddy

flourish of his riding whip, "is Monte Tomba."

I swayed and half-extended my hand towards him. But he was still

there--sitting, so to speak, on the half of himself.... I was

astonished that he did not disappear abruptly during his

exposition....

The fighting man in the Dolomites has been perhaps the most

wonderful of all these separate campaigns. I went up by

automobile as far as the clambering new road goes up the flanks

of Tofana No. 2; thence for a time by mule along the flank of

Tofana No. 1, and thence on foot to the vestiges of the famous

Castelletto.

The aspect of these mountains is particularly grim and wicked;

they are worn old mountains, they tower overhead in enormous

vertical cliffs of sallow grey, with the square jointings and

occasional clefts and gullies, their summits are toothed and

jagged; the path ascends and passes round the side of the

mountain upon loose screes, which descend steeply to a lower wall

of precipices. In the distance rise other harsh and desolate-

looking mountain masses, with shining occasional scars of old

snow. Far below is a bleak valley of stunted pine trees through

which passes the road of the Dolomites.

As I ascended the upper track two bandages men were coming down

on led mules. It was mid-August, and they were suffering from

frostbite. Across the great gap between the summits a minute

traveller with some provisions was going up by wire to some post

upon the crest. For everywhere upon the icy pinnacles are

observation posts directing the fire of the big guns on the

slopes below, or machine-gun stations, or little garrisons that

sit and wait through the bleak days. Often they have no link

with the world below but a precipitous climb or a "teleferic"

wire. Snow and frost may cut them off absolutely for weeks from

the rest of mankind. The sick and wounded must begin their

journey down to help and comfort in a giddy basket that swings

down to the head of the mule track below.

Originally all these crests were in Austrian hands; they were

stormed by the Alpini under almost incredible conditions. For

fifteen days, for example, they fought their way up these screes

on the flanks of Tofana No. 2 to the ultimate crags, making

perhaps a hundred metres of ascent each day, hiding under rocks

and in holes in the daylight and receiving fresh provisions and

ammunition and advancing by night. They were subjected to rifle

fire, machine-gun fire and bombs of a peculiar sort, big iron

balls of the size of a football filled with explosive that were

just flung down the steep. They dodged flares and star shells.

At one place they went up a chimney that would be far beyond the

climbing powers of any but a very active man. It must have been

like storming the skies. The dead and wounded rolled away often

into inaccessible ravines. Stray skeletons, rags of uniform,

fragments of weapons, will add to the climbing interest of these

gaunt masses for many years to come. In this manner it was that

Tofana No. 2 was taken.

Now the Italians are organising this prize, and I saw winding up

far above me on the steep grey slope a multitudinous string of

little things that looked like black ants, each carrying a small

bright yellow egg. They were mules bringing back balks of

timber....

But one position held out invincibly; this was the Castelletto, a

great natural fortress of rock standing out at an angle of the

mountain in such a position that it commanded the Italian

communications (the Dolomite road) in the valley below, and

rendered all their positions uncomfortable and insecure. This

obnoxious post was practically inaccessible either from above or

below, and it barred the Italians even from looking into the Val

Travenanzes which it defended. It was, in fact, an impregnable

position, and against it was pitted the invincible 5th Group of

the Alpini. It was the old problem of the irresistible force in

conflict with the immovable object. And the outcome has been the

biggest military mine in all history.

The business began in January, 1916, with surveys of the rock in

question. The work of surveying for excavations, never a very

simple one, becomes much more difficult when the site is occupied

by hostile persons with machine guns. In March, as the winter's

snows abated, the boring machinery began to arrive, by mule as

far as possible and then by hand. Altogether about half a

kilometre of gallery had to be made to the mine chamber, and

meanwhile the explosive was coming up load by load and resting

first here, then there, in discreetly chosen positions. There

were at the last thirty-five tons of it in the inner chamber.

And while the boring machines bored and the work went on,

Lieutenant Malvezzi was carefully working out the problem of "il

[Our Webmaster, who is Italian, says, "il massimo effetto dirompente"]

massimo effetto dirompimento" and deciding exactly how to pack

and explode his little hoard. On the eleventh of July, at 3.30,

as he rejoices to state in his official report, "the mine

responded perfectly both in respect of the calculations made and

of the practical effects," that is to say, the Austrians were

largely missing and the Italians were in possession of the crater

of the Castelletto and looking down the Val Travenanzes from

which they had been barred for so long. Within a month things

had been so tidied up, and secured by further excavations and

sandbags against hostile fire, that even a middle-aged English

writer, extremely fagged and hot and breathless, could enjoy the

same privilege. All this, you must understand, had gone on at a

level to which the ordinary tourist rarely climbs, in a rarefied,

chest-tightening atmosphere, with wisps of clouds floating in the

clear air below and club-huts close at hand....

Among these mountains avalanches are frequent; and they come down

regardless of human strategy. In many cases the trenches cross

avalanche tracks; they and the men in them are periodically swept

away and periodically replaced. They are positions that must be

held; if the Italians will not face such sacrifices, the

Austrians will. Avalanches and frostbite have slain and disabled

their thousands; they have accounted perhaps for as many Italians

in this austere and giddy campaign as the Austrians....

It seems to be part of the stern resolve of Fate that this, the

greatest of wars, shall be the least glorious; it is manifestly

being decided not by victories but by blunders. It is indeed a

history of colossal stupidities. Among the most decisive of

these blunders, second only perhaps of the blunder of the Verdun

attack and far outshining the wild raid of the British towards

Bagdad, was the blunder of the Trentino offensive. It does not

need the equipment of a military expert, it demands only quite

ordinary knowledge and average intelligence, to realise the folly

of that Austrian adventure. There is some justification for a

claim that the decisive battle of the war was fought upon the

soil of Italy. There is still more justification for saying that

it might have been.

There was only one good point about the Austrian thrust. No one

could have foretold it. And it did so completely surprise the

Italians as to catch them without any prepared line of positions

in the rear. On the very eve of the big Russian offensive, the

Austrians thrust eighteen divisions hard at the Trentino

frontier. The Italian posts were then in Austrian territory;

they held on the left wing and the right, but they were driven by

the sheer weight of men and guns in the centre; they lost guns

and prisoners because of the difficulty of mountain retreats to

which I have alluded, and the Austrians pouring through reached

not indeed the plain of Venetia, but to the upland valleys

immediately above it, to Asiago and Arsiero. They probably saw

the Venetian plain through gaps in the hills, but they were still

separated from it even at Arsiero by what are mountains to an

English eye, mountains as high as Snowdon. But the Italians of

such beautiful old places and Vicenza, Marostica, and Bassano

could watch the Austrian shells bursting on the last line of

hills above the plain, and I have no doubt they felt extremely

uneasy.

As one motors through these ripe and beautiful towns and through

the rich valleys that link them--it is a smiling land abounding

in old castles and villas, Vicenza is a rich museum of Palladio's

architecture and Bassano is full of irreplaceable painted

buildings--one feels that the things was a narrow escape, but

from the military point of view it was merely an insane escapade.

The Austrians had behind them--and some way behind them--one

little strangulated railway and no good pass road; their right

was held at Pasubio, their left was similarly bent back. In

front of them was between twice and three times their number of

first class troops, with an unlimited equipment. If they had

surmounted that last mountain crest they would have come down to

almost certain destruction in the plain. They could never have

got back. For a time it was said that General Cadorna considered

that possibility. From the point of view of purely military

considerations, the Trentino offensive should perhaps have ended

in the capitulation of Vicenza.

I will confess I am glad it did not do so. This tour of the

fronts has made me very sad and weary with a succession of ruins.

I can bear no more ruins unless they are the ruins of Dusseldorf,

Cologne, Berlin, or suchlike modern German city. Anxious as I am

to be a systematic Philistine, to express my preference for

Marinetti over the Florentine British and generally to antagonise

aesthetic prigs, I rejoiced over that sunlit land as one

might rejoice over a child saved from beasts.

On the hills beyond Schio I walked out through the embrasure of a

big gun in a rock gallery, and saw the highest points upon the

hillside to which the Austrian infantry clambered in their futile

last attacks. Below me were the ruins of Arsiero and Velo

d'Astico recovered, and across the broad valley rose Monte Cimone

with the Italian trenches upon its crest and the Austrians a

little below to the north. A very considerable bombardment was

going on and it reverberated finely. (It is only among mountains

that one hears anything that one can call the thunder of guns.

The heaviest bombardments I heard in France sounded merely like

Brock's benefit on a much large scale, and disappointed me

extremely.) As I sat and listened to the uproar and watched the

shells burst on Cimone and far away up the valley over

Castelletto above Pedescala, Captain Pirelli pointed out the

position of the Austrian frontier. I doubt if the English people

realise that the utmost depth to which this great Trentino

offensive, which exhausted Austria, wasted the flower of the

Hungarian army and led directly to the Galician disasters and the

intervention of Rumania, penetrated into Italian territory was

about six miles.

III. BEHIND THE FRONT

I have a peculiar affection for Verona and certain things in

Verona. Italians must forgive us English this little streak of

impertinent proprietorship in the beautiful things of their

abundant land. It is quite open to them to revenge themselves by

professing a tenderness for Liverpool or Leeds. It was, for

instance, with a peculiar and personal indignation that I saw

where an Austrian air bomb had killed five-and-thirty people in

the Piazza Erbe. Somehow in that jolly old place, a place that

have very much of the quality of a very pretty and cheerful old

woman, it seemed exceptionally an outrage. And I made a special

pilgrimage to see how it was with that monument of Can Grande,

the equestrian Scaliger with the sidelong grin, for whom I

confess a ridiculous admiration. Can Grande, I rejoice to say,

has retired into a case of brickwork, surmounted by a steep roof

of thick iron plates; no aeroplane exists to carry bombs enough

to smash that covering; there he will smile securely in the

darkness until peace comes again.

All over Venetia the Austrian seaplanes are making the same sort

of idiot raid on lighted places that the Zeppelins have been

making over England. These raids do no effective military work.

What conceivable military advantage can there be in dropping

bombs into a marketing crowd? It is a sort of anti-Teutonic

propaganda by the Central Powers to which they seem to have been

incited by their own evil genius. It is as if they could

convince us that there is an essential malignity in Germans, that

until the German powers are stamped down into the mud they will

continue to do evil things. All of the Allies have borne the

thrusting and boasting of Germany with exemplary patience for

half a century; England gave her Heligoland and stood out of the

way of her colonial expansion, Italy was a happy hunting ground

for her business enterprise, France had come near resignation on

the score of Alsace-Lorraine. And then over and above the great

outrage of the war come these incessant mean-spirited atrocities.

A great and simple wickedness it is possible to forgive; the war

itself, had it been fought greatly by Austria and Germany, would

have made no such deep and enduring breach as these silly, futile

assassinations have down between the Austro-Germans and the rest

of the civilised world. One great misdeed is a thing

understandable and forgivable; what grows upon the consciousness

of the world is the persuasion that here we fight not a national

sin but a national insanity; that we dare not leave the German

the power to attack other nations any more for ever....

Venice has suffered particularly from this ape-like impulse to

hurt and terrorise enemy non-combatants. Venice has indeed

suffered from this war far more than any other town in Italy.

Her trade has largely ceased; she has no visitors. I woke up on

my way to Udine and found my train at Venice with an hour to

spare; after much examining and stamping of my passport I was

allowed outside the station wicket to get coffee in the

refreshment room and a glimpse of a very sad and silent Grand

Canal. There was nothing doing; a black despondent remnant of

the old crowd of gondolas browsed dreamily among against the quay

to stare at me the better. The empty palaces seemed to be

sleeping in the morning sunshine because it was not worth while

to wake up....

Except in the case of Venice, the war does not seem as yet to

have made nearly such a mark upon life in Italy as it has in

England or provincial France. People speak of Italy as a poor

country, but that is from a banker's point of view. In some

respects she is the richest country on earth, and in the matter

of staying power I should think she is better off than any other

belligerent. She produces food in abundance everywhere; her

women are agricultural workers, so that the interruption of food

production by the war has been less serious in Italy than in any

other part of Europe. In peace time, she has constantly exported

labour; the Italian worker has been a seasonal emigrant to

America, north and south, to Switzerland, Germany and the south

of France. The cessation of this emigration has given her great

reserves of man power, so that she has carried on her admirable

campaign with less interference with her normal economic life

than any other power. The first person I spoke to upon the

platform at Modane was a British officer engaged in forwarding

Italian potatoes to the British front in France. Afterwards, on

my return, when a little passport irregularity kept me for half a

day in Modane, I went for a walk with him along the winding pass

road that goes down into France. "You see hundreds and hundreds

of new Fiat cars," he remarked, "along here--going up to the

French front."

But there is a return trade. Near Paris I saw scores of

thousands of shells piled high to go to Italy....

I doubt if English people fully realise either the economic

sturdiness or the political courage of their Italian ally. Italy

is not merely fighting a first-class war in first-class fashion

but she is doing a big, dangerous, generous and far-sighted thing

in fighting at all. France and England were obliged to fight;

the necessity was as plain as daylight. The participation of

Italy demanded a remoter wisdom. In the long run she would have

been swallowed up economically and politically by Germany if she

had not fought; but that was not a thing staring her plainly in

the face as the danger, insult and challenge stared France and

England in the face. What did stare her in the face was not

merely a considerable military and political risk, but the

rupture of very close financial and commercial ties. I found

thoughtful men talking everywhere I have been in Italy of two

things, of the Jugo-Slav riddle and of the question of post war

finance. So far as the former matter goes, I think the Italians

are set upon the righteous solution of all such riddles, they are

possessed by an intelligent generosity. They are clearly set

upon deserving Jugo-Slav friendship; they understand the plain

necessity of open and friendly routes towards Roumania. It was

an Italian who set out to explain to me that Fiume must be at

least a free port; it would be wrong and foolish to cut the trade

of Hungary off from the Mediterranean. But the banking puzzle is

a more intricate and puzzling matter altogether than the

possibility of trouble between Italian and Jugo-Slav.

I write of these things with the simplicity of an angel, but

without an angelic detachment. Here are questions into which one

does not so much rush as get reluctantly pushed. Currency and

banking are dry distasteful questions, but it is clear that they

are too much in the hands of mystery-mongers; it is as much the

duty of anyone who talks and writes of affairs, it is as much the

duty of every sane adult, to bring his possibly poor and

unsuitable wits to bear upon these things, as it is for him to

vote or enlist or pay his taxes. Behind the simple ostensible

spectacle of Italy recovering the unredeemed Italy of the

Trentino and East Venetia, goes on another drama. Has Italy been

sinking into something rather hard to define called "economic

slavery"? Is she or is she not escaping from that magical

servitude? Before this question has been under discussion for a

minute comes a name--for a time I was really quite unable to

decide whether it is the name of the villain in the piece or of

the maligned heroine, or a secret society or a gold mine, or a

pestilence or a delusion--the name of the /Banca Commerciale

Italiana./

Banking in a country undergoing so rapid and vigorous an economic

development as Italy is very different from the banking we simple

English know of at home. Banking in England, like land-owning,

has hitherto been a sort of hold up. There were always

borrowers, there were always tenants, and all that had to be done

was to refuse, obstruct, delay and worry the helpless borrower or

would-be tenant until the maximum of security and profit was

obtained. I have never borrowed but I have built, and I know

something of the extreme hauteur of property of England towards a

man who wants to do anything with land, and with money I gather

the case is just the same. But in Italy, which already possessed

a sunny prosperity of its own upon mediaeval lines, the

banker has had to be suggestive and persuasive, sympathetic and

helpful. These are unaccustomed attitudes for British capital.

The field has been far more attractive to the German banker, who

is less of a proudly impassive usurer and more of a partner, who

demands less than absolute security because he investigates more

industriously and intelligently. This great bank, the Banca

Commerciale Italiana, is a bank of the German type: to begin

with, it was certainly dominated by German directors; it was a

bank of stimulation, and its activities interweave now into the

whole fabric of Italian commercial life. But it has already

liberated itself from German influence, and the bulk of its

capital is Italian. Nevertheless I found discussion ranging

about firstly what the Banca Commerciale essentially /was/,

secondly what it might /become/, thirdly what it might

/do/, and fourthly what, if anything, had to be done to it.

It is a novelty to an English mind to find banking thus mixed up

with politics, but it is not a novelty in Italy. All over

Venetia there are agricultural banks which are said to be

"clerical." I grappled with this mystery. "How are they

clerical?" I asked Captain Pirelli. "Do they lend money on bad

security to clerical voters, and on no terms whatever to anti-

clericals?" He was quite of my way of thinking. "/Pecunia non

olet/," he said; "I have never yet smelt a clerical fifty lira

note."... But on the other hand Italy is very close to Germany;

she wants easy money for development, cheap coal, a market for

various products. The case against the Germans--this case in

which the Banca Commerciale Italiana appears, I am convinced

unjustly, as a suspect--is that they have turned this natural and

proper interchange with Italy into the acquisition of German

power. That they have not been merely easy traders, but

patriotic agents. It is alleged that they used their early

"pull" in Italian banking to favour German enterprises and German

political influence against the development of native Italian

business; that their merchants are not bona-fide individuals, but

members of a nationalist conspiracy to gain economic controls.

The German is a patriotic monomaniac. He is not a man but a

limb, the worshipper of a national effigy, the digit of an

insanely proud and greedy Germania, and here are the natural

consequences.

The case of the individual Italian compactly is this: "We do not

like the Austrians and Germans. These Imperialisms look always

over the Alps. Whatever increases German influence here

threatens Italian life. The German is a German first and a human

being afterwards.... But on the other hand England seems

commercially indifferent to us and France has been economically

hostile..."

"After all," I said presently, after reflection, "in that matter

of /Pecunia non olet/; there used to be fusses about

European loans in China. And one of the favourite themes of

British fiction and drama before the war was the unfortunate

position of the girl who accepted a loan from the wicked man to

pay her debts at bridge."

"Italy," said Captain Pirelli, "isn't a girl. And she hasn't

been playing bridge."

I incline on the whole to his point of view. Money is facile

cosmopolitan stuff. I think that any bank that settles down in

Italy is going to be slowly and steadily naturalised Italian, it

will become more and more Italian until it is wholly Italian. I

would trust Italy to make and keep the Banca Commerciale Italiana

Italian. I believe the Italian brain is a better brain than the

German article. But still I heard people talking of the

implicated organisation as if it were engaged in the most

insidious duplicities. "Wait for only a year or so after the

war," said one English authority to me, "and the mask will be off

and it will be frankly a 'Deutsche Bank' once more." They assure

me that then German enterprises will be favoured again, Italian

and Allied enterprises blockaded and embarrassed, the good

understanding of Italians and English poisoned, entirely through

this organisation....

The reasonable uncommercial man would like to reject all this

last sort of talk as "suspicion mania." So far as the Banca

Commerciale Italiana goes, I at least find that easy enough; I

quote that instance simply because it is a case where suspicion

has been dispelled, but in regard to a score of other business

veins it is not so easy to dispel suspicion. This war has been a

shock to reasonable men the whole world over. They have been

forced to realise that after all a great number of Germans have

been engaged in a crack-brained conspiracy against the non-German

world; that in a great number of cases when one does business

with a German the business does not end with the individual

German. We hated to believe that a business could be tainted by

German partners or German associations. If now we err on the

side of over-suspicion, it is the German's little weakness for

patriotic disingenuousness that is most to blame....

But anyhow I do not think there is much good in a kind of witch-

smelling among Italian enterprises to find the hidden German.

Certain things are necessary for Italian prosperity and Italy

must get them. The Italians want intelligent and helpful

capital. They want a helpful France. They want bituminous coal

for metallurgical purposes. They want cheap shipping. The

French too want metallurgical coal. It is more important for

civilisation, for the general goodwill of the Allies and for

Great Britain that these needs should be supplied than that

individual British money-owners or ship-owners should remain

sluggishly rich by insisting upon high security or high freights.

The control of British coal-mining and shipping is in the

national interests--for international interests--rather than for

the creation of that particularly passive, obstructive, and

wasteful type of wealth, the wealth of the mere profiteer, is as

urgent a necessity for the commercial welfare of France and Italy

and the endurance of the Great Alliance as it is for the well-

being of the common man in Britain.

I left my military guide at Verona on Saturday afternoon and

reached Milan in time to dine outside Salvini's in the Galleria

Vittorio Emanuele, with an Italian fellow story-writer. The

place was as full as ever; we had to wait for a table. It is

notable that there were still great numbers of young men not in

uniform in Milan and Turin and Vicenza and Verona; there was no

effect anywhere of a depletion of men. The whole crowded place

was smouldering with excitement. The diners looked about them as

they talked, some talked loudly and seemed to be expressing

sentiments. Newspaper vendors appeared at the intersection of

the arcades, uttering ambiguous cries, and did a brisk business

of flitting white sheets among the little tables.

"To-night," said my companion, "I think we shall declare war upon

Germany. The decision is being made."

I asked intelligently why this had not been done before. I

forget the precise explanation he gave. A young soldier in

uniform, who had been dining at an adjacent table and whom I had

not recognised before as a writer I had met some years previously

in London, suddenly joined in our conversation, with a slightly

different explanation. I had been carrying on a conversation in

slightly ungainly French, but now I relapsed into English.

But indeed the matter of that declaration of war is as plain as

daylight; the Italian national consciousness has not at first

that direct sense of the German danger that exists in the minds

of the three northern Allies. To the Italian the traditional

enemy is Austria, and this war is not primarily a war for any

other end than the emancipation of Italy. Moreover we have to

remember that for years there has been serious commercial

friction between France and Italy, and considerable mutual

elbowing in North Africa. Both Frenchmen and Italians are

resolute to remedy this now, but the restoration of really

friendly and trustful relations is not to be done in a day. It

has been an extraordinary misfortune for Great Britain that

instead of boldly taking over her shipping from its private

owners and using it all, regardless of their profit, in the

interests of herself and her allies, her government has permitted

so much of it as military and naval needs have not requisitioned

to continue to ply for gain, which the government itself has

shared by a tax on war profits. The Anglophobe elements in

Italian public life have made the utmost of this folly or laxity

in relation more particularly to the consequent dearness of coal

in Italy. They have carried on an amazingly effective campaign

in which this British slackness with the individual profiteer, is

represented as if it were the deliberate greed of the British

state. This certainly contributed very much to fortify Italy's

disinclination to slam the door on the German connection.

I did my best to make it clear to my two friends that so far from

England exploiting Italy, I myself suffered in exactly the same

way as any Italian, through the extraordinary liberties of our

shipping interest. "I pay as well as you do," I said; "the

shippers' blockade of Great Britain is more effective than the

submarines'. My food, my coal, my petrol are all restricted in

the sacred name of private property. You see, capital in England

has hitherto been not an exploitation but a hold-up. We are

learning differently now.... And anyhow, Mr. Runciman has been

here and given Italy assurances...."

In the train to Modane this old story recurred again. It is

imperative that English readers should understand clearly how

thoroughly these little matters have been /worked/ by the

enemy.

Some slight civilities led to a conversation that revealed the

Italian lady in the corner as an Irishwoman married to an

Italian, and also brought out the latent English of a very

charming elderly lady opposite to her. She had heard a speech, a

wonderful speech from a railway train, by "the Lord Runciman." He

had said the most beautiful things about Italy.

I did my best to echo these beautiful things.

Then the Irishwoman remarked that Mr. Runciman had not satisfied

everybody. She and her husband had met a minister--I found

afterwards he was one of the members of the late Giolotti

government--who had been talking very loudly and scornfully of

the bargain Italy was making with England. I assured her that

the desire of England was simply to give Italy all that she

needed.

"But," said the husband casually, "Mr. Runciman is a shipowner."

I explained that he was nothing of the sort. It was true that he

came of a shipowning family--and perhaps inherited a slight

tendency to see things from a shipowning point of view--but in

England we did not suspect a man on such a score as that.

"In Italy I think we should," said the husband of the Irish

lady.

This incidental discussion is a necessary part of my impression

of Italy at war. The two western allies and Great Britain in

particular have to remember Italy's economic needs, and to

prepare to rescue them from the blind exploitation of private

profit. They have to remember these needs too, because, if they

are left out of the picture, then it becomes impossible to

understand the full measure of the risk Italy has faced in

undertaking this war for an idea. With a Latin lucidity she has

counted every risk, and with a Latin idealism she has taken her

place by the side of those who fight for a liberal civilisation

against a Byzantine imperialism.

As I came out of the brightly lit Galleria Vittorio Emanuele into

the darkened Piazza del Duomo I stopped under the arcade and

stood looking up at the shadowy darkness of that great pinnacled

barn, that marble bride-cake, which is, I suppose, the last

southward fortress of the Franco-English Gothic.

"It was here," said my host, "that we burnt the German stuff."

"What German stuff?"

"Pianos and all sorts of things. From the shops. It is

possible, you know, to buy things too cheaply--and to give too

much for the cheapness."

THE WESTERN WAR (SEPTEMBER, 1916)

I. RUINS

If I had to present some particular scene as typical of the

peculiar vileness and mischief wrought by this modern warfare

that Germany has elaborated and thrust upon the world, I do not

think I should choose as my instance any of those great

architectural wrecks that seem most to impress contemporary

writers. I have seen the injuries and ruins of the cathedrals at

Arras and Soissons and the wreckage of the great church at Saint

Eloi, I have visited the Hotel de Ville at Arras and seen

photographs of the present state of the Cloth Hall at Ypres--a

building I knew very well indeed in its days of pride--and I have

not been very deeply moved. I suppose that one is a little

accustomed to Gothic ruins, and that there is always something

monumental about old buildings; it is only a question of degree

whether they are more or less tumble-down. I was far more

desolated by the obliteration of such villages as Fricourt and

Dompierre, and by the horrible state of the fields and gardens

round about them, and my visit to Arras railway station gave me

all the sensations of coming suddenly on a newly murdered body.

Before I visited the recaptured villages in the zone of the

actual fighting, I had an idea that their evacuation was only

temporary, that as soon as the war line moved towards Germany the

people of the devastated villages would return to build their

houses and till their fields again. But I see now that not only

are homes and villages destroyed almost beyond recognition, but

the very fields are destroyed. They are wildernesses of shell

craters; the old worked soil is buried and great slabs of crude

earth have been flung up over it. No ordinary plough will travel

over this frozen sea, let along that everywhere chunks of timber,

horrible tangles of rusting wire, jagged fragments of big shells,

and a great number of unexploded shells are entangled in the

mess. Often this chaos is stained bright yellow by high

explosives, and across it run the twisting trenches and

communication trenches eight, ten, or twelve feet deep. These

will become water pits and mud pits into which beasts will fall.

It is incredible that there should be crops from any of this

region of the push for many years to come. There is no shade

left; the roadside trees are splintered stumps with scarcely the

spirit to put forth a leaf; a few stunted thistles and weeds are

the sole proofs that life may still go on.

The villages of this wide battle region are not ruined; they are

obliterated. It is just possible to trace the roads in them,

because the roads have been cleared and repaired for the passing

of the guns and ammunition. Fricourt is a tangle of German dug-

outs. One dug-out in particular there promises to become a show

place. It must be the masterpiece of some genius for dug-outs;

it is made as if its makers enjoyed the job; it is like the work

of some horrible badger among the vestiges of what were pleasant

human homes. You are taken down a timbered staircase into its

warren of rooms and passages; you are shown the places under the

craters of the great British shells, where the wood splintered

but did not come in. (But the arrival of those shells must have

been a stunning moment.) There are a series of ingenious bolting

shafts set with iron climbing bars. In this place German

officers and soldiers have lived continually for nearly two

years. This war is, indeed, a troglodytic propaganda. You come

up at last at the far end into what was once a cellar of a decent

Frechman's home.

But there are stranger subterranean refuges than that at

Fricourt. At Dompierre the German trenches skirted the cemetery,

and they turned the dead out of their vaults and made lurking

places of the tombs. I walked with M. Joseph Reinach about this

place, picking our way carefully amidst the mud holes and the

wire, and watched the shells bursting away over the receding

battle line to the west. The wreckage of the graves was

Durereqsue. And here would be a fragment of marble angle and

here a split stone with an inscription. Splinters of coffins,

rusty iron crosses and the petals of tin flowers were trampled

into the mud, amidst the universal barbed wire. A little

distance down the slope is a brand new cemetery, with new metal

wreaths and even a few flowers; it is a disciplined array of

uniform wooden crosses, each with its list of soldiers' names.

Unless I am wholly mistaken in France no Germans will ever get a

chance for ever more to desecrate that second cemetery as they

have done its predecessor.

We walked over the mud heaps and litter that had once been houses

towards the centre of Dompierre village, and tried to picture to

ourselves what the place had been. Many things are recognisable

in Dompierre that have altogether vanished at Fricourt; for

instance, there are quire large triangular pieces of the church

wall upstanding at Dompierre. And a mile away perhaps down the

hill on the road towards Amiens, the ruins of the sugar refinery

are very distinct. A sugar refinery is an affair of big iron

receptacles and great flues and pipes and so forth, and iron does

not go down under gun fire as stone or brick does. The whole

fabric wars rust, bent and twisted, gaping with shell holes, that

raggedest display of old iron, but it still kept its general

shape, as a smashed, battered, and sunken ironclad might do at

the bottom of the sea.

There wasn't a dog left of the former life of Dompierre. There

was not even much war traffic that morning on the worn and muddy

road. The guns muttered some miles away to the west, and a lark

sang. But a little way farther on up the road was an

intermediate dressing station, rigged up with wood and

tarpaulins, and orderlies were packing two wounded men into an

ambulance. The men on the stretchers were grey faced, as though

they had been trodden on by some gigantic dirty boot.

As we came back towards where our car waited by the cemetery I

heard the jingle of a horseman coming across the space behind us.

I turned and beheld one of the odd contrasts that seem always to

be happening in this incredible war. This man was, I suppose, a

native officer of some cavalry force from French north Africa.

He was a handsome dark brown Arab, wearing a long yellow-white

robe and a tall cap about which ran a band of sheepskin. He was

riding one of those little fine lean horses with long tails that

I think are Barbary horses, his archaic saddle rose fore and aft

of him, and the turned-up toes of his soft leather boots were

stuck into great silver stirrups. He might have ridden straight

out of the Arabian nights. He passed thoughtfully, picking his

way delicately among the wire and the shell craters, and coming

into the road, broke into a canter and vanished in the direction

of the smashed-up refinery.

About such towns as Rheims or Arras or Soissons there is an

effect of waiting stillness like nothing else I have ever

experienced. At Arras the situation is almost incredible to the

civilian mind. The British hold the town, the Germans hold a

northern suburb; at one point near the river the trenches are

just four metres apart. This state of tension has lasted for

long months.

Unless a very big attack is contemplated, I suppose there is no

advantage in an assault; across that narrow interval we should

only get into trenches that might be costly or impossible to

hold, and so it would be for the Germans on our side. But there

is a kind of etiquette observed; loud vulgar talking on either

side of the four-metre gap leads at once to bomb throwing. And

meanwhile on both sides guns of various calibre keep up an

intermittent fire, the German guns register--I think that is the

right term--on the cross of Arras cathedral, the British guns

search lovingly for the German batteries. As one walks about the

silent streets one hears, "/Bang/---Pheeee---woooo" and then far

away "/dump./" One of ours. Then presently back comes

"Pheeee---woooo---/Bang!/" One of theirs.

Amidst these pleasantries, the life of the town goes on. /Le

Lion d'Arras/, an excellent illustrated paper, produces its

valiant sheets, and has done so since the siege began.

The current number of /Le Lion d'Arras/ had to report a

local German success. Overnight they had killed a gendarme.

There is to be a public funeral and much ceremony. It is rare

for anyone now to get killed; everything is so systematised.

You may buy postcards with views of the destruction at various

angles, and send them off with the Arras postmark. The town is

not without a certain business activity. There is, I am told, a

considerable influx of visitors of a special sort; they wear

khaki and lead the troglodytic life. They play cards and gossip

and sleep in the shadows, and may not walk the streets. I had

one glimpse of a dark crowded cellar. Now and then one sees a

British soldier on some special errand; he keeps to the pavement,

mindful of the spying German sausage balloon in the air. The

streets are strangely quite and grass grows between the stones.

The Hotel de Ville and the cathedral are now mostly heaps of

litter, but many streets of the town have suffered very little.

Here and there a house has been crushed and one or two have been

bisected, the front reduced to a heap of splinters and the back

halves of the rooms left so that one sees the bed, the hanging

end of the carpet, the clothes cupboard yawning open, the

pictures still on the wall. In one place a lamp stands on a

chest of drawers, on a shelf of floor cut off completely from the

world below.... Pheeee---woooo---/Bang!/ One would be

irresistibly reminded of a Sunday afternoon in the city of

London, if it were not for those unmeaning explosions.

I went to the station, a dead railway station. A notice-board

requested us to walk around the silent square on the outside

pavement and not across it. The German sausage balloon had not

been up for days; it had probably gone off to the Somme; the

Somme was a terrible vortex just then which was sucking away the

resources of the whole German line; but still discipline is

discipline. The sausage might come peeping up at any moment over

the station roof, and so we skirted the square. Arras was fought

for in the early stages of the war; two lines of sand-bagged

breastworks still run obliquely through the station; one is where

the porters used to put luggage upon cabs and one runs the length

of the platform. The station was a fine one of the modern type,

with a glass roof whose framework still remains, though the glass

powders the floor and is like a fine angular gravel underfoot.

The rails are rails of rust, and cornflowers and mustard and tall

grasses grow amidst the ballast. The waiting-rooms have suffered

from a shell or so, but there are still the sofas of green plush,

askew, a little advertisement hung from the wall, the glass

smashed. The ticket bureau is as if a giant had scattered a

great number of tickets, mostly still done up in bundles, to

Douai, to Valenciennes, to Lens and so on. These tickets are

souvenirs too portable to resist. I gave way to that common

weakness.

I went out and looked up and down the line; two deserted goods

trucks stood as if they sheltered under a footbridge. The grass

poked out through their wheels. The railway signals seemed

uncertain in their intimations; some were up and some were down.

And it was as still and empty as a summer afternoon in Pompeii.

No train has come into Arras for two long years now.

We lunched in a sunny garden with various men who love Arras but

are weary of it, and we disputed about Irish politics. We

discussed the political future of Sir F. E. Smith. We also

disputed whether there was an equivalent in English for

/embusque./ Every now and then a shell came over--an

aimless shell.

A certain liveliness marked our departure from the town.

Possibly the Germans also listen for the rare infrequent

automobile. At any rate, as we were just starting our way back--

it is improper to mention the exact point from which we started--

came "Pheeee---woooo." Quite close. But there was no /Bang!/

One's mind hung expectant and disappointed. It was a dud shell.

And then suddenly I became acutely aware of the personality of

our chauffeur. It was not his business to talk to us, but he

turned his head, showed a sharp profile, wry lips and a bright

excited eye, and remarked, "/That/ was a near one--anyhow."

He then cut a corner over the pavement and very nearly cut it

through a house. He bumped us over a shell hole and began to

toot his horn. At every gateway, alley, and cross road on this

silent and empty streets of Arras and frequently in between, he

tooted punctiliously. (It is not proper to sound motor horns in

Arras.) I cannot imagine what the listening Germans made of it.

We passed the old gates of that city of fear, still tooting

vehemently, and then with shoulders eloquent of his feelings, our

chauffeur abandoned the horn altogether and put his whole soul

into the accelerator....

Soissons was in very much the same case as Arras. There was the

same pregnant silence in her streets, the same effect of waiting

for the moment which draws nearer and nearer, when the brooding

German lines away there will be full of the covert activities of

retreat, when the streets of the old town will stir with the

joyous excitement of the conclusive advance.

The organisation of Soissons for defence is perfect. I may not

describe it, but think of whatever would stop and destroy an

attacking party or foil the hostile shell. It is there. Men

have had nothing else to do and nothing else to think of for two

years. I crossed the bridge the English made in the pursuit

after the Marne, and went into the first line trenches and peeped

towards the invisible enemy. To show me exactly where to look a

seventy-five obliged with a shell. In the crypt of the Abbey of

St. Medard near by it--it must provoke the Germans bitterly to

think that all the rest of the building vanished ages ago--the

French boys sleep beside the bones of King Childebert the Second.

They shelter safely in the prison of Louis the Pious. An

ineffective shell from a German seventy-seven burst in the walled

garden close at hand as I came out from those thousand-year-old

memories again.

The cathedral at Soissons had not been nearly so completely

smashed up as the one at Arras; I doubt if it has been very

greatly fired into. There is a peculiar beauty in the one long

vertical strip of blue sky between the broken arches in the chief

gap where the wall has tumbled in. And the people are holding on

in many cases exactly as they are doing in Arras; I do not know

whether it is habit or courage that is most apparent in this

persistence. About the chief place of the town there are ruined

houses, but some invisible hand still keeps the grass of the

little garden within bounds and has put out a bed of begonias.

In Paris I met a charming American writer, the wife of a French

artist, the lady who wrote /My House on the Field of

Honour./ She gave me a queer little anecdote. On account of

some hospital work she had been allowed to visit Soissons--a rare

privilege for a woman--and she stayed the night in a lodging.

The room into which she was shown was like any other French

provincial bedroom, and after her Anglo-Saxon habit she walked

straight to the windows to open them.

They looked exactly like any other French bedroom windows, with

neat, clean white lace curtains across them. The curtains had

been put there, because they were the proper things to put

there.

"Madame," said the hostess, "need not trouble to open the glass.

There is no more glass in Soissons."

But there were curtains nevertheless. There was all the precise

delicacy of the neatly curtained home life of France.

And she told me too of the people at dinner, and how as the

little serving-maid passed about a proud erection of cake and

conserve and cream, came the familiar "Pheeee---woooo---

/Bang!/"

"That must have been the Seminaire," said someone.

As one speaks of the weather or a passing cart.

"It was in the Rue de la Bueire, M'sieur," the little maid

asserted with quiet conviction, poising the trophy of

confectionery for Madame Huard with an unshaking hand.

So stoutly do the roots of French life hold beneath the

tramplings of war.

II. THE GRADES OF WAR

Soissons and Arras when I visited them were samples of the

deadlock war; they were like Bloch come true. The living fact

about war so far is that Bloch has not come true--/yet./ I

think in the end he will come true, but not so far as this war is

concerned, and to make that clear it is necessary to trouble the

reader with a little disquisition upon war--omitting as far as

humanly possible all mention of Napoleon's campaigns.

The development of war has depended largely upon two factors.

One of these is invention. New weapons and new methods have

become available, and have modified tactics, strategy, the

relative advantage of offensive and defensive. The other chief

factor in the evolution of the war has been social organisation.

As Machiavelli points out in his /Art of War/, there was

insufficient social stability in Europe to keep a properly

trained and disciplined infantry in the field from the passing of

the Roman legions to the appearance of the Swiss footmen. he

makes it very clear that he considers the fighting of the Middle

Ages, though frequent and bloody, to be a confused, mobbing sort

of affair, and politically and technically unsatisfactory. The

knight was an egotist in armour. Machiavelli does small justice

to the English bowmen. It is interesting to note that

Switzerland, that present island of peace, was regarded by him as

the mother of modern war. Swiss aggression was the curse of the

Milanese. That is a remark by the way; our interest here is to

note that modern war emerges upon history as the sixteenth

century unfolds, as an affair in which the essential factor is

the drilled and trained infantryman. The artillery is developing

as a means of breaking the infantry; cavalry for charging them

when broken, for pursuit and scouting. To this day this triple

division of forces dominates soldiers' minds. The mechanical

development of warfare has consisted largely in the development

of facilities for enabling or hindering the infantry to get to

close quarters. As that has been made easy or difficult the

offensive or the defensive has predominated.

A history of military method for the last few centuries would be

a record of successive alternate steps in which offensive and

defensive contrivances pull ahead, first one and then the other.

Their relative fluctuations are marked by the varying length of

campaigns. From the very outset we have the ditch and the wall;

the fortified place upon a pass or main road, as a check to the

advance. Artillery improves, then fortification improves. The

defensive holds its own for a long period, wars are mainly siege

wars, and for a century before the advent of Napoleon there are

no big successful sweeping invasions, no marches upon the enemy

capital and so on. There were wars of reduction, wars of

annoyance. Napoleon developed the offensive by seizing upon the

enthusiastic infantry of the republic, improving transport and

mobile artillery, using road-making as an aggressive method. In

spite of the successful experiment of Torres Vedras and the

warning of Plevna the offensive remained dominant throughout the

nineteenth century.

But three things were working quietly towards the rehabilitation

of the defensive; firstly the increased range, accuracy and

rapidity of rifle fire, with which we may include the development

of the machine gun; secondly the increasing use of the spade, and

thirdly the invention of barbed wire. By the end of the century

these things had come so far into military theory as to produce

the great essay of Bloch, and to surprise the British military

people, who are not accustomed to read books or talk shop, in the

Boer war. In the thinly populated war region of South Africa the

difficulties of forcing entrenched positions were largely met by

outflanking, the Boers had only a limited amount of barbed wire

and could be held down in their trenches by shrapnel, and even at

the beginning of the present war there can be little doubt that

we and our Allies were still largely unprepared for the full

possibilities of trench warfare, we attempted a war of

manoeuvres, war at about the grade to which war had been

brought in 1898, and it was the Germans who first brought the war

up to date by entrenching upon the Aisne. We had, of course, a

few aeroplanes at that time, but they were used chiefly as a sort

of accessory cavalry for scouting; our artillery was light and

our shell almost wholly shrapnel.

Now the grades of warfare that have been developed since the

present war began, may be regarded as a series of elaborations

and counter elaborations of the problem which begins as a line of

trenches behind wire, containing infantry with rifles and machine

guns. Against this an infantry attack with bayonet, after

shrapnel fails. This we will call Grade A. To this the

offensive replies with improved artillery, and particularly with

high explosive shell instead of shrapnel. By this the wire is

blown away, the trench wrecked and the defender held down as the

attack charges up. This is Grade B. But now appear the dug-out

elaborating the trench and the defensive battery behind the

trench. The defenders, under the preliminary bombardment, get

into the dug-outs with their rifles and machine guns, and emerge

as fresh as paint as the attack comes up. Obviously there is

much scope for invention and contrivance in the dug-out as the

reservoir of counter attacks. Its possibilities have been very

ably exploited by the Germans. Also the defensive batteries

behind, which have of course the exact range of the captured

trench, concentrate on it and destroy the attack at the moment of

victory. The trench falls back to its former holders under this

fire and a counter attack. Check again for the offensive. Even

if it can take, it cannot hold a position under these conditions.

This we will call Grade A2; a revised and improved A. What is

the retort from the opposite side? Obviously to enhance and

extend the range of the preliminary bombardment behind the actual

trench line, to destroy or block, if it can, the dug-outs and

destroy or silence the counter offensive artillery. If it can do

that, it can go on; otherwise Bloch wins.

If fighting went on only at ground level Bloch would win at this

stage, but here it is that the aeroplane comes in. From the

ground it would be practically impossible to locate the enemies'

dug-outs, secondary defences, and batteries. But the aeroplane

takes us immediately into a new grade of warfare, in which the

location of the defender's secondary trenches, guns, and even

machine-gun positions becomes a matter of extreme precision--

provided only that the offensive has secured command of the air

and can send his aeroplanes freely over the defender lines. Then

the preliminary bombardment becomes of a much more extensive

character; the defender's batteries are tackled by the

overpowering fire of guns they are unable to locate and answer;

the secondary dug-outs and strong places are plastered down, a

barrage fire shuts off support from the doomed trenches, the men

in these trenches are held down by a concentrated artillery fire

and the attack goes up at last to hunt them out of the dug-outs

and collect the survivors. Until the attack is comfortably

established in the captured trench, the fire upon the old counter

attack position goes on. This is the grade, Grade B2, to which

modern warfare has attained upon the Somme front. The appearance

of the Tank has only increased the offensive advantage. There at

present warfare rests.

There is, I believe, only one grade higher possible. The success

of B2 depends upon the completeness of the aerial observation.

The invention of an anti-aircraft gun which would be practically

sure of hitting and bringing down an aeroplane at any height

whatever up to 20,000 feet, would restore the defensive and

establish what I should think must be the final grade of war, A3.

But at present nothing of the sort exists and nothing of the sort

is likely to exist for a very long time; at present hitting an

aeroplane by any sort of gun at all is a rare and uncertain

achievement. Such a gun is not impossible and therefore we must

suppose such a gun will some day be constructed, but it will be

of a novel type and character, unlike anything at present in

existence. The grade of fighting that I was privileged to

witness on the Somme, the grade at which a steady successful

offensive is possible, is therefore, I conclude, the grade at

which the present war will end.

But now having thus spread out the broad theory of the business,

let me go on to tell some of the actualities of the Somme

offensive. They key fact upon both British and French fronts was

the complete ascendancy of the Allies aeroplanes. It is the

necessary preliminary condition for the method upon which the

great generals of the French army rely in this sanitary task of

shoving the German Thing off the soil of Belgium and France back

into its own land. A man who is frequently throwing out

prophecies is bound to score a few successes, and one that I may

legitimately claim is my early insistence upon that fact that the

equality of the German aviator was likely to be inferior to that

of his French or British rival. The ordinary German has neither

the flexible quality of body, the quickness of nerve, the

temperament, nor the mental habits that make a successful

aviator. This idea was first put into my head by considering the

way in which Germans walk and carry themselves, and by nothing

the difference in nimbleness between the cyclists in the streets

of German and French towns. It was confirmed by a conversation I

had with a German aviator who was also a dramatist, and who came

to see me upon some copyright matter in 1912. He broached the

view that aviation would destroy democracy, because he said only

aristocrats make aviators. (He was a man of good family.) With a

duke or so in my mind I asked him why. Because, he explained, a

man without aristocratic quality in tradition, cannot possibly

endure the "high loneliness" of the air. That sounded rather

like nonsense at the time, and then I reflected that for a

Prussian that might be true. There may be something in the

German composition that does demand association and the support

of pride and training before dangers can be faced. The Germans

are social and methodical, the French and English are by

comparison chaotic and instinctive; perhaps the very readiness

for a conscious orderliness that makes the German so formidable

upon the ground, so thorough and fore-seeking, makes him slow and

unsure in the air. At any rate the experiences of this war have

seemed to carry out this hypothesis. The German aviators will

not as a class stand up to those of the Allies. They are not

nimble in the air. Such champions as they have produced have

been men of one trick; one of their great men, Immelmann--he was

put down by an English boy a month or so ago--had a sort of

hawk's swoop. He would go very high and then come down at his

utmost pace at his antagonist, firing his machine gun at him as

he came. If he missed in this hysterical lunge, he went on

down.... This does not strike the Allied aviator as very

brilliant. A gentleman of that sort can sooner or later be

caught on the rise by going for him over the German

lines.

The first phase, then, of the highest grade offensive, the

ultimate development of war regardless of expense, is the

clearance of the air. Such German machines as are up are put

down by fighting aviators. These last fly high; in the clear

blue of the early morning they look exactly like gnats; some

trail a little smoke in the sunshine; they take their machine

guns in pursuit over the German lines, and the German anti-

aircraft guns, the Archibalds, begin to pattern the sky about

them with little balls of black smoke. From below one does not

see men nor feel that men are there; it is as if it were an

affair of midges. Close after the fighting machines come the

photographic aeroplanes, with cameras as long as a man is high,

flying low--at four or five thousand feet that is--over the enemy

trenches. The Archibald leaves these latter alone; it cannot

fire a shell to explode safely so soon after firing; but they are

shot at with rifles and machine guns. They do not mind being

shot at; only the petrol tank and the head and thorax of the

pilot are to be considered vital. They will come back with forty

or fifty bullet holes in the fabric. They will go under this

fire along the length of the German positions exposing plate

after plate; one machine will get a continuous panorama of many

miles and then come back straight to the aerodrome to develop its

plates.

There is no waste of time about the business, the photographs are

developed as rapidly as possible. Within an hour and a half

after the photographs were taken the first prints are going back

into the bureau for the examination of the photographs. Both

British and French air photographs are thoroughly scrutinised and

marked.

An air photograph to an inexperienced eye is not a very

illuminating thing; one makes our roads, blurs of wood, and

rather vague buildings. But the examiner has an eye that has

been in training; he is a picked man; he has at hand yesterday's

photographs and last week's photographs, marked maps and all

sorts of aids and records. If he is a Frenchman he is only too

happy to explain his ideas and methods. Here, he will point out,

is a little difference between the German trench beyond the wood

since yesterday. For a number of reasons he thinks that will be

a new machine gun emplacement; here at the centre of the farm

wall they have been making another. This battery here--isn't it

plain? Well, it's a dummy. The grass in front of it hasn't been

scorched, and there's been no serious wear on the road here for a

week. Presently the Germans will send one or two waggons up and

down that road and instruct them to make figures of eight to

imitate scorching on the grass in front of the gun. We know all

about that. The real wear on the road, compare this and this and

this, ends here at this spot. It turns off into the wood.

There's a sort of track in the trees. Now look where the trees

are just a little displaced! (This lens is rather better for

that.) /That's/ one gun. You see? Here, I will show you

another....

That process goes on two or three miles behind the front line.

Very clean young men in white overalls do it as if it were a

labour of love. And the Germans in the trenches, the German

gunners, /know it is going on./ They know that in the

quickest possible way these observations of the aeroplane that

was over them just now will go to the gunners. The careful

gunner, firing by the map and marking by aeroplane, kite balloon

or direct observation, will be getting onto the located guns and

machine guns in another couple of hours. The French claim that

they have located new batteries, got their /tir de

demolition/ upon them in and destroyed them within five

hours. The British I told of that found it incredible. Every

day the French print special maps showing the guns, sham guns,

trenches, everything of significance behind the German lines,

showing everything that has happened in the last four-and-twenty

hours. It is pitiless. It is indecent. The map-making and

printing goes on in the room next and most convenient to the

examination of the photographs. And, as I say, the German army

knows of this, and knows that it cannot prevent it because of its

aerial weakness. That knowledge is not the last among the forces

that is crumpling up the German resistance upon the Somme.

I visited some French guns during the /tir de

demolition/ phase. I counted nine aeroplanes and

twenty-six kite balloons in the air at the same time. There was

nothing German visible in the air at all.

It is a case of eyes and no eyes.

The French attack resolves itself into a triple system of gun-

fire. First for a day or so, or two or three days, there is

demolition fire to smash up all the exactly located batteries,

organisation, supports, behind the front line enemy trenches;

then comes barrage fire to cut off supplies and reinforcements;

then, before the advance, the hammering down fire, "heads down,"

upon the trenches. When at last this stops and the infantry goes

forward to rout out the trenches and the dug-outs, they go

forward with a minimum of inconvenience. The first wave of

attack fights, destroys, or disarms the surviving Germans and

sends them back across the open to the French trenches. They run

as fast as they can, hands up, and are shepherded farther back.

The French set to work to turn over the captured trenches and

organise themselves against any counter attack that may face the

barrage fire.

That is the formula of the present fighting, which the French

have developed. After an advance there is a pause, while the

guns move up nearer the Germans and fresh aeroplane

reconnaissance goes on. Nowhere on this present offensive has a

German counter attack had more than the most incidental success;

and commonly they have had frightful losses. Then after a few

days of refreshment and accumulation, the Allied attack resumes.

That is the perfected method of the French offensive. I had the

pleasure of learning its broad outlines in good company, in the

company of M. Joseph Reinach and Colonel Carence, the military

writer. Their talk together and with me in the various messes at

which we lunched was for the most part a keen discussion of every

detail and every possibility of the offensive machine; every

French officer's mess seems a little council upon the one supreme

question in France, /how to do it best./ M. Reinach has

made certain suggestions about the co-operation of the French and

British that I will discuss elsewhere, but one great theme was

the constitution of "the ideal battery." For years French

military thought has been acutely attentive to the best number of

guns for effective common action, and has tended rather to the

small battery theory. My two companies were playing with the

idea that the ideal battery was a battery of one big gun, with

its own aeroplane and kite balloon marking for it.

The British seem to be associated with the adventurous self-

reliance needed in the air. The British aeroplanes do not simply

fight the Germans out of the sky; they also make themselves an

abominable nuisance by bombing the enemy trenches. For every

German bomb that is dropped by aeroplane on or behind the British

lines, about twenty go down on the heads of the Germans. British

air bombs upon guns, stores and communications do some of the

work that the French effect by their systematic demolition fire.

And the British aviator has discovered and is rapidly developing

an altogether fresh branch of air activity in the machine-gun

attack at a very low altitude. Originally I believe this was

tried in western Egypt, but now it is being increasingly used

upon the British front in France. An aeroplane which comes down

suddenly, travelling very rapidly, to a few hundred feet, is

quite hard to hit, even if it is not squirting bullets from a

machine gun as it advances. Against infantry in the open this

sort of thing is extremely demoralising. It is a method of

attack still in its infancy, but there are great possibilities

for it in the future, when the bending and cracking German line

gives, as ultimately it must give if this offensive does not

relax. If the Allies persist in their pressure upon the western

front, if there is no relaxation in the supply of munitions from

Britain and no lapse into tactical stupidity, a German retreat

eastward is inevitable.

Now a cavalry pursuit alone may easily come upon disaster,

cavalry can be so easily held up by wire and a few machine guns.

I think the Germans have reckoned on that and on automobiles,

probably only the decay of their /morale/ prevents their

opening their lines now on the chance of the British attempting

some such folly as a big cavalry advance, but I do not think the

Germans have reckoned on the use of machine guns in aeroplanes,

supported by and supporting cavalry or automobiles. At the

present time I should imagine there is no more perplexing

consideration amidst the many perplexities of the German military

intelligence than the new complexion put upon pursuit by these

low level air developments. It may mean that in all sorts of

positions where they had counted confidently on getting away,

they may not be able to get away--from the face of a scientific

advance properly commanding and using modern material in a

dexterous and intelligent manner.

III. THE WAR LANDSCAPE

I saw rather more of the British than of the French aviators

because of the vileness of the weather when I visited the latter.

It is quite impossible for me to institute comparisons between

these two services. I should think that the British organisation

I saw would be hard to beat, and that none but the French could

hope to beat it. On the Western front the aviation has been

screwed up to a very much higher level than on the Italian line.

In Italy it has not become, as it has in France, the decisive

factor. The war on the Carso front in Italy--I say nothing of

the mountain warfare, which is a thing in itself--is in fact

still in the stage that I have called B. It is good warfare well

waged, but not such an intensity of warfare. It has not, as one

says of pianos and voices, the same compass.

This is true in spite of the fact that the Italians along of all

the western powers have adopted a type of aeroplane larger and

much more powerful than anything except the big Russian machines.

They are not at all suitable for any present purpose upon the

Italian front, but at a later stage, when the German is retiring

and Archibald no longer searches the air, they would be

invaluable on the western front because of their enormous bomb or

machine gun carrying capacity. "But sufficient for the day is

the swat thereof," as the British public schoolboy says, and no

doubt we shall get them when we have sufficiently felt the need

for them. The big Caproni machines which the Italians possess

are of 300 h.p. and will presently be of 500h.p. One gets up a

gangway into them was one gets into a yacht; they wave a main

deck, a forward machine gun deck and an aft machine gun; one may

walk about in them; in addition to guns and men they carry a very

considerable weight of bombs beneath. They cannot of course

beget up with the speed nor soar to the height of our smaller

aeroplanes; it is as carriers in raids behind a force of fighting

machines that they should find their use.

The British establishment I visited was a very refreshing and

reassuring piece of practical organisation. The air force of

Great Britain has had the good fortune to develop with

considerable freedom from old army tradition; many of its

officers are ex-civil engineers and so forth; Headquarters is a

little shy of technical direction; and all this in a service that

is still necessarily experimental and plastic is to the good.

There is little doubt that, given a release from prejudice, bad

associations and the equestrian tradition, British technical

intelligence and energy can do just as well as the French. Our

problem with our army is not to create intelligence, there is an

abundance of it, but to release it from a dreary social and

official pressure. The air service ransacks the army for men

with technical training and sees that it gets them, there is a

real keenness upon the work, and the men in these great mobile

hangars talk shop readily and clearly.

I have already mentioned and the newspapers have told abundantly

of the pluck, daring, and admirable work of our aviators; what is

still untellable in any detail is the energy and ability of the

constructive and repairing branch upon whose efficiency their

feats depend. Perhaps the most interesting thing I saw in

connection with the air work was the hospital for damaged

machines and the dump to which those hopelessly injured are

taken, in order that they may be disarticulated and all that is

sound in them used for reconstruction. How excellently this work

is being done may be judged from the fact that our offensive in

July started with a certain number of aeroplanes, a number that

would have seemed fantastic in a story a year before the war

began. These aeroplanes were in constant action; they fought,

they were shot down, they had their share of accidents. Not only

did the repair department make good every loss, but after three

weeks of the offensive the army was fighting with fifty more

machines than at the outset. One goes through a vast

Rembrandtesque shed opening upon a great sunny field, in whose

cool shadows rest a number of interesting patients; captured and

slightly damaged German machines, machines of our own with scars

of battle upon them, one or two cases of bad landing. The star

case came over from Peronne. It had come in two days ago.

I examined this machine and I will tell the state it was in, but

I perceive that what I have to tell will read not like a sober

statement of truth but like strained and silly lying. The

machine had had a direct hit from an Archibald shell. The

propeller had been clean blown away; so had the machine gun and

all its fittings. The engines had been stripped naked and a good

deal bent about. The timber stay over the aviator had been

broken, so that it is marvellous the wings of the machine did not

just up at once like the wings of a butterfly. The solitary

aviator had been wounded in the face. He had then come down in a

long glide into the British lines, and made a tolerable

landing....

One consequence of the growing importance of the aeroplane in

warfare is the development of a new military art, the art of

camouflage. Camouflage is humbugging disguise, it is making

things--and especially in this connection, military things--seem

not what they are, but something peaceful and rural, something

harmless and quite uninteresting to aeroplane observers. It is

the art of making big guns look like haystacks and tents like

level patches of field.

Also it includes the art of making attractive models of guns,

camps, trenches and the like that are not bona-fide guns, camps,

or trenches at all, so that the aeroplane bomb-dropper and the

aeroplane observer may waste his time and energies and the enemy

gunfire be misdirected. In Italy I saw dummy guns so made as to

deceive the very elect at a distance of a few thousand feet. The

camouflage of concealment aims either at invisibility or

imitation; I have seen a supply train look like a row of

cottages, its smoke-stack a chimney, with the tops of sham

palings running along the back of the engine and creepers painted

up its sides. But that was a flight of the imagination; the

commonest camouflage is merely to conceal. Trees are brought up

and planted near the object to be hidden, it is painted in the

same tones as its background, it is covered with an awning

painted to look like grass or earth. I suppose it is only a

matter of development before a dummy cow or so is put up to chew

the cud on the awning.

But camouflage or no camouflage, the bulk of both the French and

British forces in the new won ground of the great offensive lay

necessarily in the open. Only the big guns and the advanced Red

Cross stations had got into pits and subterranean hiding places.

The advance has been too rapid and continuous for the armies to

make much of a toilette as they halted, and the destruction and

the desolation of the country won afforded few facilities for

easy concealment. Tents, transport, munitions, these all

indicated an army on the march--at the rate of half a mile in a

week or so, to Germany. If the wet and mud of November and

December have for a time delayed that advance, the force behind

has but accumulated for the resumption of the thrust.

A journey up from the base to the front trenches shows an

interesting series of phases. One leaves Amiens, in which the

normal life threads its way through crowds of resting men in

khaki and horizon blue, in which staff officers in automobiles

whisk hither and thither, in which there are nurses and even a

few inexplicable ladies in worldly costume, in which restaurants

and cafes are congested and busy, through which there is a

perpetual coming and going of processions of heavy vans to the

railway sidings. One dodges past a monstrous blue-black gun

going up to the British front behind two resolute traction

engines--the three sun-blistered young men in the cart that

trails behind lounge in attitudes of haughty pride that would

shame the ceiling gods of Hampton Court. One passes through

arcades of waiting motor vans, through arcades of waiting motor

vans, through suburbs still more intensely khaki or horizon blue,

and so out upon the great straight poplar-edged road--to the

front. Sometimes one laces through spates of heavy traffic,

sometimes the dusty road is clear ahead, now we pass a vast

aviation camp, now a park of waiting field guns, now an

encampment of cavalry. One turns aside, and abruptly one is in

France--France as one knew it before the war, on a shady

secondary road, past a delightful chateau behind its iron gates,

past a beautiful church, and then suddenly we are in a village

street full of stately Indian soldiers.

It betrays no military secret to say that commonly the rare

tourist to the British offensive passes through Albert, with its

great modern red cathedral smashed to pieces and the great gilt

Madonna and Child that once surmounted the tower now, as everyone

knows, hanging out horizontally in an attitude that irresistibly

suggests an imminent dive upon the passing traveller. One looks

right up under it.

Presently we begin to see German prisoners. The whole lot look

entirely contented, and are guarded by perhaps a couple of men in

khaki. These German prisoners do not attempt to escape, they

have not the slightest desire for any more fighting, they have

done their bit, they say, honour is satisfied; they give

remarkably little trouble. A little way further on perhaps we

pass their cage, a double barbed-wire enclosure with a few tents

and huts within.

A string of covered waggons passes by. I turn and see a number

of men sitting inside and looking almost as cheerful as a

beanfeast in Epping Forest. the make facetious gestures. They

have a subdued sing-song going on. But one of them looks a

little sick, and then I notice not very obtrusive bandages.

"Sitting-up cases," my guide explains.

These are part of the casualties of last night's fight.

The fields on either side are now more evidently in the war zone.

The array of carts, the patches of tents, the coming and going of

men increases. But here are three women harvesting, and

presently in a cornfield are German prisoners working under one

old Frenchman. Then the fields become trampled again. Here is a

village, not so very much knocked about, and passing through it

we go slowly beside a long column of men going up to the front.

We scan their collars for signs of some familiar regiment. These

are new men going up for the first time; there is a sort of

solemn elation in many of their faces.

The men coming down are usually smothered in mud or dust, and

unless there has been a fight they look pretty well done up.

They stoop under their equipment, and some of the youngsters

drag. One pleasant thing about this coming down is the welcome

of the regimental band, which is usually at work as soon as the

men turn off from the high road. I hear several bands on the

British front; they do much to enhance the general cheerfulness.

On one of these days of my tour I had the pleasure of seeing the

---th Blankshires coming down after a fight. As we drew near I

saw that they combined an extreme muddiness with an unusual

elasticity. They all seemed to be looking us in the face instead

of being too fagged to bother. Then I noticed a nice grey helmet

dangling from one youngster's bayonet, in fact his eye directed

me to it. A man behind him had a black German helmet of the type

best known in English illustrations; then two more grey appeared.

The catch of helmets was indeed quite considerable. Then I

perceived on the road bank above and marching parallel with this

column, a double file of still muddier Germans. Either they wore

caps or went bare-headed. There were no helmets among them. We

do not rob our prisoners but--a helmet is a weapon. Anyhow, it

is an irresistible souvenir.

Now and then one sees afar off an ammunition dump, many hundreds

of stacks of shells--without their detonators as yet--being

unloaded from railway trucks, transferred from the broad gauge to

the narrow gauge line, or loaded onto motor trolleys. Now and

then one crosses a railway line. The railway lines run

everywhere behind the British front, the construction follows the

advance day by day. They go up as fast as the guns. One's guide

remarks as the car bumps over the level crossing, "That is one of

Haig's railways." It is an aspect of the Commander-in-Chief that

has much impressed and pleased the men. And at last we begin to

enter the region of the former Allied trenches, we pass the old

German front line, we pass ruined houses, ruined fields, and

thick patches of clustering wooden crosses and boards where the

dead of the opening assaults lie. There are no more reapers now,

there is no more green upon the fields, there is no green

anywhere, scarcely a tree survives by the roadside, but only

overthrown trunks and splintered stumps; the fields are

wildernesses of shell craters and coarse weeds, the very woods

are collections of blasted stems and stripped branches. This

absolutely ravaged and ruined battlefield country extends now

along the front of the Somme offensive for a depth of many miles;

across it the French and British camps and batteries creep

forward, the stores, the dumps, the railways creep forward, in

their untiring, victorious thrust against the German lines.

Overhead hum and roar the aeroplanes, away towards the enemy the

humped, blue sausage-shaped kite balloons brood thoughtfully, and

from this point and that, guns, curiously invisible until they

speak, flash suddenly and strike their one short hammer-blow of

sound.

Then one sees an enemy shell drop among the little patch of trees

on the crest to the right, and kick up a great red-black mass of

smoke and dust. We see it, and then we hear the whine of its

arrival and at last the bang. The Germans are blind now, they

have lost the air, they are firing by guesswork and their

knowledge of the abandoned territory.

"They think they have got divisional headquarters there," someone

remarks.... "They haven't. But they keep on."

In this zone where shells burst the wise automobile stops and

tucks itself away as inconspicuously as possible close up to a

heap of ruins. There is very little traffic on the road now

except for a van or so that hurries up, unloads, and gets back as

soon as possible. Mules and men are taking the stuff the rest of

the journey. We are in a flattened village, all undermined by

dug-outs that were in the original German second line. We report

ourselves to a young troglodyte in one of these, and are given a

guide, and so set out on the last part of the journey to the

ultimate point, across the land of shell craters and barbed wire

litter and old and new trenches. We have all put on British

steel helmets, hard but heavy and inelegant head coverings. I

can write little that is printable about these aesthetic crimes.

The French and German helmets are noble and beautiful things.

These lumpish /pans./..

They ought to be called by the name of the man who designed

them.

Presently we are advised to get into a communication trench. It

is not a very attractive communication trench, and we stick to

our track across the open. Three or four shells shiver overhead,

but we decide they are British shells, going out. We reach a

supporting trench in which men are waiting in a state of nearly

insupportable boredom for the midday stew, the one event of

interest in a day-long vigil. Here we are told imperatively to

come right in at once, and we do.

All communication trenches are tortuous and practically endless.

On an offensive front they have vertical sides of unsupported

earth and occasional soakaways for rain, covered by wooden

gratings, and they go on and on and on. At rare intervals they

branch, and a notice board says "To Regent Street," or "To Oxford

Street," or some such lie. It is all just trench. For a time

you talk, but talking in single file soon palls. You cease to

talk, and trudge. A great number of telephone wires come into

the trench and cross and recross it. You cannot keep clear of

them. Your helmet pings against them and they try to remove it.

Sometimes you have to stop and crawl under wires. Then you

wonder what the trench is like in really wet weather. You hear a

shell burst at no great distance. You pass two pages of /The

Strand Magazine./ Perhaps thirty yards on you pass a

cigarette end. After these sensational incidents the trench

quiets down again and continues to wind endlessly--just a sandy,

extremely narrow vertical walled trench. A giant crack.

At last you reach the front line trench. On an offensive sector

it has none of the architectural interest of first line trenches

at such places as Soissons or Arras. It was made a week or so

ago by joining up shell craters, and if all goes well we move

into the German trench along by the line of scraggy trees, at

which we peep discreetly, to-morrow night. We can peep

discreetly because just at present our guns are putting shrapnel

over the enemy at the rate of about three shells a minute, the

puffs follow each other up and down the line, and no Germans are

staring out to see us.

The Germans "strafed" this trench overnight, and the men are

tired and sleepy. Our guns away behind us are doing their best

now to give them a rest by strafing the Germans. One or two men

are in each forward sap keeping a look out; the rest sleep, a

motionless sleep, in the earthy shelter pits that have been

scooped out. One officer sits by a telephone under an earth-

covered tarpaulin, and a weary man is doing the toilet of a

machine gun. We go on to a shallow trench in which we must

stoop, and which has been badly knocked about.... Here we have

to stop. The road to Berlin is not opened up beyond this point.

My companion on this excursion is a man I have admired for years

and never met until I came out to see the war, a fellow writer.

He is a journalist let loose. Two-thirds of the junior British

officers I met on this journey were really not "army men" at all.

One finds that the apparent subaltern is really a musician, or a

musical critic, or an Egyptologist, or a solicitor, or a cloth

manufacturer, or a writer. At the outbreak of the war my guide

dyed his hair to conceal its tell-tale silver, and having been

laughed to scorn by the ordinary recruiting people, enlisted in

the sportsmen's battalion. He was wounded, and then the

authorities discovered that he was likely to be of more use with

a commission and drew him, in spite of considerable resistance,

out of the firing line. To which he always returns whenever he

can get a visitor to take with him as an excuse. He now stood

up, fairly high and clear, explaining casually that the Germans

were no longer firing, and showed me the points of interest.

I had come right up to No Man's Land at last. It was under my

chin. The skyline, the last skyline before the British could

look down on Bapaume, showed a mangy wood and a ruined village,

crouching under repeated gobbings of British shrapnel. "They've

got a battery just there, and we're making it uncomfortable." No

Man's Land itself is a weedy space broken up by shell craters,

with very little barbed wire in front of us and very little in

front of the Germans. "They've got snipers in most of the

craters, and you see them at twilight hopping about from one to

the other." We have very little wire because we don't mean to

stay for very long in this trench, but the Germans have very

little wire because they have not been able to get it up yet.

They never will get it up now....

I had been led to believe that No Man's Land was littered with

the unburied dead, but I saw nothing of the sort at this place.

There had been no German counter attack since our men came up

here. But at one point as we went along the trench there was a

dull stench. "Germans, I think," said my guide, though I did not

see how he could tell.

He looked at his watch and remarked reluctantly, "If you start at

once, you may just do it."

I wanted to catch the Boulogne boat. It was then just past one

in the afternoon. We met the stew as we returned along the

communication trench, and it smelt very good indeed.... We

hurried across the great spaces of rusty desolation upon which

every now and again a German shell was bursting....

That night I was in my flat in London. I had finished reading

the accumulated letters of some weeks, and I was just going

comfortably to bed.

IV. NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES

Such are the landscapes and method of modern war. It is more

difficult in its nature from war as it was waged in the

nineteenth century than that was from the nature of the phalanx

or the legion. The nucleus fact--when I talked to General Joffre

he was very insistent upon this point--is still as ever the

ordinary fighting man, but all the accessories and conditions of

his personal encounter with the fighting man of the other side

have been revolutionised in a quarter of a century. The fighting

together in a close disciplined order, shoulder to shoulder,

which has held good for thousands of years as the best and most

successful fighting, has been destroyed; the idea of

/breaking/ infantry formation as the chief offensive

operation has disappeared, the cavalry charge and the cavalry

pursuit are as obsolete as the cross-bow. The modern fighting

man is as individualised as a half back or a centre forward in a

football team. Personal fighting has become "scrapping" again,

an individual adventure with knife, club, bomb, revolver or

bayonet. In this war we are working out things instead of

thinking them out, and these enormous changes are still but

imperfectly apprehended. The trained and specialised military

man probably apprehends them as feebly as anyone.

This is a thing that I want to state as emphatically as possible.

It is the pith of the lesson I have learnt at the front. The

whole method of war has been so altered in the past five and

twenty years as to make it a new and different process

altogether. Much the larger part of this alteration has only

become effective in the last two years. Everyone is a beginner

at this new game; everyone is experimenting and learning.

The idea has been put admirably by /Punch./ That excellent

picture of the old-fashioned sergeant who complains to his

officer of the new recruit; "'E's all right in the trenches, Sir;

'e's all right at a scrap; but 'e won't never make a soldier," is

the quintessence of everything I am saying here. And were there

not the very gravest doubts about General Smuts in British

military circles because he had "had no military training"? A

Canadian expressed the new view very neatly on being asked, in

consequence of a deficient salute, whether he wanted to be a

soldier, by saying, "Not I! I want to be a fighter!"

The professional officer of the old dispensation was a man

specialised in relation to one of the established "arms." He was

an infantryman, a cavalryman, a gunner or an engineer. It will

be interesting to trace the changes that have happened to all

these arms.

Before this war began speculative writers had argued that

infantry drill in close formation had now no fighting value

whatever, that it was no doubt extremely necessary for the

handling, packing, forwarding and distribution of men, but that

the ideal infantry fighter was now a highly individualised and

self-reliant man put into a pit with a machine gun, and supported

by a string of other men bringing him up supplies and ready to

assist him in any forward rush that might be necessary.

The opening phases of the war seemed to contradict this. It did

not at first suit the German game to fight on this most modern

theory, and isolated individual action is uncongenial to the

ordinary German temperament and opposed to the organised social

tendencies of German life. To this day the Germans attack only

in close order; they are unable to produce a real modern infantry

for aggressive purposes, and it is a matter of astonishment to

military minds on the English side that our hastily trained new

armies should turn out to be just as good at the new fighting as

the most "seasoned troops." But there is no reason whatever why

they should not be. "Leading," in the sense of going ahead of

the men and making them move about mechanically at the word of

command, has ceased. On the British side our magnificent new

subalterns and our equally magnificent new non-commissioned

officers play the part of captains of football teams; they talk

their men individually into an understanding of the job before

them; they criticise style and performance. On the French side

things have gone even farther. Every man in certain attacks has

been given a large scale map of the ground over which he has to

go, and has had his own individual job clearly marked and

explained to him. All the Allied infantrymen tend to become

specialised, as bombers, as machine-gun men, and so on. The

unspecialised common soldier, the infantryman who has stood and

marched and moved in ranks and ranks, the "serried lines of men,"

who are the main substance of every battle story for the last

three thousand years, are as obsolete as the dodo. The rifle and

bayonet very probably are becoming obsolete too. Knives and

clubs and revolvers serve better in the trenches. The krees and

the Roman sword would be as useful. The fine flourish of the

bayonet is only possible in the rare infrequent open. Even the

Zulu assegai would serve as well.

The two operations of the infantry attack now are the rush and

the "scrap." These come after the artillery preparation. Against

the rush, the machine gun is pitted. The machine gun becomes

lighter and more and more controllable by one man; as it does so

the days of the rifle draw to a close. Against the machine gun

we are now directing the "Tank," which goes ahead and puts out

the machine gun as soon as it begins to sting the infantry rush.

We are also using the swooping aeroplane with a machine gun.

Both these devices are of British origin, and they promise very

well.

After the rush and the scrap comes the organisation of the

captured trench. "Digging in" completes the cycle of modern

infantry fighting. You may consider this the first or the last

phase of an infantry operation. It is probably at present the

least worked-out part of the entire cycle. Here lies the sole

German superiority; they bunch and crowd in the rush, they are

inferior at the scrap, but they do dig like moles. The weakness

of the British is their failure to settle down. they like the

rush and the scrap; they press on too far, they get outflanked

and lost "in the blue"; they are not naturally clever at the

excavating part of the work, and they are not as yet well trained

in making dug-outs and shelter-pits rapidly and intelligently.

they display most of the faults that were supposed to be most

distinctively French before this war came to revolutionise all

our conceptions of French character.

Now the operations of this modern infantry, which unlike any

preceding infantry in the history of war does not fight in

disciplined formations but as highly individualised specialists,

are determined almost completely by the artillery preparation.

Artillery is now the most essential instrument of war. You may

still get along with rather bad infantry; you may still hold out

even after the loss of the aerial ascendancy, but so soon as your

guns fail you approach defeat. The backbone process of the whole

art of war is the manufacture in overwhelming quantities, the

carriage and delivery of shell upon the vulnerable points of the

enemy's positions. That is, so to speak, the essential blow.

Even the infantryman is now hardly more than the residuary

legatee after the guns have taken their toll.

I have now followed nearly every phase in the life history of a

shell from the moment when it is a segment of steel bar just cut

off, to the moment when it is no more than a few dispersed and

rusting rags and fragments of steel--pressed upon the stray

visitor to the battlefield as souvenirs. All good factories are

intensely interesting places to visit, but a good munition

factory is romantically satisfactory. It is as nearly free from

the antagonism of employer and employed as any factory can be.

The busy sheds I visited near Paris struck me as being the most

living and active things in the entire war machine. Everywhere

else I saw fitful activity, or men waiting. I have seen more men

sitting about and standing about, more bored inactivity, during

my tour than I have ever seen before in my life. Even the front

line trenches seem to slumber; the Angel of Death drowses over

them, and moves in his sleep to crush out men's lives. The

gunfire has an indolent intermittence. But the munition

factories grind on night and day, grinding against the factories

in Central Europe, grinding out the slow and costly and necessary

victory that should end aggressive warfare in the world for ever.

It would be very interesting if one could arrange a meeting

between any typical Allied munition maker on the one hand, and

the Kaiser and Hindenburg, those two dominant effigies of the

German nationalists' dream of "world might." Or failing that, Mr.

Dyson might draw the encounter. You imagine these two heroic

figures got up for the interview, very magnificent in shining

helms and flowing cloaks, decorations, splendid swords, spurs.

"Here," one would say, "is the power that has held you. You were

bolstered up very loyally by the Krupp firm and so forth, you

piled up shell, guns, war material, you hoped to snatch your

victory before the industrialisation and invention of the world

could turn upon you. But you failed. You were not rapid enough.

The battle of the Marne was your misfortune. And Ypres. You

lost some chances at Ypres. Two can play at destructive

industrialism, and now we out-gun you. We are piling up

munitions now faster than you. The essentials of this Game of

the War Lord are idiotically simple, but it was not of our

choosing. It is now merely a question of months before you make

your inevitable admission. This is no war to any great

commander's glory. This gentleman in the bowler hat is the

victor, Sire; not you. Assisted, Sire, by these disrespectful-

looking factory girls in overalls."

For example, there is M. Citroen. Before the war I understand he

made automobiles; after the war he wants to turn to and make

automobiles again. For the duration of the war he makes shell.

He has been temporarily diverted from constructive to destructive

industrialism. He did me the honours of his factory. He is a

compact, active man in dark clothes and a bowler hat, with a

pencil and notebook conveniently at hand. He talked to me in

carefully easy French, and watched my face with an intelligent

eye through his pince-nez for the signs of comprehension. Then

he went on to the next point.

He took me through every stage of his process. In his office he

showed me the general story. Here were photographs of certain

vacant fields and old sheds--"this place"--he indicated the

altered prospect from the window--"at the outbreak of the war."

He showed me a plan of the first undertaking. "Now we have

rather over nine thousand workpeople."

He showed me a little row of specimens. "These we make for

Italy. These go to Russia. These are the Rumanian pattern."

Thence to the first stage, the chopping up of the iron bars, the

furnace, the punching out of the first shape of the shell; all

this is men's work. I had seen this sort of thing before in

peace ironworks, but I saw it again with the same astonishment,

the absolute precision of movement on the part of the half-naked

sweating men, the calculated efficiency of each worker, the

apparent heedlessness, the real certitude, with which the blazing

hot cylinder is put here, dropped there, rolls to its next

appointed spot, is chopped up and handed on, the swift passage to

the cooling crude, pinkish-purple shell shape. Down a long line

one sees in perspective a practical symmetry, of furnace and

machine group and the shells marching on from this first series

of phases to undergo the long succession of operations, machine

after machine, across the great width of the shed in which eighty

per cent of the workers are women. There is a thick dust of

sounds in the air, a rumble of shafting, sudden thuddings,

clankings, and M. Citroen has to raise his voice. He points out

where he has made little changes in procedures, cut out some

wasteful movement.... He has an idea and makes a note in the

ever-ready notebook.

There is a beauty about all these women, there is extraordinary

grace in their finely adjusted movements. I have come from an

after-lunch coffee upon the boulevards and from watching the ugly

fashion of our time; it is a relief to be reminded that most

women can after all be beautiful--if only they would not "dress."

these women wear simple overalls and caps. In the cap is a

rosette. Each shed has its own colour of rosette.

"There is much esprit de corps here," says M. Citroen.

"And also," he adds, showing obverse as well as reverse of the

world's problem of employment and discipline, "we can see at once

if a woman is not in her proper shed."

Across the great sheds under the shafting--how fine it must look

at night!--the shells march, are shaped, cut, fitted with copper

bands, calibrated, polished, varnished....

Then we go on to another system of machines in which lead is

reduced to plastic ribbons and cut into shrapnel bullets as the

sweetstuff makers pull out and cut up sweetstuff. And thence

into a warren of hot underground passages in which run the power

cables. There is not a cable in the place that is not

immediately accessible to the electricians. We visit the dynamos

and a vast organisation of switchboards....

These things are more familiar to M. Citroen than they are to me.

He wants me to understand, but he does not realise that I would

like a little leisure to wonder. What is interesting him just

now, because it is the newest thing, is his method of paying his

workers. He lifts a hand gravely: "I said, what we must do is

abolish altogether the counting of change."

At a certain hour, he explained, came pay-time. The people had

done; it was to his interest and their that they should get out

of the works as quickly as possible and rest and amuse

themselves. He watched them standing in queues at the wickets

while inside someone counted; so many francs, so many centimes.

It bored him to see this useless, tiresome waiting. It is

abolished. Now at the end of each week the worker goes to a

window under the initial of his name, and is handed a card on

which these items have been entered:

Balance from last week.

So many hours at so much.

Premiums.

The total is so many francs, so many centimes. This is divided

into the nearest round number, 100, 120, 80 francs as the case

may be, and a balance of the odd francs and centimes. The latter

is carried forward to the next week's account. At the bottom of

the card is a tear-off coupon with a stamp, coloured to indicate

the round sum, green, let us say, for 100, blue for 130 francs.

This is taken to a wicket marked 100 or 130 as the case may be,

and there stands a cashier with his money in piles of 100 or 130

francs counted ready to hand; he sweeps in the coupon, sweeps out

the cash. "/Next!/"

I became interested in the worker's side of this organisation. I

insist on seeing the entrances, the clothes-changing places, the

lavatories, and so forth of the organisation. As we go about we

pass a string of electric trolleys steered by important-looking

girls, and loaded with shell, finished as far as these works are

concerned and on their way to the railway siding. We visit the

hospital, for these works demand a medical staff. It is not only

that men and women faint or fall ill, but there are accidents,

burns, crushings, and the like. The war casualties begin already

here, and they fall chiefly among the women. I saw a wounded

woman with a bandaged face sitting very quietly in the corner.

The women here face danger, perhaps not quite such obvious danger

as the women who, at the next stage in the shell's career, make

and pack the explosives in their silk casing, but quite

considerable risk. And they work with a real enthusiasm. They

know they are fighting the Bloches as well as any men. Certain

of them wear Russian decorations. The women of this particular

factory have been thanked by the Tsar, and a number of

decorations were sent by him for distribution among them.

The shell factory and the explosives shed stand level with the

drill yard as the real first stage in one of the two essential

/punches/ in modern war. When one meets the shell again it

is being unloaded from the railway truck into an ammunition dump.

And here the work of control is much more the work of a good

traffic manager than of the old-fashioned soldier.

The dump I best remember I visited on a wet and windy day. Over

a great space of ground the sidings of the rail-head spread, the

normal gauge rail-head spread out like a fan and interdigitated

with the narrow gauge lines that go up practically to the guns.

And also at the sides camions were loading, and an officer from

the Midi in charge of one of these was being dramatically

indignant at five minutes' delay. Between these two sets of

lines, shells were piled of all sizes, I should think some

hundreds of thousands of shells altogether, wet and shining in

the rain. French reservists, soldiers from Madagascar, and some

Senegalese were busy at different points loading and unloading

the precious freights. A little way from me were despondent-

looking German prisoners handling timber. All this dump was no

more than an eddy as it were in the path of the shell from its

birth from the steel bars near Paris to the accomplishment of its

destiny in the destruction or capture of more Germans.

And next the visitor meets the shell coming up upon a little

trolley to the gun. He sees the gunners, as drilled and precise

as the men he saw at the forges, swing out the breech block and

run the shell, which has met and combined with its detonators and

various other industrial products since it left the main dump,

into the gun. The breech closes like a safe door, and hides the

shell from the visitor. It is "good-bye." He receives

exaggerated warning of the danger to his ears, stuffs his fingers

into them, and opens his mouth as instructed, hears a loud but by

no means deafening report, and sees a spit of flame near the

breech. Regulations of a severe character prevent his watching

from an aeroplane the delivery of the goods upon the customers

opposite.

I have already described the method of locating enemy guns and so

forth by photography. Many of the men at this work are like

dentists rather than soldiers; they are busy in carefully lit

rooms, they wear white overalls, they have clean hands and

laboratory manners. The only really romantic figure in the whole

of this process, the only figure that has anything of the old

soldierly swagger about him still, is the aviator. And, as one

friend remarked to me when I visited the work of the British

flying corps, "The real essential strength of this arm is the

organisation of its repairs. Here is one of the repair vans

through which our machine guns go. It is a motor workshop on

wheels. But at any time all this park, everything, can pack up

and move forward like Barnum and Bailey's Circus. The machine

guns come through this shop in rotation; they go out again,

cleaned, repaired, made new again. Since we got all that working

we have heard nothing of a machine gun jamming in any air fight

at all."...

The rest of the career of the shell after it has left the gun one

must imagine chiefly from the incoming shell from the enemy. You

see suddenly a flying up of earth and stones and anything else

that is movable in the neighbourhood of the shell-burst, the

instantaneous unfolding of a dark cloud of dust and reddish

smoke, which comes very quickly to a certain size and then begins

slowly to fray out and blow away. Then, after seeing the cloud

of the burst you hear the hiss of the shell's approach, and

finally you are hit by the sound of the explosion. This is the

climax and end of the life history of any shell that is not a dud

shell. Afterwards the battered fuse may serve as some

journalist's paper-weight. The rest is scrap iron.

Such is, so to speak, the primary process of modern warfare. I

will not draw the obvious pacifist moral of the intense folly of

human concentration upon such a process. The Germans willed it.

We Allies have but obeyed the German will for warfare because we

could not do otherwise, we have taken up this simple game of

shell delivery, and we are teaching them that we can play it

better, in the hope that so we and the world may be freed from

the German will-to-power and all its humiliating and disgusting

consequences henceforth for ever. Europe now is no more than a

household engaged in holding up and if possible overpowering a

monomaniac member.

Now the whole of this process of the making and delivery of a

shell, which is the main process of modern warfare, is one that

can be far better conducted by a man accustomed to industrial

organisation or transit work than by the old type of soldier.

This is a thing that cannot be too plainly stated or too often

repeated. Germany nearly won this way because of her

tremendously modern industrial resources; but she blundered into

it and she is losing it because she has too many men in military

uniform and because their tradition and interests were to

powerful with her. All the state and glories of soldiering, the

bright uniforms, the feathers and spurs, the flags, the march-

past, the disciplined massed advance, the charge; all these are

as needless and obsolete now in war as the masks and shields of

an old-time Chinese brave. Liberal-minded people talk of the

coming dangers of militarism in the face of events that prove

conclusively that professional militarism is already as dead as

Julius Caesar. What is coming is not so much the conversion

of men into soldiers as the socialisation of the economic

organisation of the country with a view to both national and

international necessities. We do not want to turn a chemist or a

photographer into a little figure like a lead soldier, moving

mechanically at the word of command, but we do want to make his

chemistry or photography swiftly available if the national

organisation is called upon to fight.

We have discovered that the modern economic organisation is in

itself a fighting machine. It is so much so that it is capable

of taking on and defeating quite easily any merely warrior people

that is so rash as to pit itself against it. Within the last

sixteen years methods of fighting have been elaborated that have

made war an absolutely hopeless adventure for any barbaric or non-

industrialised people. In the rush of larger events few people

have realised the significance of the rapid squashing of the

Senussi in western Egypt, and the collapse of De Wet's rebellion

in South Africa. Both these struggles would have been long,

tedious and uncertain even in A.D. 1900. This time they have

been, so to speak, child's play.

Occasionally into the writer's study there come to hand drifting

fragments of the American literature upon the question of

"preparedness," and American papers discussing the Mexican

situation. In none of these is there evident any clear

realisation of the fundamental revolution that has occurred in

military methods during the last two years. It looks as if a

Mexican war, for example, was thought of as an affair of rather

imperfectly trained young men with rifles and horses and old-

fashioned things like that. A Mexican war on that level might be

as tedious as the South African war. But if the United States

preferred to go into Mexican affairs with what I may perhaps call

a 1916 autumn outfit instead of the small 1900 outfit she seems

to possess at present, there is no reason why America should not

clear up any and every Mexican guerilla force she wanted to in a

few weeks.

To do that she would need a plant of a few hundred aeroplanes,

for the most part armed with machine guns, and the motor repair

vans and so forth needed to go with the aeroplanes; she would

need a comparatively small army of infantry armed with machine

guns, with motor transport, and a few small land ironclads. Such

a force could locate, overtake, destroy and disperse any possible

force that a country in the present industrial condition of

Mexico could put into the field. No sort of entrenchment or

fortification possible in Mexico could stand against it. It

could go from one end of the country to the other without serious

loss, and hunt down and capture anyone it wished....

The practical political consequence of the present development of

warfare, of the complete revolution in the conditions of warfare

since this century began, is to make war absolutely hopeless for

any peoples not able either to manufacture or procure the very

complicated appliances and munitions now needed for its

prosecution. Countries like Mexico, Bulgaria, Serbia,

Afghanistan or Abyssinia are no more capable of going to war

without the connivance and help of manufacturing states than

horses are capable of flying. And this makes possible such a

complete control of war by the few great states which are at the

necessary level of industrial development as not the most Utopian

of us have hitherto dared to imagine.

Infantrymen with automobile transport, plentiful machine guns,

Tanks and such-like accessories; that is the first Arm in modern

war. The factory hand and all the material of the shell route

from the factory to the gun constitute the second Arm. Thirdly

comes the artillery, the guns and the photographic aeroplanes

working with the guns. Next I suppose we must count sappers and

miners as a fourth Arm of greatly increased importance. The

fifth and last combatant Arm is the modern substitute for

cavalry; and that also is essentially a force of aeroplanes

supported by automobiles. Several of the French leaders with

whom I talked seemed to be convinced that the horse is absolutely

done with in modern warfare. There is nothing, they declared,

that cavalry ever did that cannot now be done better by

aeroplane.

This is something to break the hearts of the Prussian junkers and

of old-fashioned British army people. The hunt across the

English countryside, the preservation of the fox as a sacred

animal, the race meeting, the stimulation of betting in all

classes of the public; all these things depend ultimately upon

the proposition that the "breed of horses" is of vital importance

to the military strength of Great Britain. But if the arguments

of these able French soldiers are sound, the cult of the horse

ceases to be of any more value to England than the elegant

activities of the Toxophilite Society. Moreover, there has been

a colossal buying of horses for the British army, a tremendous

organisation for the purchase and supply of fodder, then

employment of tens of thousands of men as grooms, minders and the

like, who would otherwise have been in the munition factories or

the trenches.

To what possible use can cavalry be put? Can it be used in

attack? Not against trenches; that is better done by infantrymen

following up gunfire. Can it be used against broken infantry in

the open? Not if the enemy has one or two machine guns covering

their retreat. Against expose infantry the swooping aeroplane

with a machine gun is far more deadly and more difficult to hit.

Behind it your infantry can follow to receive surrenders; in most

circumstances they can come up on cycles if it is a case of

getting up quickly across a wide space. Similarly for pursuit

the use of wire and use of the machine gun have abolished the

possibility of a pouring cavalry charge. The swooping aeroplane

does everything that cavalry can do in the way of disorganising

the enemy, and far more than it can do in the way of silencing

machine guns. It can capture guns in retreat much more easily by

bombing traction engines and coming down low and shooting horses

and men. An ideal modern pursuit would be an advance of guns,

automobiles full of infantry, motor cyclists and cyclists, behind

a high screen of observation aeroplanes and a low screen of

bombing and fighting aeroplanes. Cavalry /might/ advance

across fields and so forth, but only as a very accessory part of

the general advance....

And what else is there for the cavalry to do?

It may be argued that horses can go over country that is

impossible for automobiles. That is to ignore altogether what

has been done in this war by such devices as caterpillar wheels.

So far from cavalry being able to negotiate country where

machines would stick and fail, mechanism can now ride over places

where any horse would flounder.

I submit these considerations to the horse-lover. They are not

my original observations; they have been put to me and they have

convinced me. Except perhaps as a parent of transport mules I

see no further part henceforth for the horse to play in war.

The form and texture of the coming warfare--if there is still

warfare to come--are not yet to be seen in their completeness

upon the modern battlefield. One swallow does not make a summer,

nor a handful of aeroplanes, a "Tank" or so, a few acres of shell

craters, and a village here and there, pounded out of

recognition, do more than foreshadow the spectacle of modernised

war on land. War by these developments has become the monopoly

of the five great industrial powers; it is their alternative to

end or evolve it, and if they continue to disagree, then it must

needs become a spectacle of majestic horror such as no man can

yet conceive. It has been wise of Mr. Pennell therefore, who has

recently been drawing his impressions of the war upon stone, to

make his pictures not upon the battlefield, but among the huge

industrial apparatus that is thrusting behind and thrusting up

through the war of the gentlemen in spurs. He gives us the

splendours and immensities of forge and gun pit, furnace and mine

shaft. He shows you how great they are and how terrible. Among

them go the little figures of men, robbed of all dominance,

robbed of all individual quality. He leaves it for you to draw

the obvious conclusion that presently, if we cannot contrive to

put an end to war, blacknessess like these, enormities and flares

and towering threats, will follow in the track of the Tanks and

come trampling over the bickering confusion of mankind.

There is something very striking in these insignificant and

incidental men that Mr. Pennell shows us. Nowhere does a man

dominate in all these wonderful pictures. You may argue perhaps

that that is untrue to the essential realities; all this array of

machine and workshop, all this marshalled power and purpose, has

been the creation of inventor and business organiser. But are we

not a little too free with that word "/creation/"? Falstaff

was a "creation" perhaps, or the Sistine sibyls; there we have

indubitably an end conceived and sought and achieved; but did

these inventors and business organisers do more than heed certain

unavoidable imperatives? Seeking coal they were obliged to mine

in a certain way; seeking steel they had to do this and this and

not that and that; seeking profit they had to obey the imperative

of the economy. So little did they plan their ends that most of

these manufacturers speak with a kind of astonishment of the

deadly use to which their works are put. They find themselves

making the new war as a man might wake out of some drugged

condition to find himself strangling his mother.

So that Mr. Pennell's sketchy and transient human figures seem

altogether right to me. He sees these forges, workshops, cranes

and the like, as inhuman and as wonderful as cliffs or great

caves or icebergs or the stars. They are a new aspect of the

logic of physical necessity that made all these older things, and

he seizes upon the majesty and beauty of their dimensions with an

entire impartiality. And they are as impartial. Through all

these lithographs runs one present motif, the motif of the

supreme effort of western civilisation to save itself and the

world from the dominance of the reactionary German Imperialism of

modern science. The pictures are arranged to shape out the life

of a shell, from the mine to the great gun; nothing remains of

their history to show except the ammunition dump, the gun in

action and the shell-burst. Upon this theme all these great

appearances are strung to-day. But to-morrow they may be strung

upon some other and nobler purpose. These gigantic beings of

which the engineer is the master and slave, are neither

benevolent nor malignant. To-day they produce destruction, they

are the slaves of the spur; to-morrow we hope they will bridge

and carry and house and help again.

For that peace we struggle against the dull inflexibility of the

German Will-to-Power.

V. TANKS

It is the British who have produced the "land ironclad" since I

returned from France, and used it apparently with very good

effect. I felt no little chagrin at not seeing them there,

because I have a peculiar interest in these contrivances. It

would be more than human not to claim a little in this matter. I

described one in a story in /The Strand Magazine/ in 1903,

and my story could stand in parallel columns beside the first

account of these monsters in action given by Mr. Beach Thomas or

Mr. Philip Gibbs. My friend M. Joseph Reinach has successfully

passed off long extracts from my story as descriptions of the

Tanks upon British officers who had just seen them. The

filiation was indeed quite traceable. They were my grandchildren--

I felt a little like King Lear when first I read about them. Yet

let me state at once that I was certainly not their prime

originator. I took up an idea, manipulated it slightly, and

handed it on. The idea was suggested to me by the contrivances

of a certain Mr. Diplock, whose "ped-rail" notion, the notion of

a wheel that was something more than a wheel, a wheel that would

take locomotives up hill-sides and over ploughed fields, was

public property nearly twenty years ago. Possibly there were

others before Diplock. To the Ped-rail also Commander Murray

Sueter, one of the many experimentalists upon the early tanks,

admits his indebtedness, and it would seem that Mr. Diplock was

actually concerned in the earlier stage of the tanks.

Since my return I have been able to see the Tank at home, through

the courtesy of the Ministry of Munitions. They have progressed

far beyond any recognisable resemblance to the initiatives of Mr.

Diplock; they have approximated rather to the American

caterpillar. As I suspected when first I heard of these devices,

the War Office and the old army people had practically nothing to

do with their development. They took to it very reluctantly--as

they have taken to every novelty in this war. One brilliant

general scrawled over an early proposal the entirely

characteristic comment that it was a pity the inventor could not

use his imagination to better purpose. (That foolish British

trick of sneering at "imagination" has cost us hundreds of

thousands of useless casualties and may yet lose us the war.)

Tanks were first mooted at the front about a year and a half ago;

Mr. Winston Churchill was then asking questions about their

practicability; he filled many simple souls with terror; they

thought him a most dangerous lunatic. The actual making of the

Tanks arose as an irregular side development of the armoured-car

branch of the Royal Naval Air Service work. The names most

closely associated with the work are (I quote a reply of Dr.

Macnamara's in the House of Commons) Mr. d'Eyncourt, the Director

of Naval Construction, Mr. W. O. Tritton, Lieut. Wilson,

R.N.A.S., Mr. Bussell, Lieut. Stern, R.N.A.S., who is now Colonel

Stern, Captain Symes, and Mr. F. Skeens. There are many other

claims too numerous to mention in detail.

But however much the Tanks may disconcert the gallant Colonel

Newcomes who throw an air of restraint over our victorious front,

there can be no doubt that they are an important as well as a

novel development of the modern offensive. Of course neither the

Tanks nor their very obvious next developments going to wrest the

decisive pre-eminence from the aeroplane. The aeroplane remains

now more than ever the instrument of victory upon the western

front. Aerial ascendancy, properly utilised, is victory. But

the mobile armoured big gun and the Tank as a machine-gun

silencer must enormously facilitate an advance against the

blinded enemy. Neither of them can advance against properly

aimed big gun fire. That has to be disposed of before they make

their entrance. It remains the function of the aeroplane to

locate the hostile big guns and to direct the /tir de

demolition/ upon them before the advance begins--

possibly even to bomb them out. But hitherto, after the

destruction of driving back of the defender's big guns has been

effected, the dug-out and the machine gun have still inflicted

heavy losses upon the advancing infantry until the fight is won.

So soon as the big guns are out, the tanks will advance,

destroying machine guns, completing the destruction of the wire,

and holding prisoners immobile. Then the infantry will follow to

gather in the sheaves. Multitudinously produced and--I write it

with a defiant eye on Colonel Newcome--/properly handled/,

these land ironclads are going to do very great things in

shortening the war, in pursuit, in breaking up the retreating

enemy. Given the air ascendancy, and I am utterly unable to

imagine any way of conclusively stopping or even greatly delaying

an offensive thus equipped.

The young of even the most horrible beasts have something piquant

and engaging about them, and so I suppose it is in the way of

things that the land ironclad which opens a new and more dreadful

and destructive phase in the human folly of warfare, should

appear first as if it were a joke. Never has any such thing so

completely masked its wickedness under an appearance of genial

silliness. The Tank is a creature to which one naturally flings

a pet name; the five or six I was shown wandering, rooting and

climbing over obstacles, round a large field near X, were as

amusing and disarming as a little of lively young pigs.

At first the War Office prevented the publication of any pictures

or descriptions of these contrivances except abroad; then

abruptly the embargo was relaxed, and the press was flooded with

photographs. The reader will be familiar now with their

appearance. They resemble large slugs with an underside a little

like the flattened rockers of a rocking-horse, slugs between 20

and 40 feet long. They are like flat-sided slugs, slugs of

spirit, who raise an enquiring snout, like the snout of a

dogfish, into the air. They crawl upon their bellies in a way

that would be tedious to describe to the general reader and

unnecessary to describe to the enquiring specialists. They go

over the ground with the sliding speed of active snails. Behind

them trail two wheels, supporting a flimsy tail, wheels that

strike one as incongruous as if a monster began kangaroo and

ended doll's perambulator. (These wheels annoy me.) They are not

steely monsters; they are painted with drab and unassuming

colours that are fashionable in modern warfare, so that the

armour seems rather like the integument of a rhinoceros. At the

sides of the head project armoured checks, and from above these

stick out guns that look like stalked eyes. That is the general

appearance of the contemporary tank.

It slides on the ground; the silly little wheels that so detract

from the genial bestiality of its appearance dandle and bump

behind it. It swings about its axis. It comes to an obstacle, a

low wall let us say, or a heap of bricks, and sets to work to

climb it with its snout. It rears over the obstacle, it raises

its straining belly, it overhangs more and more, and at last

topples forward; it sways upon the heap and then goes plunging

downwards, sticking out the weak counterpoise of its wheeled

tail. If it comes to a house or a tree or a wall or such-like

obstruction it rams against it so as to bring all its weight to

bear upon it--it weighs /some/ tons--and then climbs over

the debris. I saw it, and incredulous soldiers of experience

watched it at the same time, cross trenches and wallow amazingly

through muddy exaggerations of small holes. Then I repeated the

tour inside.

Again the Tank is like a slug. The slug, as every biological

student knows, is unexpectedly complicated inside. The Tank is

as crowded with inward parts as a battleship. It is filled with

engines, guns and ammunition, and in the interstices men.

"You will smash your hat," said Colonel Stern. "No; keep it on,

or else you will smash your head."

Only Mr. C. R. W. Nevinson could do justice to the interior of a

Tank. You see a hand gripping something; you see the eyes and

forehead of an engineer's face; you perceive that an overall

bluishness beyond the engine is the back of another man. "Don't

hold that," says someone; "it is too hot. Hold on to that." The

engines roar, so loudly that I doubt whether one could hear guns

without; the floor begins to slope and slopes until one seems to

be at forty-five degrees or thereabouts; then the whole concern

swings up and sways and slants the other way. You have crossed a

bank. You heel sideways. Through the door which has been left

open you see the little group of engineers, staff officers and

naval men receding and falling away behind you. You straighten

up and go up hill. You halt and begin to rotate. Through the

open door, the green field, with its red walls, rows of worksheds

and forests of chimneys in the background, begins a steady

processional movement. The group of engineers and officers and

naval men appears at the other side of the door and farther off.

Then comes a sprint down hill. You descend and stretch your

legs.

About the field other Tanks are doing their stunts. One is

struggling in an apoplectic way in the mud pit with a cheek half

buried. It noses its way out and on with an air of animal

relief.

They are like jokes by Heath Robinson. One forgets that these

things have already saved the lives of many hundreds of our

soldiers and smashed and defeated thousands of Germans.

Said one soldier to me: "In the old attacks you used to see the

British dead lying outside the machine-gun emplacements like

birds outside a butt with a good shot inside. /Now/, these

things walk through."

I saw other things that day at X. The Tank is only a beginning

in a new phase of warfare. Of these other things I may only

write in the most general terms.

But though Tanks and their collaterals are being made upon a very

considerable scale in X, already I realised as I walked through

gigantic forges as high and marvellous as cathedrals, and from

workshed to workshed where gun carriages, ammunition carts and a

hundred such things were flowing into existence with the swelling

abundance of a river that flows out of a gorge, that as the

demand for the new developments grows clear and strong, the

resources of Britain are capable still of a tremendous response.

/If only we do not rob these great factories and works of their

men./

Upon this question certain things need to be said very plainly.

The decisive factor in the sort of war we are now waging is

production and right use of mechanical material; victory in this

war depends now upon three things: the aeroplane, the gun, and

the Tank developments. These--and not crowds of men--are the

prime necessity for a successful offensive. Every man we draw

from munition making to the ranks brings our western condition

nearer to the military condition of Russia. In these things we

may be easily misled by military "experts" We have to remember

that the military "expert" is a man who learnt his business

before 1914, and that the business of war has been absolutely

revolutionised since 1914; the military expert is a man trained

to think of war as essentially an affair of cavalry, infantry in

formation, and field guns, whereas cavalry is entirely obsolete,

infantry no longer fights in formation, and the methods of

gunnery have been entirely changed. The military man I observe

still runs about the world in spurs, he travels in trains in

spurs, he walks in spurs, he thinks in terms of spurs. He has

still to discover that it is about as ridiculous as if he were to

carry a crossbow. I take it these spurs are only the outward and

visible sign of an inward obsolescence. The disposition of the

military "expert" is still to think too little of machinery and

to demand too much of the men. Behind our front at the time of

my visit there were, for example, many thousands of cavalry, men

tending horses, men engaged in transporting bulky fodder for

horses and the like. These men were doing about as much in this

war as if they had been at Timbuctoo. Every man who is taken

from munition making at X to spur-worshipping in khaki, is a dead

loss to the military efficiency of the country. Every man that

is needed or is likely to be needed for the actual operations of

modern warfare can be got by combing out the cavalry, the brewing

and distilling industries, the theatres and music halls, and the

like unproductive occupations. The under-staffing of munition

works, the diminution of their efficiency by the use of aged and

female labour, is the straight course to failure in this war.

In X, in the forges and machine shops, I saw already too large a

proportion of boys and grey heads.

War is a thing that changes very rapidly, and we have in the

Tanks only the first of a great series of offensive developments.

They are bound to be improved, at a great pace. The method of

using them will change very rapidly. Any added invention will

necessitate the scrapping of old types and the production of the

new patterns in quantity. It is of supreme necessity to the

Allies if they are to win this war outright that the lead in

inventions and enterprise which the British have won over the

Germans in this matter should be retained. It is our game now to

press the advantage for all it is worth. We have to keep ahead

to win. We cannot do so unless we have unstinted men and

unstinted material to produce each new development as its use is

realised.

Given that much, the Tank will enormously enhance the advantage

of the new offensive method on the French front; the method that

is of gun demolition after aerial photography, followed by an

advance; it is a huge addition to our prospect of decisive

victory. What does it do? It solves two problems. The existing

Tank affords a means of advancing against machine-gun fire and of

destroying wire and machine guns without much risk of loss, so

soon as the big guns have done their duty by the enemy guns. And

also behind the Tank itself, it is useless to conceal, lies the

possibility of bringing up big guns and big gun ammunition,

across nearly any sort of country, as fast as the advance can

press forward. Hitherto every advance has paid a heavy toll to

the machine gun, and every advance has had to halt after a couple

of miles or so while the big guns (taking five or six days for

the job) toiled up to the new positions.

It is impossible to restrain a note of sharp urgency from what

one has to say about these developments. The Tanks remove the

last technical difficulties in our way to decisive victory and a

permanent peace; they also afford a reason for straining every

nerve to bring about a decision and peace soon. At the risk of

seeming an imaginative alarmist I would like to point out the

reasons these things disclose for hurrying this war to a decision

and doing our utmost to arrange the world's affairs so as to make

another war improbable. Already these serio-comic Tanks,

weighing something over twenty tons or so, have gone slithering

around and sliding over dead and wounded men. That is not an

incident for sensitive minds to dwell upon, but it is a mere

little child's play anticipation of what the big land ironclads

/that are bound to come if there is no world pacification/,

are going to do.

What lies behind the Tank depends upon this fact; there is no

definable upward limit of mass. Upon that I would lay all the

stress possible, because everything turns upon that.

You cannot make a land ironclad so big and heavy but that you

cannot make a caterpillar track wide enough and strong enough to

carry it forward. Tanks are quite possible that will carry

twenty-inch or twenty-five inch guns, besides minor armament.

Such Tanks may be undesirable; the production may exceed the

industrial resources of any empire to produce; but there is no

inherent impossibility in such things. There are not even the

same limitations as to draught and docking accommodation that

sets bounds to the size of battleships. It follows, therefore,

as a necessary deduction that if the world's affairs are so left

at the end of the war that the race of armaments continues, that

Tank will develop steadily into a tremendous instrument of

warfare, driven by engines of scores of thousands of horse-power,

tracking on a track scores of hundreds of yards wide and weighing

hundreds or thousands of tons. Nothing but a world agreement not

to do so can prevent this logical development of the land

ironclad. Such a structure will make wheel-ruts scores of feet

deep; it will plough up, devastate and destroy the country it

passes over altogether.

For my own part I never imagined the land ironclad idea would get

loose into war. I thought that the military intelligence was

essentially unimaginative and that such an aggressive military

power as Germany, dominated by military people, would never

produce anything of the sort. I thought that this war would be

fought out without Tanks and that then war would come to an end.

For of course it is mere stupidity that makes people doubt the

ultimate ending of war. I have been so far justified in these

expectations of mine, that it is not from military sources that

these things have come. They have been thrust upon the soldiers

from without. But now that they are loose, now that they are in

war, we have to face their full possibilities, to use our

advantage in them and press on to the end of the war. In support

of a photo-aero directed artillery, even our present Tanks can be

used to complete an invisible offensive. We shall not so much

push as ram. It is doubtful if the Germans can get anything of

the sort into action before six months are out. We ought to get

the war on to German soil before the Tanks have grown to more

than three or four times their present size. Then it will not

matter so much how much bigger they grow. It will be the German

landscape that will suffer.

After one has seen the actual Tanks it is not very difficult to

close one's eyes and figure the sort of Tank that may be arguing

with Germany in a few months' time about the restoration of

Belgium and Serbia and France, the restoration of the sunken

tonnage, the penalties of the various Zeppelin and submarine

murders, the freedom of seas and land alike from piracy, the

evacuation of all Poland including Posen and Cracow, and the

guarantees for the future peace of Europe. The machine will be

perhaps as big as a destroyer and more heavily armed and

equipped. It will swim over and through the soil at a pace of

ten or twelve miles an hour. In front of it will be corn, land,

neat woods, orchards, pasture, gardens, villages and towns. It

will advance upon its belly with a swaying motion, devouring the

ground beneath it. Behind it masses of soil and rock, lumps of

turf, splintered wood, bits of houses, occasional streaks of red,

will drop from its track, and it will leave a wake, six or seven

times as wide as a high road, from which all soil, all

cultivation, all semblance to cultivated or cultivatable land

will have disappeared. It will not even be a track of soil. It

will be a track of subsoil laid bare. It will be a flayed strip

of nature. In the course of its fighting the monster may have to

turnabout. It will then halt and spin slowly round, grinding out

an arena of desolation with a diameter equal to its length. If

it has to retreat and advance again these streaks and holes of

destruction will increase and multiply. Behind the fighting line

these monsters will manoeuvre to and fro, destroying the

land for all ordinary agricultural purposes for ages to come.

The first imaginative account of the land ironclad that was ever

written concluded with the words, "They are the /reductio ad

absurdum/ of war." They are, and it is to the engineers, the

ironmasters, the workers and the inventive talent of Great

Britain and France that we must look to ensure that it is in

Germany, the great teacher of war, that this demonstration of

war's ultimate absurdity is completed.

For forty years Frankenstein Germany invoked war, turned every

development of material and social science to aggressive ends,

and at last when she felt the time was ripe she let loose the new

monster that she had made of war to cow the spirit of mankind.

She set the thing trampling through Belgium. She cannot grumble

if at last it comes home, stranger and more dreadful even than

she made it, trampling the German towns and fields with German

blood upon it and its eyes towards Berlin.

This logical development of the Tank idea may seem a gloomy

prospect for mankind. But it is open to question whether the

tremendous development of warfare that has gone on in the last

two years does after all open a prospect of unmitigated gloom.

There has been a good deal of cheap and despondent sneering

recently at the phrase, "The war that will end war." It is still

possible to maintain that that may be a correct description of

this war. It has to be remembered that war, as the aeroplane and

the Tank have made it, has already become an impossible luxury

for any barbaric or uncivilised people. War on the grade that

has been achieved on the Somme predicates an immense

industrialism behind it. Of all the States in the world only

four can certainly be said to be fully capable of sustaining war

at the level to which it has now been brought upon the western

front. These are Britain, France, Germany, and the United States

of America. Less certainly equal to the effort are Italy, Japan,

Russia, and Austria. These eight powers are the only powers

/capable of warfare under modern conditions./ Five are

already Allies and one is incurably pacific. There is no other

power or people in the world that can go to war now without the

consent and connivance of these great powers. If we consider

their alliances, we may count it that the matter rests now

between two groups of Allies and one neutral power. So that

while on the one hand the development of modern warfare of which

the Tank is the present symbol opens a prospect of limitless

senseless destruction, it opens on the other hand a prospect of

organised world control. This Tank development must ultimately

bring the need of a real permanent settlement within the compass

of the meanest of diplomatic intelligences. A peace that will

restore competitive armaments has now become a less desirable

prospect for everyone than a continuation of the war. Things

were bad enough before, when the land forces were still in a

primitive phase of infantry, cavalry and artillery, and when the

only real race to develop monsters and destructors was for sea

power. But the race for sea power before 1914 was mere child's

play to the breeding of engineering monstrosities for land

warfare that must now follow any indeterminate peace settlement.

I am no blind believer in the wisdom of mankind, but I cannot

believe that men are so insensate and headstrong as to miss the

plain omens of the present situation.

So that after all the cheerful amusement the sight of a Tank

causes may not be so very unreasonable. These things may be no

more than one of those penetrating flashes of wit that will

sometimes light up and dispel the contentions of an angry man.

If they are not that, then they are the grimmest jest that ever

set men grinning. Wait and see, if you do not believe me.

HOW PEOPLE THINK ABOUT THE WAR

I. DO THEY REALLY THINK AT ALL?

All human affairs are mental affairs; the bright ideas of to-day

are the realities of to-morrow. The real history of mankind is

the history of how ideas have arisen, how they have taken

possession of men's minds, how they have struggled, altered,

proliferated, decayed. There is nothing in this war at all but a

conflict of ideas, traditions, and mental habits. The German

Will clothed in conceptions of aggression and fortified by

cynical falsehood, struggles against the fundamental sanity of

the German mind and the confused protest of mankind. So that the

most permanently important thing in the tragic process of this

war is the change of opinion that is going on. What are people

making of it? Is it producing any great common understandings,

any fruitful unanimities?

No doubt it is producing enormous quantities of cerebration, but

is it anything more than chaotic and futile cerebration? We are

told all sorts of things in answer to that, things without a

scrap of evidence or probability to support them. It is, we are

assured, turning people to religion, making them moral and

thoughtful. It is also, we are assured with equal confidence,

turning them to despair and moral disaster. It will be followed

by (1) a period of moral renascence, and (2) a debauch. It is

going to make the workers (1) more and (2) less obedient and

industrious. It is (1) inuring men to war and (2) filling them

with a passionate resolve never to suffer war again. And so on.

I propose now to ask what is really happening in this matter? How

is human opinion changing? I have opinions of my own and they are

bound to colour my discussion. The reader must allow for that,

and as far as possible I will remind him where necessary to make

his allowance.

Now first I would ask, is any really continuous and thorough

mental process going on at all about this war? I mean, is there

any considerable number of people who are seeing it as a whole,

taking it in as a whole, trying to get a general idea of it from

which they can form directing conclusions for the future? Is

there any considerable number of people even trying to do that?

At any rate let me point out first that there is quite an

enormous mass of people who--in spite of the fact that their

minds are concentrated on aspects of this war, who are at present

hearing, talking, experiencing little else than the war--are

nevertheless neither doing nor trying to do anything that

deserves to be called thinking about it at all. They may even be

suffering quite terribly by it. But they are no more mastering

its causes, reasons, conditions, and the possibility of its

future prevention than a monkey that has been rescued in a

scorching condition from the burning of a house will have

mastered the problem of a fire. It is just happening to and

about them. It may, for anything they have learnt about it,

happen to them again.

A vast majority of people are being swamped by the spectacular

side of the business. It was very largely my fear of being so

swamped myself that made me reluctant to go as a spectator to the

front. I knew that my chances of being hit by a bullet were

infinitesimal, but I was extremely afraid of being hit by some

too vivid impression. I was afraid that I might see some

horribly wounded man or some decayed dead body that would so scar

my memory and stamp such horror into me as to reduce me to a mere

useless, gibbering, stop-the-war-at-any-price pacifist. Years

ago my mind was once darkened very badly for some weeks with a

kind of fear and distrust of life through a sudden unexpected

encounter one tranquil evening with a drowned body. But in this

journey in Italy and France, although I have had glimpses of much

death and seen many wounded men, I have had no really horrible

impressions at all. That side of the business has, I think, been

overwritten. The thing that haunts me most is the impression of

a prevalent relapse into extreme untidiness, of a universal

discomfort, of fields, and of ruined houses treated

disregardfully.... But that is not what concerns us now in this

discussion. What concerns us now is the fact that this war is

producing spectacular effects so tremendous and incidents so

strange, so remarkable, so vivid, that the mind forgets both

causes and consequences and simply sits down to stare.

For example, there is this business of the Zeppelin raids in

England. It is a supremely silly business; it is the most

conclusive demonstration of the intellectual inferiority of the

German to the Western European that is should ever have happened.

There was the clearest /a priori/ case against the gas-bag.

I remember the discussions ten or twelve years ago in which it

was established to the satisfaction of every reasonable man that

ultimately the "heavier than air" machine (as we called it then)

must fly better than the gas-bag, and still more conclusively

that no gas-bag was conceivable that could hope to fight and

defeat aeroplanes. Nevertheless the German, with that dull faith

of his in mere "Will," persisted along his line. He knew

instinctively that he could not produce aviators to meet the

Western European; all his social instincts made him cling to the

idea of a great motherly, almost sow-like bag of wind above him.

At an enormous waste of resources Germany has produced these

futile monsters, that drift in the darkness over England

promiscuously dropping bombs on fields and houses. They are now

meeting the fate that was demonstrably certain ten years ago. If

they found us unready for them it is merely that we were unable

to imagine so idiotic an enterprise would ever be seriously

sustained and persisted in. We did not believe in the

probability of Zeppelin raids any more than we believed that

Germany would force the world into war. It was a thing too silly

to be believed. But they came--to their certain fate. In the

month after I returned from France and Italy, no less than four

of these fatuities were exploded and destroyed within thirty

miles of my Essex home.... There in chosen phrases you have the

truth about these things. But now mark the perversion of thought

due to spectacular effect.

I find over the Essex countryside, which has been for more than a

year and a half a highway for Zeppelins, a new and curious

admiration for them that has arisen out of these very disasters.

Previously they were regarded with dislike and a sort of

distrust, as one might regard a sneaking neighbour who left his

footsteps in one's garden at night. But the Zeppelins of

Billericay and Potter's Bar are--heroic things. (The Cuffley one

came down too quickly, and the fourth one which came down for its

crew to surrender is despised.) I have heard people describe the

two former with eyes shining with enthusiasm.

"First," they say, "you saw a little round red glow that spread.

Then you saw the whole Zeppelin glowing. Oh, it was

/beautiful!/ Then it began to turn over and come down, and

it flames and pieces began to break away. And then down it came,

leaving flaming pieces all up the sky. At last it was a pillar

of fire eight thousand feet high.... Everyone said, 'Ooooo!' And

then someone pointed out the little aeroplane lit up by the flare--

such a leetle thing up there in the night! It is the greatest

thing I have ever seen. Oh! the most wonderful--most wonderful!"

There is a feeling that the Germans really must after all be a

splendid people to provide such magnificent pyrotechnics.

Some people in London the other day were pretending to be shocked

by an American who boasted that he had been in "two /bully/

bombardments," but he was only saying what everyone feels more or

less. We are at a spectacle that--as a spectacle--our

grandchildren will envy. I understand now better the story of

the man who stared at the sparks raining up from his own house as

it burnt in the night and whispered "/Lovely! Lovely!/"

The spectacular side of the war is really an enormous distraction

from thought. And against thought there also fights the native

indolence of the human mind. The human mind, it seems, was

originally developed to think about the individual; it thinks

reluctantly about the species. It takes refuge from that sort of

thing if it possibly can. And so the second great preventive of

clear thinking is the tranquillising platitude.

The human mind is an instrument very easily fatigued. Only a few

exceptions go on thinking restlessly--to the extreme exasperation

of their neighbours. The normal mind craves for decisions, even

wrong or false decisions rather than none. It clutches at

comforting falsehoods. It loves to be told, "/There/, don't

you worry. That'll be all right. That's /settled./" This

war has come as an almost overwhelming challenge to mankind. To

some of us it seems as it if were the Sphynx proffering the

alternative of its riddle or death. Yet the very urgency of this

challenge to think seems to paralyse the critical intelligence of

very many people altogether. They will say, "This war is going

to produce enormous changes in everything." They will then

subside mentally with a feeling of having covered the whole

ground in a thoroughly safe manner. Or they will adopt an air of

critical aloofness. They will say, "How is it possible to

foretell what may happen in this tremendous sea of change?" And

then, with an air of superior modesty, they will go on doing--

whatever they feel inclined to do. Many others, a degree less

simple in their methods, will take some entirely partial aspect,

arrive at some guesswork decision upon that, and then behave as

though that met every question we have to face. Or they will

make a sort of admonitory forecast that is conditional upon the

good behaviour of other people. "Unless the Trade Unions are

more reasonable," they will say. Or, "Unless the shipping

interest is grappled with and controlled." Or, "Unless England

wakes up." And with that they seem to wash their hands of further

responsibility for the future.

One delightful form of put-off is the sage remark, "Let us finish

the war first, and then let us ask what is going to happen after

it." One likes to think of the beautiful blank day after the

signing of the peace when these wise minds swing round to pick up

their deferred problems....

I submit that a man has not done his duty by himself as a

rational creature unless he has formed an idea of what is going

on, as one complicated process, until he has formed an idea

sufficiently definite for him to make it the basis of a further

idea, which is his own relationship to that process. He must

have some notion of what the process is going to do to him, and

some notion of what he means to do, if he can, to the process.

That is to say, he must not only have an idea how the process is

going, but also an idea of how he wants it to go. It seems so

natural and necessary for a human brain to do this that it is

hard to suppose that everyone has not more or less attempted it.

But few people, in Great Britain at any rate, have the habit of

frank expression, and when people do not seem to have made out

any of these things for themselves there is a considerable

element of secretiveness and inexpressiveness to be allowed for

before we decide that they have not in some sort of fashion done

so. Still, after all allowances have been made, there remains a

vast amount of jerry-built and ready-made borrowed stuff in most

of people's philosophies of the war. The systems of authentic

opinion in this world of thought about the war are like

comparatively rare thin veins of living mentality in a vast world

of dead repetitions and echoed suggestions. And that being the

case, it is quite possible that history after the war, like

history before the war, will not be so much a display of human

will and purpose as a resultant of human vacillations,

obstructions, and inadvertences. We shall still be in a drama of

blind forces following the line of least resistance.

One of the people who is often spoken of as if he were doing an

enormous amount of concentrated thinking is "the man in the

trenches." We are told--by gentlemen writing for the most part at

home--of the most extraordinary things that are going on in those

devoted brains, how they are getting new views about the duties

of labour, religion, morality, monarchy, and any other notions

that the gentleman at home happens to fancy and wished to push.

Now that is not at all the impression of the khaki mentality I

have reluctantly accepted as correct. For the most part the man

in khaki is up against a round of tedious immediate duties that

forbid consecutive thought; he is usually rather crowded and not

very comfortable. He is bored.

The real horror of modern war, when all is said and done, is the

boredom. To get killed our wounded may be unpleasant, but it is

at any rate interesting; the real tragedy is in the desolated

fields, the desolated houses, the desolated hours and days, the

bored and desolated minds that hang behind the melee

and just outside the melee. The peculiar

beastliness of the German crime is the way the German war cant

and its consequences have seized upon and paralysed the mental

movement of Western Europe. Before 1914 war was theoretically

unpopular in every European country; we thought of it as

something tragic and dreadful. Now everyone knows by experience

that it is something utterly dirty and detestable. We thought it

was the Nemean lion, and we have found it is the Augean stable.

But being bored by war and hating war is quite unproductive

/unless you are thinking about its nature and causes so

thoroughly that you will presently be able to take hold of it and

control it and end it./ It is no good for everyone to say

unanimously, "We will have no more war," unless you have thought

out how to avoid it, and mean to bring that end about. It is as

if everyone said, "We will have no more catarrh," or "no more

flies," or "no more east wind." And my point is that the immense

sorrows at home in every European country and the vast boredom of

the combatants are probably not really producing any effective

remedial mental action at all, and will not do so unless we get

much more thoroughly to work upon the thinking-out process.

In such talks as I could get with men close up to the front I

found beyond this great boredom and attempts at distraction only

very specialised talk about changes in the future. Men were keen

upon questions of army promotion, of the future of conscription,

of the future of the temporary officer, upon the education of

boys in relation to army needs. But the war itself was bearing

them all upon its way, as unquestioned and uncontrolled as if it

were the planet on which they lived.

II. THE YIELDING PACIFIST AND THE CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR

Among the minor topics that people are talking about behind the

western fronts is the psychology of the Yielding Pacifist and the

Conscientious Objector. Of course, we are all pacifists

nowadays; I know of no one who does not want not only to end this

war but to put an end to war altogether, except those blood-red

terrors Count Reventlow, Mr. Leo Maxse--how he does it on a

vegetarian dietary I cannot imagine!--and our wild-eyed

desperados of /The Morning Post./ But most of the people I

meet, and most of the people I met on my journey, are pacifists

like myself who want to /make/ peace by beating the armed

man until he gives in and admits the error of his ways, disarming

him and reorganising the world for the forcible suppression of

military adventures in the future. They want belligerency put

into the same category as burglary, as a matter of forcible

suppression. The Yielding Pacifist who will accept any sort of

peace, and the Conscientious Objector who will not fight at all,

are not of that opinion.

Both Italy and France produce parallel types to those latter, but

it would seem that in each case England displays the finer

developments. The Latin mind is directer than the English, and

its standards--shall I say?--more primitive; it gets more

directly to the fact that here are men who will not fight. And

it is less charitable. I was asked quite a number of times for

the English equivalent of an /embusque./ "We don't

generalise," I said, "we treat each case on its merits!"

One interlocutor near Udine was exercised by our Italian Red

Cross work.

"Here," he said, "are sixty or seventy young Englishmen, all fit

for military service.... Of course they go under fire, but it is

not like being junior officers in the trenches. Not one of them

has been killed or wounded."

He reflected. "One, I think, has been decorated," he said....

My French and Italian are only for very rough common jobs; when

it came to explaining the Conscientious Objector sympathetically

they broke down badly. I had to construct long parenthetical

explanations of our antiquated legislative methods to show how it

was that the "conscientious objector" had been so badly defined.

The foreigner does not understand the importance of vague

definition in British life. "Practically, of course, we offered

to exempt anyone who conscientiously objected to fight or serve.

Then the Pacifist and German people started a campaign to enrol

objectors. Of course every shirker, every coward and slacker in

the country decided at once to be a conscientious objector.

Anyone but a British legislator could have foreseen that. Then

we started Tribunals to wrangle with the objectors about their

/bona fides./ Then the Pacifists and the Pro-Germans issued

little leaflets and started correspondence courses to teach

people exactly how to lie to the Tribunals. Trouble about

freedom of the pamphleteer followed. I had to admit--it has been

rather a sloppy business. "The people who made the law knew

their own minds, but we English are not an expressive people."

These are not easy things to say in Elementary (and slightly

Decayed) French or in Elementary and Corrupt Italian.

"But why do people support the sham conscientious objector and

issue leaflets to help him--when there is so much big work

clamouring to be done?"

"That," I said, "is the Whig tradition."

When they pressed me further, I said: "I am really the

questioner. I am visiting /your/ country, and you have to

tell /me/ things. It is not right that I should do all the

telling. Tell me all about Romain Rolland."

And so I pressed them about the official socialists in Italy and

the Socialist minority in France until I got the question out of

the net of national comparisons and upon a broader footing. In

several conversations we began to work out in general terms the

psychology of those people who were against the war. But usually

we could not get to that; my interlocutors would insist upon

telling me just what they would like to do or just what they

would like to see done to stop-the-war pacifists and

conscientious objectors; pleasant rather than fruitful

imaginative exercises from which I could effect no more than

platitudinous uplifts.

But the general drift of such talks as did seem to penetrate the

question was this, that among these stop-the-war people there are

really three types. First there is a type of person who hates

violence and the infliction of pain under any circumstances, and

who have a mystical belief in the rightness (and usually the

efficacy) of non-resistance. These are generally Christians, and

then their cardinal text is the instruction to "turn the other

cheek." Often they are Quakers. If they are consistent they are

vegetarians and wear /Lederlos/ boots. They do not desire

police protection for their goods. They stand aloof from all the

force and conflict of life. They have always done so. This is

an understandable and respectable type. It has numerous Hindu

equivalents. It is a type that finds little difficulty about

exemptions--provided the individual has not been too recently

converted to his present habits. But it is not the prevalent

type in stop-the-war circles. Such genuine ascetics do not

number more than a thousand or so, all three of our western

allied countries. The mass of the stop-the-war people is made up

quite other elements.

In the complex structure of the modern community there are two

groups or strata or pockets in which the impulse of social

obligation, the gregarious sense of a common welfare, is at its

lowest; one of these is the class of the Resentful Employee, the

class of people who, without explanation, adequate preparation or

any chance, have been shoved at an early age into uncongenial

work and never given a chance to escape, and the other is the

class of people with small fixed incomes or with small salaries

earnt by routine work, or half independent people practising some

minor artistic or literary craft, who have led uneventful,

irresponsible lives from their youth up, and never came at any

point into relations of service to the state. This latter class

was more difficult to define than the former--because it is more

various within itself. My French friends wanted to talk of the

"Psychology of the Rentier." I was for such untranslatable

phrases as the "Genteel Whig," or the "Donnish Liberal." But I

lit up an Italian--he is a Milanese manufacturer--with "these

Florentine English who would keep Italy in a glass case." "I

know," he said. Before I go on to expand this congenial theme,

let me deal first with the Resentful Employee, who is a much more

considerable, and to me a much more sympathetic, figure in

European affairs. I began life myself as a Resentful Employee.

By the extremest good luck I have got my mind and spirit out of

the distortions of that cramping beginning, but I can still

recall even the anger of those old days.

He becomes an employee between thirteen and fifteen; he is made

to do work he does not like for no other purpose that he can see

except the profit and glory of a fortunate person called his

employer, behind whom stand church and state blessing and

upholding the relationship. He is not allowed to feel that he

has any share whatever in the employer's business, or that any

end is served but the employer's profit. He cannot see that the

employer acknowledges any duty to the state. Neither church nor

state seems to insist that the employer has any public function.

At no point does the employee come into a clear relationship of

mutual obligation with the state. There does not seem to be any

way out for the employee from a life spent in this subordinate,

toilsome relationship. He feels put upon and cheated out of

life. He is without honour. If he is a person of ability or

stubborn temper he struggles out of his position; if he is a

kindly and generous person he blames his "luck" and does his work

and lives his life as cheerfully as possible--and so live the

bulk of our amazing European workers; if he is a being of great

magnanimity he is content to serve for the ultimate good of the

race; if he has imagination, he says, "Things will not always be

like this," and becomes a socialist or a guild socialist, and

tries to educate the employer to a sense of reciprocal duty; but

if he is too human for any of these things, then he begins to

despise and hate the employer and the system that made him. He

wants to hurt them. Upon that hate it is easy to trade.

A certain section of what is called the Socialist press and the

Socialist literature in Europe is no doubt great-minded; it seeks

to carve a better world out of the present. But much of it is

socialist only in name. Its spirit is Anarchistic. Its real

burthen is not construction but grievance; it tells the bitter

tale of the employee, it feeds and organises his malice, it

schemes annoyance and injury for the hated employer. The state

and the order of the world is confounded with the capitalist.

Before the war the popular so-called socialist press reeked with

the cant of rebellion, the cant of any sort of rebellion. "I'm a

rebel," was the silly boast of the young disciple. "Spoil

something, set fire to something," was held to be the proper text

for any girl or lad of spirit. And this blind discontent carried

on into the war. While on the one hand a great rush of men

poured into the army saying, "Thank God! we can serve our

country at last instead of some beastly profiteer," a sourer

remnant, blind to the greater issues of the war, clung to the

reasonless proposition, "the state is only for the Capitalist.

This war is got up by Capitalists. Whatever has to be done--

/we are rebels./"

Such a typical paper as the British /Labour Leader/, for

example, may be read in vain, number after number, for any sound

and sincere constructive proposal. It is a prolonged scream of

extreme individualism, a monotonous repetition of incoherent

discontent with authority, with direction, with union, with the

European effort. It wants to do nothing. It just wants effort

to stop--even at the price of German victory. If the whole

fabric of society in western Europe were to be handed over to

those pseudo-socialists to-morrow, to be administered for the

common good, they would fly the task in terror. They would make

excuses and refuse the undertaking. They do not want the world

to go right. The very idea of the world going right does not

exist in their minds. They are embodied discontent and hatred,

making trouble, and that is all they are. They want to be

"rebels"--to be admired as "rebels".

That is the true psychology of the Resentful Employee. He is a

de-socialised man. His sense of the State has been destroyed.

The Resentful Employees are the outcome of our social injustices.

They are the failures of our social ad educational systems. We

may regret their pitiful degradation, we may exonerate them from

blame; none the less they are a pitiful crew. I have seen the

hardship of the trenches, the gay and gallant wounded. I do a

little understand what our soldiers, officers and men alike, have

endured and done. And though I know I ought to allow for all

that I have stated, I cannot regard these conscientious objectors

with anything but contempt. Into my house there pours a dismal

literature rehearsing the hardships of these men who set

themselves up to be martyrs for liberty; So and So, brave hero,

has been sworn at--positively sworn at by a corporal; a nasty

rough man came into the cell of So and So and dropped several

h's; So and So, refusing to undress and wash, has been undressed

and washed, and soap was rubbed into his eyes--perhaps purposely;

the food and accommodation are not of the best class; the doctors

in attendance seem hasty; So and So was put into a damp bed and

has got a nasty cold. Then I recall a jolly vanload of wounded

men I saw out there....

But after all, we must be just. A church and state that

permitted these people to be thrust into dreary employment in

their early 'teens, without hope or pride, deserves such citizens

as these. The marvel is that there are so few. There are a poor

thousand or so of these hopeless, resentment-poisoned creatures

in Great Britain. Against five willing millions. The Allied

countries, I submit, have not got nearly all the conscientious

objectors they deserve.

If the Resentful Employee provides the emotional impulse of the

resisting pacifist, whose horizon is bounded by his one

passionate desire that the particular social system that has

treated him so ill should collapse and give in, and its leaders

and rulers be humiliated and destroyed, the intellectual

direction of a mischievous pacifism comes from an entirely

different class.

The Genteel Whig, though he differs very widely in almost every

other respect from the Resentful Employee, has this much in

common, that he has never been drawn into the whirl of collective

life in any real and assimilative fashion. This is what is the

matter with both of them. He is a little loose, shy, independent

person. Except for eating and drinking--in moderation, he has

never done anything real from the day he was born. He has

frequently not even faced the common challenge of matrimony.

Still more frequently is he childless, or the daring parent of

one particular child. He has never traded nor manufactured. He

has drawn his dividends or his salary with an entire

unconsciousness of any obligations to policemen or navy for these

punctual payments. Probably he has never ventured even to

reinvest his little legacy. He is acutely aware of possessing an

exceptionally fine intelligence, but he is entirely unconscious

of a fundamental unreality. Nothing has ever occurred to him to

make him ask why the mass of men were either not possessed of his

security or discontented with it. The impulses that took his

school friends out upon all sorts of odd feats and adventures

struck him as needless. As he grew up he turned with an equal

distrust from passion or ambition. His friends went out after

love, after adventure, after power, after knowledge, after this

or that desire, and became men. But he noted merely that they

became fleshly, that effort strained them, that they were

sometimes angry or violent or heated. He could not but feel that

theirs were vulgar experiences, and he sought some finer exercise

for his exceptional quality. He pursued art or philosophy or

literature upon their more esoteric levels, and realised more and

more the general vulgarity and coarseness of the world about him,

and his own detachment. The vulgarity and crudity of the things

nearest him impressed him most; the dreadful insincerity of the

Press, the meretriciousness of success, the loudness of the rich,

the baseness of common people in his own land. The world

overseas had by comparison a certain glamour. Except that when

you said "United States" to him he would draw the air sharply

between his teeth and beg you not to...

Nobody took him by the collar and shook him.

If our world had considered the advice of William James and

insisted upon national service from everyone, national service in

the drains or the nationalised mines or the nationalised deep-sea

fisheries if not in the army or navy, we should not have had any

such men. If it had insisted that wealth and property are no

more than a trust for the public benefit, we should have had no

genteel indispensables. These discords in our national unanimity

are the direct consequence of our bad social organisation. We

permit the profiteer and the usurer; they evoke the response of

the Reluctant Employee, and the inheritor of their wealth becomes

the Genteel Whig.

But that is by the way. It was of course natural and inevitable

that the German onslaught upon Belgium and civilisation generally

should strike these recluse minds not as a monstrous ugly

wickedness to be resisted and overcome at any cost, but merely as

a nerve-racking experience. Guns were going off on both sides.

The Genteel Whig was chiefly conscious of a repulsive vast

excitement all about him, in which many people did inelegant and

irrational things. They waved flags--nasty little flags. This

child of the ages, this last fruit of the gigantic and tragic

tree of life, could no more than stick its fingers in its ears as

say, "Oh, please, do /all/ stop!" and then as the strain

grew intenser and intenser set itself with feeble pawings now to

clamber "Au-dessus de la Melee," and now to--in some

weak way--stop the conflict. ("Au-dessus de la

Melee"--as the man said when they asked him where he

was when the bull gored his sister.) The efforts to stop the

conflict at any price, even at the price of entire submission to

the German Will, grew more urgent as the necessity that everyone

should help against the German Thing grew more manifest.

Of all the strange freaks of distressed thinking that this war

has produced, the freaks of the Genteel Whig have been among the

most remarkable. With an air of profound wisdom he returns

perpetually to his proposition that there are faults on both

sides. To say that is his conception of impartiality. I suppose

that if a bull gored his sister he would say that there were

faults on both sides; his sister ought not to have strayed into

the field, she was wearing a red hat of a highly provocative

type; she ought to have been a cow and then everything would have

been different. In the face of the history of the last forty

years, the Genteel Whig struggles persistently to minimise the

German outrage upon civilisation and to find excuses for Germany.

He does this, not because he has any real passion for falsehood,

but because by training, circumstance, and disposition he is

passionately averse from action with the vulgar majority and from

self-sacrifice in a common cause, and because he finds in the

justification of Germany and, failing that, in the blackening of

the Allies to an equal blackness, one line of defence against the

wave of impulse that threatens to submerge his private self. But

when at last that line is forced he is driven back upon others

equally extraordinary. You can often find simultaneously in the

same Pacifist paper, and sometimes even in the utterances of the

same writer, two entirely incompatible statements. The first is

that Germany is so invincible that it is useless to prolong the

war since no effort of the Allies is likely to produce any

material improvement in their position, and the second is that

Germany is so thoroughly beaten that she is now ready to abandon

militarism and make terms and compensations entirely acceptable

to the countries she has forced into war. And when finally facts

are produced to establish the truth that Germany, though still

largely wicked and impenitent, is being slowly and conclusively

beaten by the sanity, courage and persistence of the Allied

common men, then the Genteel Whig retorts with his last defensive

absurdity. He invents a national psychology for Germany.

Germany, he invents, loves us and wants to be our dearest friend.

Germany has always loved us. The Germans are a loving, unenvious

people. They have been a little mislead--but nice people do not

insist upon that fact. But beware of beating Germany, beware of

humiliating Germany; then indeed trouble will come. Germany will

begin to dislike us. She will plan a revenge. Turning aside

from her erstwhile innocent career, she may even think of hate.

What are our obligations to France, Italy, Serbia and Russia,

what is the happiness of a few thousands of the Herero, a few

millions of the Belgians--whose numbers moreover are constantly

diminishing--when we might weigh them against the danger, the

most terrible danger, of incurring /permanent German

hostility?.../

A Frenchman I talked to knew better than that. "What will happen

to Germany," I asked, "if we are able to do so to her and so;

would she take to dreams of a /Revanche?/"

"She will take to Anglomania," he said, and added after a flash

of reflection, "In the long run it will be the worse for you."

III. THE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL

One of the indisputable things about the war, so far as Britain

and France go--and I have reason to believe that on a lesser

scale things are similar in Italy--is that it has produced a very

great volume of religious thought and feeling. About Russia in

these matters we hear but little at the present time, but one

guesses at parallelism. People habitually religious have been

stirred to new depths of reality and sincerity, and people are

thinking of religion who never thought of religion before. But

as I have already pointed out, thinking and feeling about a

matter is of no permanent value unless something is /thought

out/, unless there is a change of boundary or relationship,

and it an altogether different question to ask whether any

definite change is resulting from this universal ferment. If it

is not doing so, then the sleeper merely dreams a dream that he

will forget again....

Now in no sort of general popular mental activity is there so

much froth and waste as in religious excitements. This has been

the case in all periods of religious revival. The number who are

rather impressed, who for a few days or weeks take to reading

their Bibles or going to a new place of worship or praying or

fasting or being kind and unselfish, is always enormous in

relation to the people whose lives are permanently changed. The

effort needed if a contemporary is to blow off the froth, is

always very considerable.

Among the froth that I would blow off is I think most of the

tremendous efforts being made in England by the Anglican church

to attract favourable attention to itself /apropos/

of the war. I came back from my visit to the Somme battlefields

to find the sylvan peace of Essex invaded by a number of ladies

in blue dresses adorned with large white crosses, who, regardless

of the present shortage of nurses, were visiting every home in

the place on some mission of invitation whose details remained

obscure. So far as I was able to elucidate this project, it was

in the nature of a magic incantation; a satisfactory end of the

war was to be brought about by convergent prayer and religious

assiduities. The mission was shy of dealing with me personally,

although as a lapsed communicant I should have thought myself a

particularly hopeful field for Anglican effort, and it came to my

wife and myself merely for our permission and countenance in an

appeal to our domestic servants. My wife consulted the

household; it seemed very anxious to escape from that appeal, and

as I respect Christianity sufficiently to detest the

identification of its services with magic processes, the mission

retired--civilly repulsed. But the incident aroused an uneasy

curiosity in my mind with regard to the general trend of Anglican

teaching and Anglican activities at the present time. The trend

of my enquiries is to discover the church much more incoherent

and much less religious--in any decent sense of the word--than I

had supposed it to be.

Organisation is the life of material and the death of mental and

spiritual processes. There could be no more melancholy

exemplification of this than the spectacle of the Anglican and

Catholic churches at the present time, one using the tragic

stresses of war mainly for pew-rent touting, and the other

paralysed by its Austrian and South German political connections

from any clear utterance upon the moral issues of the war.

Through the opening phases of the war the Established Church of

England was inconspicuous; this is no longer the case, but it may

be doubted whether the change is altogether to its advantage. To

me this is a very great disappointment. I have always had a very

high opinion of the intellectual values of the leading divines of

both the Anglican and Catholic communions. The self-styled

Intelligentsia of Great Britain is all too prone to sneer at

their equipment; but I do not see how any impartial person can

deny that Father Bernard Vaughn is in mental energy, vigour of

expression, richness of thought and variety of information fully

the equal of such an influential lay publicist as Mr. Horatio

Bottomley. One might search for a long time among prominent

laymen to find the equal of the Bishop of London. Nevertheless

it is impossible to conceal the impression of tawdriness that

this latter gentleman's work as head of the National Mission has

left upon my mind. Attired in khaki he has recently been

preaching in the open air to the people of London upon Tower

Hill, Piccadilly, and other conspicuous places. Obsessed as I am

by the humanities, and impressed as I have always been by the

inferiority of material to moral facts, I would willingly have

exchanged the sight of two burning Zeppelins for this spectacle

of ecclesiastical fervour. But as it is, I am obliged to trust

to newspaper reports and the descriptions of hearers and eye-

witnesses. They leave to me but little doubt of the regrettable

superficiality of the bishop's utterances.

We have a multitude of people chastened by losses, ennobled by a

common effort, needing support in that effort, perplexed by the

reality of evil and cruelty, questioning and seeking after God.

What does the National Mission offer? On Tower Hill the bishop

seems to have been chiefly busy with a wrangling demonstration

that ten thousand a year is none too big a salary for a man

subject to such demands and expenses as his see involves. So far

from making anything out of his see he was, he declared, two

thousand a year to the bad. Some day, when the church has

studied efficiency, I suppose that bishops will have the leisure

to learn something about the general state of opinion and

education in their dioceses. The Bishop of London was evidently

unaware of the almost automatic response of the sharp socialists

among his hearers. Their first enquiry would be to learn how he

came by that mysterious extra two thousand a year with which he

supplemented his stipend. How did he earn /that?/ And if he

didn't earn it---! And secondly, they would probably have

pointed out to him that his standard of housing, clothing, diet

and entertaining was probably a little higher than theirs. It is

really no proof of virtuous purity that a man's expenditure

exceeds his income. And finally some other of his hearers were

left unsatisfied by his silence with regard to the current

proposal to pool all clerical stipends for the common purposes of

the church. It is a reasonable proposal, and if bishops must

dispute about stipends instead of preaching the kingdom of God,

then they are bound to face it. The sooner they do so, the more

graceful will the act be. From these personal apologetics the

bishop took up the question of the exemption, at the request of

the bishops, of the clergy from military service. It is one of

our contrasts with French conditions--and it is all to the

disadvantage of the British churches.

In his Piccadilly contribution to the National Mission of

Repentance and Hope the bishop did not talk politics but sex. He

gave his hearers the sort of stuff that is handed out so freely

by the Cinema Theatres, White Slave Traffic talk, denunciations

of "Night Hawks"--whatever "Night Hawks" may be--and so on. One

this or another occasion the bishop--he boasts that he himself is

a healthy bachelor--lavished his eloquence upon the Fall in the

Birth Rate, and the duty of all married people, from paupers

upward, to have children persistently. Now sex, like diet, is a

department of conduct and a very important department, but /it

isn't religion!/ The world is distressed by international

disorder, by the monstrous tragedy of war; these little hot talks

about indulgence and begetting have about as much to do with the

vast issues that concern us as, let us say, a discussion of the

wickedness of eating very new and indigestible bread. It is

talking round and about the essential issue. It is fogging the

essential issue, which is the forgotten and neglected kingship of

God. The sin that is stirring the souls of men is the sin of

this war. It is the sin of national egotism and the devotion of

men to loyalties, ambitions, sects, churches, feuds, aggressions,

and divisions that are an outrage upon God's universal

kingdom.

The common clergy of France, sharing the military obligations and

the food and privations of their fellow parishioners, contrast

very vividly with the home-staying types of the ministries of the

various British churches. I met and talked to several. Near

Frise there were some barge gunboats--they have since taken their

place in the fighting, but then they were a surprise--and the men

had been very anxious to have their craft visited and seen. The

priest who came after our party to see if he could still arrange

that, had been decorated for gallantry. Of course the English

too have their gallant chaplains, but they are men of the officer

caste, they are just young officers with peculiar collars; not

men among men, as are the French priests.

There can be no doubt that the behaviour of the French priests in

this war has enormously diminished anti-clerical bitterness in

France. There can be no doubt that France is far more a

religious country than it was before the war. But if you ask

whether that means any return to the church, any reinstatement of

the church, the answer is a doubtful one. Religion and the

simple priest are stronger in France to-day; the church, I think,

is weaker.

I trench on no theological discussion when I record the

unfavourable impression made upon all western Europe by the

failure of the Holy Father to pronounce definitely upon the

rights and wrongs of the war. The church has abrogated its right

of moral judgement. Such at least seemed to be the opinion of

the Frenchmen with whom I discussed a remarkable interview with

Cardinal Gasparri that I found one morning in /Le Journal./

It was not the sort of interview to win the hearts of men who

were ready to give their lives to set right what they believe to

be the greatest outrage that has ever been inflicted upon

Christendom, that is to say the forty-three years of military

preparation and of diplomacy by threats that culminated in the

ultimatum to Serbia, the invasion of Belgium and the murder of

the Vise villagers. It was adorned with a large portrait

of "Benoit XV.," looking grave and discouraging over his

spectacles, and the headlines insisted it was "/La

Pensee du Pape./" Cross-heads sufficiently indicated

the general tone. One read:

/"Le Saint Siege impartial...

Au-dessus de la bataille...."/

The good Cardinal would have made a good lawyer. He had as

little to say about God and the general righteousness of things

as the Bishop of London. But he got in some smug reminders of

the severance of diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Perhaps

now France will be wiser. He pointed out that the Holy See in

its Consistorial Allocution of January 22nd, 1915, invited the

belligerents to observe the rules of war. Could anything more be

done than that? Oh!--in the general issue of the war, if you

want a judgement on the war as a whole, how is it possible that

the Vatican to decide? Surely the French know that excellent

principle of justice, /Audiatur et altera pars/, and how

under existing circumstances can the Vatican do that...? The

Vatican is cut off from communication with Austria and Germany.

The Vatican has been deprived of its temporal power and local

independence (another neat point)....

So France is bowed out. When peace is restored, the Vatican will

perhaps be able to enquire if there was a big German army in

1914, if German diplomacy was aggressive from 1875 onward, if

Belgium was invaded unrighteously, if (Catholic) Austria forced

the pace upon (non-Catholic) Russia. But now--now the Holy See

must remain as impartial as an unbought mascot in a shop

window....

The next column of /Le Journal/ contained an account of the

Armenian massacres; the blood of the Armenian cries out past the

Holy Father to heaven; but then Armenians are after all heretics,

and here again the principle of /Audiatur et altera pars/

comes in. Communications are not open with the Turks. Moreover,

Armenians, like Serbs, are worse than infidels; they are

heretics. Perhaps God is punishing them....

/Audiatur et altera pars/, and the Vatican has not forgotten

the infidelity and disrespect of both France and Italy in the

past. These are the things, it seems, that really matter to the

Vatican. Cardinal Gasparri's portrait, in the same issue of

/Le Journal/, displays a countenance of serene contentment,

a sort of incarnate "Told-you-so."

So the Vatican lifts its pontifical skirts and shakes the dust of

western Europe off its feet.

It is the most astounding renunciation in history.

Indubitably the Christian church took a wide stride from the

kingship of God when it placed a golden throne for the unbaptised

Constantine in the midst of its most sacred deliberations at

Nicaea. But it seems to me that this abandonment of moral

judgements in the present case by the Holy See is an almost wider

step from the church's allegiance to God....

Thought about the great questions of life, thought and reasoned

direction, this is what the multitude demands mutely and weakly,

and what the organised churches are failing to give. They have

not the courage of their creeds. Either their creeds are

intellectual flummery or they are the solution to the riddles

with which the world is struggling. But the churches make no

mention of their creeds. They chatter about sex and the magic

effect of church attendance and simple faith. If simple faith is

enough, the churches and their differences are an imposture. Men

are stirred to the deepest questions about life and God, and the

Anglican church, for example, obliges--as I have described.

It is necessary to struggle against the unfavourable impression

made by these things. They must not blind us to the deeper

movement that is in progress in a quite considerable number of

minds in England and France alike towards the realisation of the

kingdom of God.

What I conceive to be the reality of the religious revival is to

be found in quarters remote from the religious professionals.

Let me give but one instance of several that occur to me. I met

soon after my return from France a man who has stirred my

curiosity for years, Mr. David Lubin, the prime mover in the

organisation of the International Institute of Agriculture in

Rome. It is a movement that has always appealed to my

imagination. The idea is to establish and keep up to date a

record of the food supplies in the world with a view to the

ultimate world control of food supply and distribution. When its

machinery has developed sufficiently to a control in the

interests of civilisation of many other staples besides

foodstuffs. It is in fact the suggestion and beginning of the

economic world peace and the economic world state, just as the

Hague Tribunal is the first faint sketch of a legal world state.

The King of Italy has met Mr. Lubin's idea with open hands. (It

was because of this profoundly interesting experiment that in a

not very widely known book of mine, /The World Set Free/

(May, 1914), in which I represented a world state as arising out

of Armageddon, I made the first world conference meet at Brissago

in Italian Switzerland under the presidency of the King of

Italy.) So that when I found I could meet Mr. Lubin I did so very

gladly. We lunched together in a pretty little room high over

Knightsbridge, and talked through an afternoon.

He is a man rather after the type of Gladstone; he could be made

to look like Gladstone in a caricature, and he has that

compelling quality of intense intellectual excitement which was

one of the great factors in the personal effectiveness of

Gladstone. He is a Jew, but until I had talked to him for some

time that fact did not occur to me. He is in very ill health, he

has some weakness of the heart that grips him and holds him at

times white and silent.

At first we talked of his Institute and its work. Then we came

to shipping and transport. Whenever one talks now of human

affairs one comes presently to shipping and transport generally.

In Paris, in Italy, when I returned to England, everywhere I

found "cost of carriage" was being discovered to be a question of

fundamental importance. Yet transport, railroads and shipping,

these vitally important services in the world's affairs, are

nearly everywhere in private hands and run for profit. In the

case of shipping they are run for profit on such antiquated lines

that freights vary from day to day and from hour to hour. It

makes the business of food supply a gamble. And it need not be a

gamble.

But that is by the way in the present discussion. As we talked,

the prospect broadened out from a prospect of the growing and

distribution of food to a general view of the world becoming one

economic community.

I talked of various people I had been meeting in the previous few

weeks. "So many of us," I said, "seem to be drifting away from

the ideas of nationalism and faction and policy, towards

something else which is larger. It is an idea of a right way of

doing things for human purposes, independently of these limited

and localised references. Take such things as international

hygiene for example, take /this/ movement. We are feeling

our way towards a bigger rule."

"The rule of Righteousness," said Mr. Lubin.

I told him that I had been coming more and more to the idea--not

as a sentimentality or a metaphor, but as the ruling and

directing idea, the structural idea, of all one's political and

social activities--of the whole world as one state and community

and of God as the King of that state.

"But /I/ say that," cried Mr. Lubin, "I have put my name to that. And--it is /here!/"

He struggled up, seized an Old Testament that lay upon a side

table. He stood over it and rapped its cover. "It is

/here/," he said, looking more like Gladstone than ever, "in

the Prophets."

That is all I mean to tell at present of that conversation.

We talked of religion for two hours. Mr. Lubin sees things in

terms of Israel and I do not. For all that we see things very

much after the same fashion. That talk was only one of a number

of talks about religion that I have had with hard and practical

men who want to get the world straighter than it is, and who

perceive that they must have a leadership and reference outside

themselves. That is why I assert so confidently that there is a

real deep religious movement afoot in the world. But not one of

those conversations could have gone on, it would have ceased

instantly, if anyone bearing the uniform and brand of any

organised religious body, any clergyman, priest, mollah, of

suchlike advocate of the ten thousand patented religions in the

world, had come in. He would have brought in his sectarian

spites, his propaganda of church-going, his persecution of the

heretic and the illegitimate, his ecclesiastical politics, his

taboos, and his doctrinal touchiness.... That is why, though I

perceive there is a great wave of religious revival in the world

to-day, I doubt whether it bodes well for the professional

religions....

The other day I was talking to an eminent Anglican among various

other people and someone with an eye to him propounded this

remarkable view.

"There are four stages between belief and utter unbelief. There

are those who believe in God, those who doubt like Huxley the

Agnostic, those who deny him like the Atheists but who do at

least keep his place vacant, and lastly those who have set up a

Church in his place. That is the last outrage of unbelief."

IV. THE RIDDLE OF THE BRITISH

All the French people I met in France seemed to be thinking and

talking about the English. The English bring their own

atmosphere with them; to begin with they are not so talkative,

and I did not find among them anything like the same vigour of

examination, the same resolve to understand the Anglo-French

reaction, that I found among the French. In intellectual

processes I will confess that my sympathies are undisguisedly

with the French; the English will never think nor talk clearly

until the get clerical "Greek" and sham "humanities" out of their

public schools and sincere study and genuine humanities in; our

disingenuous Anglican compromise is like a cold in the English

head, and the higher education in England is a training in

evasion. This is an always lamentable state of affairs, but just

now it is particularly lamentable because quite tremendous

opportunities for the good of mankind turn on the possibility of

a thorough and entirely frank mutual understanding between

French, Italians, and English. For years there has been a

considerable amount of systematic study in France of English

thought and English developments. Upon almost any question of

current English opinion and upon most current English social

questions, the best studies are in French. But there has been

little or no reciprocal activity. The English in France seem to

confine their French studies to /La Vie Parisienne./ It is

what they have been led to expect of French literature.

There can be no doubt in any reasonable mind that this war is

binding France and England very closely together. They dare not

quarrel for the next fifty years. They are bound to play a

central part in the World League for the Preservation of Peace

that must follow this struggle. There is no question of their

practical union. It is a thing that must be. But it is

remarkable that while the French mind is agog to apprehend every

fact and detail it can about the British, to make the wisest and

fullest use of our binding necessities, that strange English

"incuria"--to use the new slang--attains to its most monumental

in this matter.

So there is not much to say about how the British think about the

French. They do not think. They feel. At the outbreak of the

war, when the performance of France seemed doubtful, there was an

enormous feeling for France in Great Britain; it was like the

formless feeling one has for a brother. It was as if Britain had

discovered a new instinct. If France had crumpled up like paper,

the English would have fought on passionately to restore her.

That is ancient history now. Now the English still feel

fraternal and fraternally proud; but in a mute way they are

dazzled. Since the German attack on Verdun began, the French

have achieved a crescendo. None of us could have imagined it.

It did not seem possible to very many of us at the end of 1915

that either France or Germany could hold on for another year.

There was much secret anxiety for France. It has given place now

to unstinted confidence and admiration. In their astonishment

the British are apt to forget the impressive magnitude of their

own effort, the millions of soldiers, the innumerable guns, the

endless torrent of supplies that pour into France to avenge the

little army of Mons. It seems natural to us that we should so

exert ourselves under the circumstances. I suppose it is

wonderful, but, as a sample Englishman, I do not feel that it is

at all wonderful. I did not feel it wonderful even when I saw

the British aeroplanes lording it in the air over Martinpuich,

and not a German to be seen. Since Michael would have it so,

there, at last, they were.

There was a good deal of doubt in France about the vigour of the

British effort, until the Somme offensive. All that had been

dispelled in August when I reached Paris. There was not the

shadow of a doubt remaining anywhere of the power and loyalty of

the British. These preliminary assurances have to be made,

because it is in the nature of the French mind to criticise, and

it must not be supposed that criticisms of detail and method

affect the fraternity and complete mutual confidence which is the

stuff of the Anglo-French relationship.

Now first the French have been enormously astonished by the

quality of the ordinary British soldiers in our new armies. One

Colonial colonel said something almost incredible to me--almost

incredible as coming as from a Frenchman; it was a matter to

solemn for any compliments or polite exaggerations; he said in

tones of wonder and conviction, "/They are as good as

ours./" It was his acme of all possible praise.

That means any sort of British soldier. Unless he is assisted by

a kilt the ordinary Frenchman is unable to distinguish between

one sort of British soldier and another. He cannot tell--let the

ardent nationalist mark the fact!--a Cockney from an Irishman or

the Cardiff from the Essex note. He finds them all extravagantly

and unquenchably cheerful and with a generosity--"like good

children." There his praise is a little tinged by doubt. The

British are reckless--recklessness in battle a Frenchman can

understand, but they are also reckless about to-morrow's bread

and whether the tent is safe against a hurricane in the night.

He is struck too by the fact that they are much more vocal than

the French troops, and that they seem to have a passion for bad

lugubrious songs. There he smiles and shrugs his shoulders, and

indeed what else can any of us do in the presence of that

mystery? At any rate the legend of the "phlegmatic" Englishman

has been scattered to the four winds of heaven by the guns of the

western front. The men are cool in action, it is true; but for

the rest they are, by the French standards, quicksilver.

But I will not expand further upon the general impression made by

the English in France. Philippe Millet's /En Liaison avec les

Anglais/ gives in a series of delightful pictures portraits of

British types from the French angle. There can be little doubt

that the British quality, genial naive, plucky and generous, has

won for itself a real affection in France wherever it has had a

chance to display itself....

But when it comes to British methods then the polite Frenchman's

difficulties begin. Translating hints into statements and

guessing at reservations, I would say that the French fall very

short of admiration of the way in which our higher officers set

about their work, they are disagreeably impressed by a general

want of sedulousness and close method in our leading. They think

we economise brains and waste blood. They are shocked at the way

in which obviously incompetent or inefficient men of the old army

class are retained in their positions even after serious

failures, and they were profoundly moved by the bad staff work

and needlessly heavy losses of our opening attacks in July. They

were ready to condone the blunderings and flounderings of the

1915 offensive as the necessary penalties of an "amateur" army,

they had had to learn their own lesson in Champagne, but they

were surprised to find how much the British had still to learn in

July, 1916. The British officers excuse themselves because, they

plead, they are still amateurs. "That is no reason," says the

Frenchman, "why they should be amateurish."

No Frenchman said as much as this to me, but their meaning was as

plain as daylight. I tackled one of my guides on this matter; I

said that it was the plain duty of the French military people to

criticise British military methods sharply if they thought they

were wrong. "It is not easy," he said. "Many British officers

do not think they have anything to learn. And English people do

not like being told things. What could we do? We could hardly

send a French officer or so to your headquarters in a tutorial

capacity. You have to do things in your own way." When I tried

to draw General Castelnau into this dangerous question by

suggesting that we might borrow a French general or so, he would

say only, "There is only one way to learn war, and that is to

make war." When it was too late, in the lift, I thought of the

answer to that. There is only one way to make war, and that is

by the sacrifice of incapables and the rapid promotion of able

men. If old and tried types fail now, new types must be sought.

But to do that we want a standard of efficiency. We want a

conception of intellectual quality in performance that is still

lacking....

M. Joseph Reinach, in whose company I visited the French part of

the Somme front, was full of a scheme, which he has since

published, for the breaking up and recomposition of the French

and British armies into a series of composite armies which would

blend the magnificent British manhood and material with French

science and military experience. He pointed out the endless

advantages of such an arrangement; the stimulus of emulation, the

promotion of intimate fraternal feeling between the peoples of

the two countries. "At present," he said, "no Frenchman ever

sees an Englishman except at Amiens or on the Somme. Many of

them still have no idea of what the English are doing...."

"Have I ever told you the story of compulsory Greek at Oxford and

Cambridge?" I asked abruptly.

"What has that to do with it?"

"Or how two undistinguished civil service commissioners can hold

up the scientific education of our entire administrative class?"

M. Reinach protested further.

"Because you are proposing to loosen the grip of a certain narrow

and limited class upon British affairs, and you propose it as

though it were a job as easy as rearranging railway fares or

sending a van to Calais. That is the problem that every decent

Englishman is trying to solve to-day, every man of that Greater

Britain which has supplied these five million volunteers, these

magnificent temporary officers and all this wealth of munitions.

And the oligarchy is so invincibly fortified! Do you think it

will let in Frenchmen to share its controls? It will not even

let in Englishmen. It holds the class schools; the class

universities; the examinations for our public services are its

class shibboleths; it is the church, the squirearchy, the

permanent army class, permanent officialdom; it makes every

appointment, it is the fountain of honour; what it does not know

is not knowledge, what it cannot do must not be done. It rules

India ignorantly and obstructively; it will wreck the empire

rather than relinquish its ascendancy in Ireland. It is densely

self-satisfied and instinctively monopolistic. It is on our

backs, and with it on our backs we common English must bleed and

blunder to victory.... And you make this proposal!"

The antagonistic relations of the Anglican oligarchy with the

greater and greater-spirited Britain that thrust behind it in

this war are probably paralleled very closely in Germany,

probably they are exaggerated in Germany with a bigger military

oligarchy and a relatively lesser civil body under it. This

antagonism is the oddest outcome of the tremendous /de-

militarisation/ of war that has been going on. In France it

is probably not so marked because of the greater flexibility and

adaptability of the French culture.

All military people--people, that is, professionally and

primarily military--are inclined to be conservative. For

thousands of years the military tradition has been a tradition of

discipline. The conception of the common soldier has been a

mechanically obedient, almost dehumanised man, of the of officer

a highly trained autocrat. In two years all this has been

absolutely reversed. Individual quality, inventive organisation

and industrialism will win this war. And no class is so innocent

of these things as the military caste. Long accustomed as they

are to the importance of moral effect they put a brave face upon

the business; they save their faces astonishingly, but they are

no longer guiding and directing this war, they are being pushed

from behind by forces they never foresaw and cannot control. The

aeroplanes and great guns have bolted with them, the tanks

begotten of naval and civilian wits, shove them to victory in

spite of themselves.

Wherever I went behind the British lines the officers were going

about in spurs. These spurs at last got on my nerves. They

became symbolical. They became as grave an insult to the tragedy

of the war as if they were false noses. The British officers go

for long automobile rides in spurs. They walk about the trenches

in spurs. Occasionally I would see a horse; I do not wish to be

unfair in this matter, there were riding horses sometimes within

two or three miles of the ultimate front, but they were rarely

used.

I do not say that the horse is entirely obsolescent in this war.

In was nothing is obsolete. In the trenches men fight with

sticks. In the Pasubio battle the other day one of the Alpini

silenced a machine gun by throwing stones. In the West African

campaign we have employed troops armed with bows and arrows, and

they have done very valuable work. But these are exceptional

cases. The military use of the horse henceforth will be such an

exceptional case. It is ridiculous for these spurs still to

clink about the modern battlefield. What the gross cost of the

spurs and horses and trappings of the British army amount to, and

how many men are grooming and tending horses who might just as

well be ploughing and milking at home, I cannot guess; it must be

a total so enormous as seriously to affect the balance of the

war.

And these spurs and their retention are only the outward and

visible symbol of the obstinate resistance of the Anglican

intelligence to the clear logic of the present situation. It is

not only the external equipment of our leaders that falls behind

the times; our political and administrative services are in the

hands of the same desolatingly inadaptable class. The British

are still wearing spurs in Ireland; they are wearing them in

India; and the age of the spur has passed. At the outset of this

war there was an absolute cessation of criticism of the military

and administrative castes; it is becoming a question whether we

may not pay too heavily in blundering and waste, in military and

economic lassitude, in international irritation and the

accumulation of future dangers in Ireland, Egypt, India, and

elsewhere, for an apparent absence of internal friction. These

people have no gratitude for tacit help, no spirit of intelligent

service, and no sense of fair play to the outsider. The latter

deficiency indeed they call /esprit de corps/ and prize it

as if it were a noble quality.

It becomes more and more imperative that the foreign observer

should distinguish between this narrower, older official Britain

and the greater newer Britain that struggles to free itself from

the entanglement of a system outgrown. There are many Englishmen

who would like to say to the French and Irish and the Italians

and India, who indeed feel every week now a more urgent need of

saying, "Have patience with us." The Riddle of the British is

very largely solved if you will think of a great modern liberal

nation seeking to slough an exceedingly tough and tight skin....

Nothing is more illuminating and self-educational than to explain

one's home politics to an intelligent foreigner enquirer; it

strips off all the secondary considerations, the allusiveness,

the merely tactical considerations, the allusiveness, the merely

tactical considerations. One sees the forest not as a confusion

of trees but as something with a definite shape and place. I was

asked in Italy and in France, "Where does Lord Northcliffe come

into the British system--or Lloyd George? Who is Mr. Redmond?

Why is Lloyd George a Minister, and why does not Mr. Redmond take

office? Isn't there something called an ordnance department, and

why is there a separate ministry of munitions? Can Mr. Lloyd

George remove an incapable general?..."

I found it M. Joseph Reinach particularly penetrating and

persistent. It is an amusing but rather difficult exercise to

recall what I tried to convey to him by way of a theory of

Britain. He is by no means an uncritical listener. I explained

that there is an "inner Britain," official Britain, which is

Anglican or official Presbyterian, which at the outside in the

whole world cannot claim to speak for twenty million Anglican or

Presbyterian communicants, which monopolises official positions,

administration and honours in the entire British empire,

dominates the court, and, typically, is spurred and red-tabbed.

(It was just at this time that the spurs were most on my

nerves.)

This inner Britain, I went on to explain, holds tenaciously to

its positions of advantage, from which it is difficult to

dislodge it without upsetting the whole empire, and it insists

upon treating the rest of the four hundred millions who

constitute that empire as outsiders, foreigners, subject races

and suspected persons.

"To you," I said, "it bears itself with an appearance of faintly

hostile, faintly contemptuous apathy. It is still so entirely

insular that it shudders at the thought of the Channel Tunnel.

This is the Britain which irritates and puzzles you so intensely--

that you are quite unable to conceal these feelings from me.

Unhappily it is the Britain you see most of. Well, outside this

official Britain is 'Greater Britain'--the real Britain with

which you have to reckon in the future." (From this point a

faint flavour of mysticism crept into my dissertation. I found

myself talking with something in my voice curiously reminiscent

of those liberal Russians who set themselves to explain the

contrasts and contradictions of "official" Russia and "true"

Russia.) "This Greater Britain," I asserted, "is in a perpetual

conflict with official Britain, struggling to keep it up to its

work, shoving it towards its ends, endeavouring in spite of its

tenacious mischievousness of the privileged to keep the peace and

a common aim with the French and Irish and Italians and Russians

and Indians. It is to that outer Britain that those Englishmen

you found so interesting and sympathetic, Lloyd George and Lord

Northcliffe, for example, belong. It is the Britain of the great

effort, the Britain of the smoking factories and the torrent of

munitions, the Britain of the men and subalterns of the new

armies, the Britain which invents and thinks and achieves, and

stands now between German imperialism and the empire of the

world. I do not want to exaggerate the quality of greater

Britain. If the inner set are narrowly educated, the outer set

if often crudely educated. If the inner set is so close knit as

to seem like a conspiracy, the outer set is so loosely knit as to

seem like a noisy confusion. Greater Britain is only beginning

to realise itself and find itself. For all its crudity there is

a giant spirit in it feeling its way towards the light. It has

quite other ambitions for the ending of the war than some haggled

treaty of alliance with France and Italy; some advantage that

will invalidate German competition; it begins to realise newer

and wider sympathies, possibilities of an amalgamation of

interests and community of aim that is utterly beyond the habits

of the old oligarchy to conceive, beyond the scope of that tawdry

word 'Empire' to express...."

I descended from my rhetoric to find M. Reinach asking how and

when this greater Britain was likely to become politically

effective.

V. THE SOCIAL CHANGES IN PROGRESS

"Nothing will be the same after the war." This is one of the

consoling platitudes with which people cover over voids of

thought. They utter it with an air of round-eyed profundity.

But to ask in reply, "Then how will things be different?" is in

many cases to rouse great resentment. It is almost as rude as

saying, "Was that thought of yours really a thought?"

Let us in this chapter confine ourselves to the social-economic

processes that are going on. So far as I am able to distinguish

among the things that are being said in these matters, they may

be classified out into groups that centre upon several typical

questions. There is the question of "How to pay for the war?"

There is the question of the behaviour of labour after the war.

"Will there be a Labour Truce or a violent labour struggle?"

There is the question of the reconstruction of European industry

after the war in the face of an America in a state of monetary

and economic repletion through non-intervention. My present

purpose in this chapter is a critical one; it is not to solve

problems but to set out various currents of thought that are

flowing through the general mind. Which current is likely to

seize upon and carry human affairs with it, is not for our

present speculation.

There seem to be two distinct ways of answering the first of the

questions I have noted. They do not necessarily contradict each

other. Of course the war is being largely paid for immediately

out of the accumulated private wealth of the past. We are buying

off the "hold-up" of the private owner upon the material and

resources we need, and paying in paper money and war loans. This

is not in itself an impoverishment of the community. The wealth

of individuals is not the wealth of nations; the two things may

easily be contradictory when the rich man's wealth consists of

land or natural resources or franchises or privileges the use of

which he reluctantly yields for high prices. The conversion of

held-up land and material into workable and actively used

material in exchange for national debt may be indeed a positive

increase in the wealth of the community. And what is happening

in all the belligerent countries is the taking over of more and

more of the realities of wealth from private hands and, in

exchange, the contracting of great masses of debt to private

people. The nett tendency is towards the disappearance of a

reality holding class and the destruction of realities in

warfare, and the appearance of a vast /rentier/ class in its

place. At the end of the war much material will be destroyed for

evermore, transit, food production and industry will be

everywhere enormously socialised, and the country will be liable

to pay every year in interest, a sum of money exceeding the

entire national expenditure before the war. From the point of

view of the state, and disregarding material and moral damages,

that annual interest is the annual instalment of the price to be

paid for the war.

Now the interesting question arises whether these great

belligerent states may go bankrupt, and if so to what extent.

States may go bankrupt to the private creditor without

repudiating their debts or seeming to pay less to him. They can

go bankrupt either by a depreciation of their currency or--

without touching the gold standard--through a rise in prices. In

the end both these things work out to the same end; the creditor

gets so many loaves or pairs of boots or workman's hours of

labour for his pound /less/ than he would have got under the

previous conditions. One may imagine this process of price (and

of course wages) increase going on to a limitless extent. Many

people are inclined to look to such an increase in prices as a

certain outcome of the war, and just so far as it goes, just so

far will the burthen of the /rentier/ class, their call, tat

is, for goods and services, be lightened. This expectation is

very generally entertained, and I can see little reason against

it. The intensely stupid or dishonest "labour" press, however,

which in the interests of the common enemy misrepresents

socialism and seeks to misguide labour in Great Britain, ignores

these considerations, and positively holds out this prospect of

rising prices as an alarming one to the more credulous and

ignorant of its readers.

But now comes the second way of meeting the after-the-war

obligations. This second way is by increasing the wealth of the

state and by increasing the national production to such an extent

that the payment of the /rentier/ class will not be an

overwhelming burthen. Rising prices bilk the creditor.

Increased production will check the rise in prices and get him a

real payment. The outlook for the national creditor seems to be

that he will be partly bilked and partly paid; how far he will be

bilked and how far depends almost entirely upon this possible

increase in production; and there is consequently a very keen and

quite unprecedented desire very widely diffused among intelligent

and active people, holding War Loan scrip and the like, in all

the belligerent countries, to see bold and hopeful schemes for

state enrichment pushed forward. The movement towards socialism

is receiving an impulse from a new and unexpected quarter, there

is now a /rentier/ socialism, and it is interesting to note

that while the London /Times/ is full of schemes of great

state enterprises, for the exploitation of Colonial state lands,

for the state purchase and wholesaling of food and many natural

products, and for the syndication of shipping and the great

staple industries into vast trusts into which not only the

British but the French and Italian governments may enter as

partners, the so-called socialist press of Great Britain is

chiefly busy about the draughts in the cell of Mr. Fenner

Brockway and the refusal of Private Scott Duckers to put on his

khaki trousers. /The New Statesman/ and the Fabian Society,

however, display a wider intelligence.

There is a great variety of suggestions for this increase of

public wealth and production. Many of them have an extreme

reasonableness. The extent to which they will be adopted

depends, no doubt, very largely upon the politician and permanent

official, and both these classes are prone to panic in the

presence of reality. In spite of its own interests in

restraining a rise in prices, the old official "salariat" is

likely to be obstructive to any such innovations. It is the

resistance of spurs and red tabs to military innovations over

again. This is the resistance of quills and red tape. On the

other hand the organisation of Britain for war has "officialised"

a number of industrial leaders, and created a large body of

temporary and adventurous officials. They may want to carry on

into peace production the great new factories the war has

created. At the end of the war, for example, every belligerent

country will be in urgent need of cheap automobiles for farmers,

tradesmen, and industrial purposes generally, America is now

producing such automobiles at a price of eighty pounds. But

Europe will be heavily in debt to America, her industries will be

disorganised, and there will therefore be no sort of return

payment possible for these hundreds of thousands of automobiles.

A country that is neither creditor nor producer cannot be an

importer. Consequently though those cheap tin cars may be

stacked as high as the Washington Monument in America, they will

never come to Europe. On the other hand the great shell

factories of Europe will be standing idle and ready, their staffs

disciplined and available, for conversion to the new task. The

imperative common sense of the position seems to be that the

European governments should set themselves straight away to out-

Ford Ford, and provide their own people with cheap road

transport.

But here comes in the question whether this common-sense course

is inevitable. Suppose the mental energy left in Europe after

the war is insufficient for such a constructive feat as this.

There will certainly be the obstruction of official pedantry, the

hold-up of this vested interest and that, the greedy desire of

"private enterprise" to exploit the occasion upon rather more

costly and less productive lines, the general distrust felt by

ignorant and unimaginative people of a new way of doing things.

The process after all may not get done in the obviously wise way.

This will not mean that Europe will buy American cars. It will

be quite unable to buy American cars. It will be unable to make

anything that America will not be able to make more cheaply for

itself. But it will mean that Europe will go on without cheap

cars, that is to say it will go on a more sluggishly and clumsily

and wastefully at a lower economic level. Hampered transport

means hampered production of other things, and in increasing

inability to buy abroad. And so we go down and down.

It does not follow that because a course is the manifestly right

and advantageous course for the community that it will be taken.

I am reminded of this by a special basket in my study here, into

which I pitch letters, circulars, pamphlets and so forth as they

come to hand from a gentleman named Gattie, and his friends Mr.

Adrian Ross, Mr. Roy Horniman, Mr. Henry Murray and others. His

particular project is the construction of a Railway Clearing

House for London. It is an absolutely admirable scheme. It

would cut down the heavy traffic in the streets of London to

about one-third; it would enable us to run the goods traffic of

England with less than half the number of railway trucks we now

employ; it would turn over enormous areas of valuable land from

their present use as railway goods yards and sidings; it would

save time in the transit of goods and labour in their handling.

It is a quite beautifully worked out scheme. For the last eight

or ten years this group of devoted fanatics has been pressing

this undertaking upon an indifferent country with increasing

vehemence and astonishment at that indifference. The point is

that its adoption, though it would be of general benefit, would

be of no particular benefit to any leading man or highly placed

official. On the other hand it would upset all sorts of

individuals who are in a position to obstruct it quietly--and

they do so. Meaning no evil. I dip my hand in the accumulation

and extract a leaflet by the all too zealous Mr. Murray. In it

he denounces various public officials by name as he cheats and

scoundrels, and invites a prosecution for libel.

In that fashion nothing will ever get done. There is no

prosecution, but for all that I do not agree with Mr. Murray

about the men he names. These gentlemen are just comfortable

gentlemen, own brothers to these old generals of ours who will

not take off their spurs. They are probably quite charming

people except that they know nothing of that Fear of God which

searches by heart. Why should they bother?

So many of these after-the-war problems bring one back to the

question of how far the war has put the Fear of God into the

hearts of responsible men. There is really no other reason in

existence that I can imagine why they should ask themselves the

question, "Have I done my best?" and that still more important

question, "Am I doing my best now?" And so while I hear plenty

of talk about the great reorganisations that are to come after

the war, while there is the stir of doubt among the

/rentiers/ whether, after all, they will get paid, while the

unavoidable stresses and sacrifices of the war are making many

people question the rightfulness of much that they did as a

matter of course, and of much that they took for granted, I

perceive there is also something dull and not very articulate in

this European world, something resistant and inert, that is like

the obstinate rolling over of a heavy sleeper after he has been

called upon to get up. "Just a little longer.... Just for

/my/ time."

One thought alone seems to make these more intractable people

anxious. I thrust it in as my last stimulant when everything

else has failed. "There will be /frightful/ trouble with

labour after the war," I say.

They try to persuade themselves that military discipline is

breaking in labour....

What does British labour think of the outlook after the war?

As a distinctive thing British labour does not think. "Class-

conscious labour," as the Marxists put it, scarcely exists in

Britain. The only convincing case I ever met was a bath-chairman

of literary habits Eastbourne. The only people who are, as a

class, class-conscious in the British community are the Anglican

gentry and their fringe of the genteel. Everybody else is

"respectable." The mass of British workers find their thinking

in the ordinary halfpenny papers or in /John Bull./ The so-

called labour papers are perhaps less representative of British

Labour than any other section of the press; the /Labour

Leader/, for example, is the organ of such people as Bertrand

Russell, Vernon Lee, Morel, academic /rentiers/ who know

about as much as of the labour side of industrialism as they do

of cock-fighting. All the British peoples are racially willing

and good-tempered people, quite ready to be led by those they

imagine to be abler than themselves. They make the most cheerful

and generous soldiers in the whole world, without insisting upon

that democratic respect which the Frenchman exacts. They do not

criticise and they do not trouble themselves much about the

general plan of operations, so long as they have confidence in

the quality and good will of their leading. But British soldiers

will of their loading. But British soldiers will hiss a general

when they think he is selfish, unfeeling, or a muff. And the

socialist propaganda has imported ideas of public service into

private employment. Labour in Britain has been growing

increasingly impatient of bad or selfish industrial leadership.

Labour trouble in Great Britain turns wholly upon the idea

crystallised in the one word "profiteer." Legislation and

regulation of hours of labour, high wages, nothing will keep

labour quiet in Great Britain if labour thinks it is being

exploited for private gain.

Labour feels very suspicious of private gain. For that suspicion

a certain rather common type of employer is mainly to blame.

Labour believes that employers is mainly to blame. Labour

believes that employers as a class cheat workmen as a class, plan

to cheat them of their full share in the common output, and drive

hard bargains. It believes that private employers are equally

ready to sacrifice the welfare of the nation and the welfare of

the workers for mere personal advantage. It has a traditional

experience to support these suspicions.

In no department of morals have ideas changed so completely

during the last eight years as in relation to "profits". Eighty

years ago everyone believed in the divine right of property to do

what it pleased its advantages, a doctrine more disastrous

socially than the divine right of kings. There was no such sense

of the immorality of "holding up" as pervades the public

conscience to-day. The worker was expected not only to work, but

to be grateful for employment. The property owner held his

property and handed it out for use and development or not, just

as he thought fit. These ideas are not altogether extinct today.

Only a few days ago I met a magnificent old lady of seventy nine

or eighty, who discoursed upon the wickedness of her gardener in

demanding another shilling a week because of war prices.

She was a valiant and handsome personage. A face that had still

a healthy natural pinkness looked out from under blond curls, and

an elegant and carefully tended hand tossed back some fine old

lace to gesticulate more freely. She had previously charmed her

hearers by sweeping aside certain rumours that were drifting

about.

"Germans invade /Us!/" she cried. "Who'd /let/ 'em,

I'd like to know? Who'd /let/ 'em?"

And then she reverted to her grievance about the gardener.

"I told him that after the war he'd be glad enough to get

anything. Grateful! They'll all be coming back after the war--

all of 'em, glad enough to get anything. Asking for another

shilling indeed!"

Everyone who heard her looked shocked. But that was the tone of

everyone of importance in the dark years that followed the

Napoleonic wars. That is just one survivor of the old tradition.

Another is Blight the solicitor, who goes about bewailing the

fact that we writers are "holding out false hopes of higher

agricultural wages after the war." But these are both

exceptions. They are held to be remarkable people even by their

own class. The mass of property owners and influential people in

Europe to-day no more believe in the sacred right of property to

hold up development and dictate terms than do the more

intelligent workers. The ideas of collective ends and of the

fiduciary nature of property, had been soaking through the

European community for years before the war. The necessity for

sudden and even violent co-operations and submersions of

individuality in a common purpose, is rapidly crystallising out

these ideas into clear proposals.

War is an evil thing, but most people who will not learn from

reason must have an ugly teacher. This war has brought home to

everyone the supremacy of the public need over every sort of

individual claim.

One of the most remarkable things in the British war press is the

amount of space given to the discussion of labour developments

after the war. This in its completeness peculiar to the British

situation. Nothing on the same scale is perceptible in the press

of the Latin allies. A great movement on the part of capitalists

and business organisers is manifest to assure the worker of a

change of heart and a will to change method. Labour is

suspicious, not foolishly but wisely suspicious. But labour is

considering it.

"National industrial syndication," say the business organisers.

"Guild socialism," say the workers.

There is also a considerable amount of talking and writing about

"profit-sharing" and about giving the workers a share in the

business direction. Neither of these ideas appeals to the

shrewder heads among the workers. So far as direction goes their

disposition is to ask the captain to command the ship. So far as

profits go, they think the captain has no more right than the

cabin boy to speculative gains; he should do his work for his pay

whether it is profitable or unprofitable work. There is little

balm for labour discontent in these schemes for making the worker

also an infinitesimal profiteer.

During my journey in Italy and France I met several men who were

keenly interested in business organisation. Just before I

started my friend N, who has been the chief partner in the

building up of a very big and very extensively advertised

American business, came to see me on his way back to America. He

is as interested in his work as a scientific specialist, and as

ready to talk about it to any intelligent and interested hearer.

He was particularly keen upon the question of continuity in the

business, when it behoves the older generation to let in the

younger to responsible management and to efface themselves. He

was a man of five-and-forty. Incidentally he mentioned that he

had never taken anything for his private life out of the great

business he had built up but a salary, "a good salary," and that

now he was gong to grant himself a pension. "I shan't interfere

any more. I shall come right away and live in Europe for a year

so as not to be tempted to interfere. The boys have got to run

it some day, and they had better get their experience while

they're young and capable of learning by it. I did."

I like N's ideas. "Practically," I said, "you've been a public

official. You've treated your business like a public service."

That was his idea.

"Would you mind if it was a public service?"

He reflected, and some disagreeable memory darkened his face.

"Under the politicians?" he said.

I took the train of thought N had set going abroad with me next

day. I had the good luck to meet men who were interesting

industrially. Captain Pirelli, my guide in Italy, has a name

familiar to every motorist; his name goes wherever cars go, spelt

with a big long capital P. Lieutenant de Tessin's name will

recall one of the most interesting experiments in profit-sharing

to the student of social science. I tried over N's problem on

both of them. I found in both their minds just the same attitude

as he takes up towards his business. They think any businesses

that are worthy of respect, the sorts of businesses that interest

them, are public functions. Money-lenders and speculators,

merchants and gambling gentlefolk may think in terms of profit;

capable business directors certainly do nothing of the sort.

I met a British officer in France who is also a landowner. I got

him to talk about his administrative work upon his property. He

was very keen upon new methods. He said he tried to do his duty

by his land.

"How much land?" I asked.

"Just over nine thousand acres," he said.

"But you could manage forty or fifty thousand with little more

trouble."

"If I had it. In some ways it would be easier."

"What a waste!" I said. "Of course you ought not to /own/

these acres; what you ought to be is the agricultural controller

of just as big an estate of the public lands as you could manage--

with a suitable salary."

He reflected upon that idea. He said he did not get much of a

salary out of his land as it was, and made a regrettable allusion

to Mr. Lloyd George. "When a man tries to do his duty by his

land," he said...

But here running through the thoughts of the Englishman and the

Italian and the Frenchman and the American alike one finds just

the same idea of a kind of officialdom in ownership. It is an

idea that pervades our thought and public discussion to-day

everywhere, and it is an idea that is scarcely traceable at all

in the thought of the early half of the nineteenth century. The

idea of service and responsibility in property has increased and

is increasing, the conception of "hold-up," the usurer's

conception of his right to be bought out of the way, fades. And

the process has been enormously enhanced by the various big-scale

experiments in temporary socialism that have been forced upon the

belligerent powers. Men of the most individualistic quality are

being educated up to the possibilities of concerted collective

action. My friend and fellow-student Y, inventor and business

organiser, who used to make the best steam omnibuses in the

world, and who is now making all sorts of things for the army,

would go pink with suspicious anger at the mere words "inspector"

or "socialism" three or four years ago. He does not do so now.

A great proportion of this sort of man, this energetic directive

sort of man in England, is thinking socialism to-day. They may

not be saying socialism, but they are thinking it. When labour

begins to realise what is adrift it will be divided between two

things: between appreciative co-operation, for which guild

socialism in particular has prepared its mind, and traditional

suspicion. I will not over to guess here which will prevail.

The impression I have of the present mental process in the

European communities is that while the official class and the

/rentier/ class is thinking very poorly and inadequately and

with a merely obstructive disposition; while the churches are

merely wasting their energies in futile self-advertisement; while

the labour mass is suspicious and disposed to make terms for

itself rather than come into any large schemes of reconstruction

that will abolish profit as a primary aim in economic life, there

is still a very considerable movement towards such a

reconstruction. Nothing is so misleading as a careless analogy.

In the dead years that followed the Napoleonic wars, which are

often quoted as a precedent for expectation now, the spirit of

collective service was near its minimum; it was never so strong

and never so manifestly spreading and increasing as it is to-day.

But service to what?

I have my own very strong preconceptions here, and since my

temperament is sanguine they necessarily colour my view. I

believe that this impulse to collective service can satisfy

itself only under the formula that mankind is one state of which

God is the undying king, and that the service of men's collective

needs is the true worship of God. But eagerly as I would grasp

at any evidence that this idea is being developed and taken up by

the general consciousness, I am quite unable to persuade myself

that anything of the sort is going on. I do perceive a search

for large forms into which the prevalent impulse to devotion can

be thrown. But the organised religious bodies, with their creeds

and badges and their instinct for self-preservation at any cost,

stand between men and their spiritual growth in just the same way

the forestallers stand between men and food. Their activities at

present are an almost intolerable nuisance. One cannot say "God"

but some tout is instantly seeking to pluck one into his

particular cave of flummery and orthodoxy. What a rational man

means by God is just God. The more you define and argue about

God the more he remains the same simple thing. Judaism,

Christianity, Islam, modern Hindu religious thought, all agree in

declaring that there is one God, master and leader of all

mankind, in unending conflict with cruelty, disorder, folly and

waste. To my mind, it follows immediately that there can be no

king, no government of any sort, which is not either a

subordinate or a rebel government, a local usurpation, in the

kingdom of God. But no organised religious body has ever had the

courage and honesty to insist upon this. They all pander to

nationalism and to powers and princes. They exists so to pander.

Every organised religion in the world exists only to exploit and

divert and waste the religious impulse in man.

This conviction that the world kingdom of God is the only true

method of human service, is so clear and final in my own mind, it

seems so inevitably the conviction to which all right-thinking

men must ultimately come, that I feel almost like a looker-on at

a game of blind-man's bluff as I watch the discussion of

synthetic political ideas. The blind man thrusts his seeking

hands into the oddest corners, he clutches at chairs and

curtains, but at last he must surely find and hold and feel over

and guess the name of the plainly visible quarry.

Some of the French and Italian people I talked to said they were

fighting for "Civilisation." That is one name for the kingdom of

God, and I have heard English people use it too. But much of the

contemporary thought of England stills wanders with its back to

the light. Most of it is pawing over jerry-built, secondary

things. I have before me a little book, the joint work of Dr.

Grey and Mr. Turner, of an ex-public schoolmaster and a

manufacturer, called /Eclipse or Empire?/ (The title

/World Might or Downfall?/ had already been secured in

another quarter.) It is a book that has been enormously

advertised; it has been almost impossible to escape its column-

long advertisements; it is billed upon the hoardings, and it is

on the whole a very able and right-spirited book. It calls for

more and better education, for more scientific methods, for less

class suspicion and more social explicitness and understanding,

for a franker and fairer treatment of labour. But why does it

call for these things? Does it call for them because they are

right? Because in accomplishing them one serves God?

Not at all. But because otherwise this strange sprawling empire

of ours will drop back into a secondary place in the world.

These two writers really seem to think that the slack workman,

the slacker wealthy man, the negligent official, the conservative

schoolmaster, the greedy usurer, the comfortable obstructive,

confronted with this alternative, terrified at this idea of

something or other called the Empire being "eclipsed," eager for

the continuance of this undefined glory over their fellow-

creatures called "Empire," will perceive the error of their ways

and become energetic, devoted, capable. They think an ideal of

that sort is going to change the daily lives of men.... I

sympathise with their purpose, and I deplore their conception of

motives. If men will not give themselves for righteousness, they

will not give themselves for a geographical score. If they will

not work well for the hatred of bad work, they will not work well

for the hatred of Germans. This "Empire" idea has been cadging

about the British empire, trying to collect enthusiasm and

devotion, since the days of Disraeli. It is, I submit, too big

for the mean-spirited, and too tawdry and limited for the fine

and generous. It leaves out the French and the Italians and the

Belgians and all our blood brotherhood of allies. It has no

compelling force in it. We British are not naturally

Imperialist; we are something greater--or something less. For

two years and a half now we have been fighting against

Imperialism in its most extravagant form. It is a poor incentive

to right living to propose to parody the devil we fight against.

The blind man must lunge again.

For when the right answer is seized it answers not only the

question why men should work for their fellow-men but also why

nation should cease to arm and plan and contrive against nation.

The social problem is only the international problem in retail,

the international problem is only the social one in gross.

My bias rules me altogether here. I see men in social, in

economic and in international affairs alike, eager to put an end

to conflict, inexpressibly weary of conflict and the waste and

pain and death it involves. But to end conflict one must abandon

aggressive or uncordial pretensions. Labour is sick at the idea

of more strikes and struggles after the war, industrialism is

sick of competition and anxious for service, everybody is sick of

war. But how can they end any of these clashes except by the

definition and recognition of a common end which will establish a

standard for the trial of every conceivable issue, to which, that

is, every other issue can be subordinated; and what common end

can there be in all the world except this idea of the world

kingdom of God? What is the good of orienting one's devotion to

a firm, or to class solidarity, or /La Republique

Francais/, or Poland, or Albania, or such love and

loyalty as people profess for King George or King Albert or the

Duc d'Orleans--it puzzles me why--or any such intermediate object

of self-abandonment? We need a standard so universal that the

platelayer may say to the barrister or the duchess, or the Red

Indian to the Limehouse sailor, or the Anzac soldier to the Sinn

Feiner or the Chinaman, "What are we two doing for it?" And to

fill the place of that "it," no other idea is great enough or

commanding enough, but only the world kingdom of God.

However long he may have to hunt, the blind man who is seeking

service and an end to bickerings will come to that at last,

because of all the thousand other things he may clutch at,

nothing else can satisfy his manifest need.

VI. THE ENDING OF THE WAR

About the end of the war there are two chief ways of thinking,

there is a simpler sort of mind which desires merely a date, and

a more complex kind which wants particulars. To the former class

belong most of the men out at the front. They are so bored by

this war that they would welcome any peace that did not

definitely admit defeat--and examine the particulars later. The

"tone" of the German army, to judge by its captured letters, is

even lower. It would welcome peace in any form. Never in the

whole history of the world has a war been so universally

unpopular as this war.

The mind of the soldier is obsessed by a vision of home-coming

for good, so vivid and alluring that it blots out nearly every

other consideration. The visions of people at home are of plenty

instead of privation, lights up, and the cessation of a hundred

tiresome restrictions. And it is natural therefore that a writer

rather given to guesses and forecasts should be asked very

frequently to guess how long the war has still to run.

All such forecasting is the very wildest of shooting. There are

the chances of war to put one out, and of a war that changes far

faster than the military intelligence. I have made various

forecasts. At the outset I thought that military Germany would

fight at about the 1899 level, would be lavish with cavalry and

great attacks, that it would be reluctant to entrench, and that

the French and British had learnt the lesson of the Boer war

better than the Germans. I trusted to the melodramatic instinct

of the Kaiser. I trusted to the quickened intelligence of the

British military caste. The first rush seemed to bear me out,

and I opened my paper day by day expecting to read of the British

and French entrenched and the Germans beating themselves to death

against wire and trenches. In those days I wrote of the French

being over the Rhine before 1915. But it was the Germans who

entrenched first.

Since then I have made some other attempts. I did not prophesy

at all in 1915, so far as I can remember. If I had I should

certainly have backed the Gallipoli attempt to win. It was the

right thing to do, and it was done abominably. It should have

given us Constantinople and brought Bulgaria to our side; it gave

us a tragic history of administrative indolence and negligence,

and wasted bravery and devotion. I was very hopeful of the

western offensive in 1915; and in 1916 I counted still on our

continuing push. I believe we were very near something like

decision this last September, but some archaic dream of doing it

with cavalry dashed these hopes. The "Tanks" arrived to late to

do their proper work, and their method of use is being worked out

very slowly.... I still believe in the western push, if only we

push it for all we are worth. If only we push it with our

brains, with our available and still unorganised brains; if only

we realise that the art of modern war is to invent and invent and

invent. Hitherto I have always hoped and looked for decision, a

complete victory that would enable the Allies to dictate peace.

But such an expectation is largely conditioned by these delicate

questions of adaptability that my tour of the front has made very

urgent in my mind. A spiteful German American writer has said

that the British would rather kill twenty thousand of their men

than break one general. Even a grain of truth in such a remark

is a very valid reasoning for lengthening one's estimate of the

duration of the war.

There can be no doubt that the Western allies are playing a

winning game upon the western front, and that this is the front

of decision now. It is not in doubt that they are beating the

Germans and shoving them back. The uncertain factor is the rate

at which they are shoving them back. If they can presently get

to so rapid an advance as to bring the average rate since July

1st up to two or three miles a day, then we shall still see the

Allies dictating terms. But if the shove drags on at its present

pace of less than a mile and four thousand prisoners a week over

the limited Somme front only, if nothing is attempted elsewhere

to increase the area of pressure, [*This was written originally

before the French offensive at Verdun.] then the intolerable

stress and boredom of the war will bring about a peace long

before the Germans are decisively crushed. But the war,

universally detested, may go on into 1918 or 1919. Food riots,

famine, and general disorganisation will come before 1920, if it

does. The Allies have a winning game before them, but they seem

unable to discover and promote the military genius needed to

harvest an unquestionable victory. In the long run this may not

be an unmixed evil. Victory, complete and dramatic, may be

bought too dearly. We need not triumphs out of this war but the

peace of the world.

This war is altogether unlike any previous war, and its ending,

like its development, will follow a course of its own. For a

time people's minds ran into the old grooves, the Germans were

going /nach Paris/ and /nach London/; Lord Curzon

filled our minds with a pleasant image of the Bombay Lancers

riding down /Unter den Linden./ But the Versailles

precedent of a council of victors dictating terms to the

vanquished is not now so evidently in men's minds. The utmost

the Allies talk upon now is to say, "We must end the war on

German soil." The Germans talk frankly of "holding out." I have

guessed that the western offensive will be chiefly on German soil

by next June; it is a mere guess, and I admit it is quite

conceivable that the "push" may still be grinding out its daily

tale of wounded and prisoners in 1918 far from that goal.

None of the combatants expected such a war as this, and the

consequence is that the world at large has no idea how to get out

of it. The war may stay with us like a schoolboy caller, because

it does not know how to go. The Italians said as much to me.

"Suppose we get to Innsbruck and Laibach and Trieste," they said,

"it isn't an end!" Lord Northcliffe, I am told, came away from

Italy with the conviction that the war would last six years.

There is the clearest evidence that nearly everyone is anxious to

get out of the war now. Nobody at all, except perhaps a few

people who may be called to account, and a handful of greedy

profit-seekers, wants to keep it going. Quietly perhaps and

unobtrusively, everyone I know is now trying to find the way out

of the war, and I am convinced that the same is the case in

Germany. That is what makes the Peace-at-any-price campaign so

exasperating. It is like being chased by clamorous geese across

a common in the direction in which you want to go. But how are

we to get out--with any credit--in such a way as to prevent a

subsequent collapse into another war as frightful?

At present three programmes are before the world of the way in

which the war can be ended. The first of these assumes a

complete predominance of our Allies. It has been stated in

general terms by Mr. Asquith. Evacuation, reparation, due

punishment of those responsible for the war, and guarantees that

nothing of the sort shall happen again. There is as yet no

mention of the nature of these guarantees. Just exactly what is

to happen to Poland, Austria, and the Turkish Empire does not

appear in this prospectus. The German Chancellor is equally

elusive. The Kaiser has stampeded the peace-at-any-price people

of Great Britain by proclaiming that Germany wants peace. We

knew that. But what sort of peace? It would seem that we are

promised vaguely evacuation and reparation on the western

frontier, and in addition there are to be guarantees--but it is

quite evident that they are altogether different guarantees from

Mr. Asquith's--that nothing of the sort is ever to happen again.

The programme of the British and their Allies seems to

contemplate something like a forcible disarmament and military

occupation of Belgium, the desertion of Serbia and Russia, and

the surrender to Germany of every facility for a later and more

successful German offensive in the west. But it is clear that on

these terms as stated the war must go on to the definite defeat

of one side or the other, or a European chaos. They are

irreconcilable sets of terms.

Yet it is hard to say how they can be modified on either side, if

the war is to be decided only between the belligerents and by

standards of national interest only, without reference to any

other considerations. Our Allies would be insane to leave the

Hohenzollern at the end of the war with a knife in his hand,

after the display he has made of his quality. To surrender his

knife means for the Hohenzollern the abandonment of his dreams,

the repudiation of the entire education and training of Germany

for half a century. When we realise the fatality of this

antagonism, we realise how it is that, in this present

anticipation of hell, the weary, wasted and tormented nations

must still sustain their monstrous dreary struggle. And that is

why this thought that possible there may be a side way out, a

sort of turning over of the present endlessly hopeless game into

a new and different and manageable game through the introduction

of some external factor, creeps and spreads as I find it creeping

and spreading.

That is what the finer intelligences of America are beginning to

realise, and why men in Europe continually turn their eyes to

America, with a surmise, with a doubt.

A point of departure for very much thinking in this matter is the

recent speech of President Wilson that heralded the present

discussion. All Europe was impressed by the truth, and by

President Wilson's recognition of the truth, that from any other

great war after this America will be unable to abstain. Can

America come into this dispute at the end to insist upon

something better than a new diplomatic patchwork, and so obviate

the later completer Armageddon? Is there, above the claims and

passions of Germany, France, Britain, and the rest of them, a

conceivable right thing to do for all mankind, that it might also

be in the interest of America to support? Is there a Third Party

solution, so to speak, which may possibly be the way out from

this war?

And further I would go on to ask, is not this present exchange of

Notes, appealing to the common sense of the world, really the

beginning, and the proper beginning, of the unprecedented Peace

Negotiations to end this unprecedented war? And, I submit, the

longer this open discussion goes on before the doors close upon

the secret peace congress the better for mankind.

Let me sketch out here what I conceive to be the essentials of a

world settlement. Some of the items are the mere commonplaces of

everyone who discusses this question; some are less frequently

insisted upon. I have been joining up one thing to another,

suggestions I have heard from this man and that, and I believe

that it is really possible to state a solution that will be

acceptable to the bulk of reasonable men all about the world.

Directly we put the panic-massacres of Dinant and Louvain, the

crime of the /Lusitania/ and so on into the category of

symptoms rather than essentials, outrages that call for special

punishments and reparations, but that do not enter further into

the ultimate settlement, we can begin to conceive a possible

world treaty. Let me state the broad outlines of this

pacification. The outlines depend one upon the other; each is a

condition of the other. It is upon these lines that the

thoughtful, as distinguished from the merely the combative

people, seem to be drifting everywhere.

In the first place, it is agreed that there would have to be an

identical treaty between all the great powers of the world

binding them to certain things. It would have to provide:---

That the few great industrial states capable of producing modern

war equipment should take over and control completely the

manufacture of all munitions of war in the world. And that they

should absolutely close the supply of such material to all the

other states in the world. This is a far easier task than many

people suppose. War has now been so developed on its mechanical

side that the question of its continuance or abolition rests now

entirely upon four or five great powers.

Next comes the League of Peace idea; that there should be an

International Tribunal for the discussion and settlement of

international disputes. That the dominating powers should

maintain land and sea forces only up to a limit agreed upon and

for internal police use only or for the purpose of enforcing the

decisions of the Tribunal. That they should all be bound to

attack and suppress any power amongst them which increases its

war equipment beyond its defined limits.

That much has already been broached in several quarters. But so

far is not enough. It ignores the chief processes of that

economic war that aids and abets and is inseparably a part of

modern international conflicts. If we are to go as far as we

have already stated in the matter of international controls, then

we must go further and provide that the International Tribunal

should have power to consider and set aside all tariffs and

localised privileges that seem grossly unfair or seriously

irritating between the various states of the world. It should

have power to pass or revise all new tariff, quarantine, alien

exclusion, or the like legislation affecting international

relations. Moreover, it should take over and extend the work of

the International Bureau of Agriculture at Rome with a view to

the control of all staple products. It should administer the sea

law of the world, and control and standardise freights in the

common interests of mankind. Without these provisions it would

be merely preventing the use of certain weapons; it would be

doing nothing to prevent countries strangling or suffocating each

other by commercial warfare. It would not abolish war.

Now upon this issue people do not seem to me to be yet thinking

very clearly. It is the exception to find anyone among the peace

talkers who really grasps how inseparably the necessity for free

access for everyone to natural products, to coal and tropical

products, e.g. free shipping at non-discriminating tariffs, and

the recognition by a Tribunal of the principle of common welfare

in trade matters, is bound up with the ideal of a permanent world

peace. But any peace that does not provide for these things will

be merely laying down of the sword in order to take up the

cudgel. And a "peace" that did not rehabilitate industrial

Belgium, Poland, and the north of France would call imperatively

for the imposition upon the Allies of a system of tariffs in the

interests of these countries, and for a bitter economic "war

after the war" against Germany. That restoration is, of course,

an implicit condition to any attempt to set up an economic peace

in the world.

These things being arranged for the future, it would be further

necessary to set up an International Boundary Commission, subject

to certain defining conditions agreed upon by the belligerents,

to re-draw the map of Europe, Asia, and Africa. This war does

afford an occasion such as the world may never have again of

tracing out the "natural map" of mankind, the map that will

secure the maximum of homogeneity and the minimum of racial and

economic freedom. All idealistic people hope for a restored

Poland. But it is a childish thing to dream of a contented

Poland with Posen still under the Prussian heel, with Cracow cut

off, and without a Baltic port. These claims of Poland to

completeness have a higher sanction than the mere give and take

of belligerents in congress.

Moreover this International Tribunal, if it was indeed to prevent

war, would need also to have power to intervene in the affairs of

any country or region in a state of open and manifest disorder,

for the protection of foreign travellers and of persons and

interests localised in that country but foreign to it.

Such an agreement as I have here sketched out would at once lift

international politics out of the bloody and hopeless squalor of

the present conflict. It is, I venture to assert, the peace of

the reasonable man in any country whatever. But it needs the

attention of such a disengaged people as the American people to

work it out and supply it with--weight. It needs putting before

the world with some sort of authority greater than its mere

entire reasonableness. Otherwise it will not come before the

minds of ordinary men with the effect of a practicable

proposition. I do not see any such plant springing from the

European battlefields. It is America's supreme opportunity. And

yet it is the common sense of the situation, and the solution

that must satisfy a rational German as completely as a rational

Frenchman or Englishman. It has nothing against it but the

prejudice against new and entirely novel things.

In throwing out the suggestion that America should ultimately

undertake the responsibility of proposing a world peace

settlement, I admit that I run counter to a great deal of

European feeling. Nowhere in Europe now do people seem to be in

love with the United States. But feeling is a colour that

passes. And the question is above matters of feeling. Whether

the belligerents dislike Americans or the Americans dislike the

belligerents is an incidental matter. The main question is of

the duty of a great and fortunate nation towards the rest of the

world and the future of mankind.

I do not know how far Americans are aware of the trend of feeling

in Europe at the present time. Both France and Great Britain

have a sense of righteousness in this war such as no nation, no

people, has ever felt in war before. We know we are fighting to

save all the world from the rule of force and the unquestioned

supremacy of the military idea. Few Frenchmen or Englishmen can

imagine the war presenting itself to an American intelligence

under any other guise. At the invasion of Belgium we were

astonished that America did nothing. At the sinking of the

/Lusitania/ all Europe looked to America. The British mind

contemplates the spectacle of American destroyers acting as

bottleholders to German submarines with a dazzled astonishment.

"Manila," we gasp. In England we find excuses for America in our

own past. In '64 we betrayed Denmark; in '70 we deserted France.

The French have not these memories. They do not understand the

damning temptations of those who feel they are "/au-dessus de

la melee./" They believe they had some share in

the independence of America, that there is a sacred cause in

republicanism, that there are grounds for a peculiar sympathy

between France and the United States in republican institutions.

They do not realise that Germany and America have a common

experience in recent industrial development, and a common belief

in the "degeneracy" of all nations with a lower rate of trade

expansion. They do not realise how a political campaign with the

slogan of "Peace and a Full Dinner-Pail" looks in the middle

west, what an honest, simple, rational appeal it makes there.

Atmospheres alter values. In Europe, strung up to tragic and

majestic issues, to Europe gripping a gigantic evil in a death

struggle, that would seem an inscription worthy of a pigsty. A

child in Europe would know now that the context is, "until the

bacon-buyer calls," and it is difficult to realise that adult

citizens in America may be incapable of realising that obvious

context.

I set these things down plainly. There is a very strong

disposition in all the European countries to believe America

fundamentally indifferent to the rights and wrongs of the

European struggle; sentimentally interested perhaps, but

fundamentally indifferent. President Wilson is regarded as a

mere academic sentimentalist by a great number of Europeans.

There is a very widespread disposition to treat America lightly

and contemptuously, to believe that America, as one man put it to

me recently, "hasn't the heart to do anything great or the guts

to do anything wicked." There is a strong undercurrent of

hostility therefore to the idea of America having any voice

whatever in the final settlement after the war. It is not for a

British writer to analyse the appearance that have thus affected

American world prestige. I am telling what I have observed.

Let me relate two trivial anecdotes.

X came to my hotel in Paris one day to take me to see a certain

munitions organisation. He took from his pocket a picture

postcard that had been sent him by a well-meaning American

acquaintance from America. It bore a portrait of General

Lafayette, and under it was printed the words, "General

Lafayette, /Colonel in the United States army./"

"Oh! These Americans!" said X with a gesture.

And as I returned to Paris from the French front, our train

stopped at some intermediate station alongside of another train

of wounded men. Exactly opposite our compartment was a car. It

arrested our conversation. It was, as it were, an ambulance

/de grand luxe/; it was a thing of very light, bright wood

and very golden decorations; at one end of it was painted very

large and fair the Stars and Stripes, and at the other fair-sized

letters of gold proclaimed--I am sure the lady will not resent

this added gleam of publicity--"Presented by Mrs. William

Vanderbilt."

My companions were French writers and French military men, and

they were discussing with very keen interest that persistent

question, "the ideal battery." But that ambulance sent a shaft

of light into our carriage, and we stared together.

Then Colonel Z pointed with two fingers and remarked to us,

without any excess of admiration:

"/America!/"

Then he shrugged his shoulders and pulled down the corners of his

mouth.

We felt there was nothing more to add to that, and after a little

pause the previous question was resumed.

I state these things in order to make it clear that America will

start at a disadvantage when she starts upon the mission of

salvage and reconciliation which is, I believe, her proper

role in this world conflict. One would have to be blind

and deaf on this side to be ignorant of European persuasion of

America's triviality. I would not like to be an American

travelling in Europe now, and those I meet here and there have

some of the air of men who at any moment may be dunned for a

debt. They explode without provocation into excuses and

expostulations.

And I will further confess that when Viscount Grey answered the

intimations of President Wilson and ex-President Taft of an

American initiative to found a World League for Peace, by asking

if America was prepared to back that idea with force, he spoke

the doubts of all thoughtful European men. No one but an

American deeply versed in the idiosyncrasies of the American

population can answer that question, or tell us how far the

delusion of world isolation which has prevailed in America for

several generations has been dispelled. But if the answer to

Lord Grey is "Yes," then I think history will emerge with a

complete justification of the obstinate maintenance of neutrality

by America. It is the end that reveals a motive. It is our

ultimate act that sometimes teaches us our original intention.

No one can judge the United States yet. Were you neutral because

you are too mean and cowardly, or too stupidly selfish, or

because you had in view an end too great to be sacrificed to a

moment of indignant pride and a force in reserve too precious to

dispel? That is the still open question for America.

Every country is a mixture of many strands. There is a Base

America, there is a Dull America, there is an Ideal and Heroic

America. And I am convinced that at present Europe underrates

and misjudges the possibilities of the latter.

All about the world to-day goes a certain freemasonry of thought.

It is an impalpable and hardly conscious union of intention. It

thinks not in terms of national but human experience; it falls

into directions and channels of thinking that lead inevitably to

the idea of a world-state under the rule of one righteousness.

In no part of the world is this modern type of mind so abundantly

developed, less impeded by antiquated and perverse political and

religious forms, and nearer the sources of political and

administrative power, than in America. It does not seem to

matter what thousand other things America may happen to be,

seeing that it is also that. And so, just as I cling to the

belief, in spite of hundreds of adverse phenomena, that the

religious and social stir of these times must ultimately go far

to unify mankind under the kingship of God, so do I cling also to

the persuasion that there are intellectual forces among the

rational elements in the belligerent centres, among the other

neutrals and in America, that will co-operate in enabling the

United States to play that role of the Unimpassioned Third

Party, which becomes more and more necessary to a generally

satisfactory ending of the war.

The idea that the settlement of this war must be what one might

call an unimpassioned settlement or, if you will, a scientific

settlement or a judicial and not a treaty settlement, a

settlement, that is, based upon some conception of what is right

and necessary rather than upon the relative success or failure of

either set of belligerents to make its Will the standard of

decision, is one that, in a great variety of forms and partial

developments, I find gaining ground in the most different

circles. The war was an adventure, it was the German adventure

under the Hohenzollern tradition, to dominate the world. It was

to be the last of the Conquests. It has failed. Without calling

upon the reserve strength of America the civilised world has

defeated it, and the war continues now partly upon the issue

whether it shall be made for ever impossible, and partly because

Germany has no organ but its Hohenzollern organisation through

which it can admit its failure and develop its latent readiness

for a new understanding on lines of mutual toleration. For that

purpose nothing more reluctant could be devised than Hohenzollern

imperialism. But the attention of every new combatant--it is not

only Germany now--has been concentrated upon military

necessities; every nation is a clenched nation, with its powers

of action centred in its own administration, bound by many

strategic threats and declarations, and dominated by the idea of

getting and securing advantages. It is inevitable that a

settlement made in a conference of belligerents alone will be

shortsighted, harsh, limited by merely incidental necessities,

and obsessed by the idea of hostilities and rivalries continuing

perennially; it will be a trading of advantages for subsequent

attacks. It will be a settlement altogether different in effect

as well as in spirit from a world settlement made primarily to

establish a new phase in the history of mankind.

Let me take three instances of the impossibility of complete

victory /on either side/ giving a solution satisfactory to

the conscience and intelligence of reasonable men.

The first--on which I will not expatiate, for everyone knows of

its peculiar difficulty--is Poland.

The second is a little one, but one that has taken hold of my

imagination. In the settlement of boundaries preceding this war

the boundary between Serbia and north-eastern Albania was drawn

with an extraordinary disregard of the elementary needs of the

Albanians of that region. It ran along the foot of the mountains

which form their summer pastures and their refuge from attack,

and it cut their mountains off from their winter pastures and

market towns. Their whole economic life was cut to pieces and

existence rendered intolerable for them. Now an intelligent

Third Party settling Europe would certainly restore these market

towns, Ipek, Jakova, and Prisrend, to Albania. But the Albanians

have no standing in this war; theirs is the happy lot that might

have fallen to Belgium had she not resisted; the war goes to and

fro through Albania; and when the settlement comes, it is highly

improbable that the slightest notice will be taken of Albania's

plight in the region. In which case these particular Albanians

will either be driven into exile to America or they will be

goaded to revolt, which will be followed no doubt by the punitive

procedure usual in the Balkan peninsula.

For my third instance I would step from a matter as small as

three market towns and the grazing of a few thousand head of

sheep to a matter as big as the world. What is going to happen

to the shipping of the world after this war? The Germans, with

that combination of cunning and stupidity which baffles the rest

of mankind, have set themselves to destroy the mercantile marine

not merely of Britain and France but of Norway and Sweden,

Holland, and all the neutral countries. The German papers openly

boast that they are building up a big mercantile marine that will

start out to take up the world's overseas trade directly peace is

declared. Every such boast receives careful attention in the

British press. We have heard a very great deal about the German

will-to-power in this war, but there is something very much older

and tougher and less blatant and conspicuous, the British will.

In the British papers there has appeared and gained a permanent

footing this phrase, "ton for ton." This means that Britain will

go on fighting until she has exacted and taken over from Germany

the exact equivalent of all the British shipping Germany has

submarined. People do not realise that a time may come when

Germany will be glad and eager to give Russia, France and Italy

all that they require of her, when Great Britain may be quite

content to let her allies make an advantageous peace and herself

still go on fighting Germany. She does not intend to let that

furtively created German mercantile marine ship or coal or exist

upon the high seas--so long as it can be used as an economic

weapon against her. Neither Britain nor France nor Italy can

tolerate anything of the sort.

It has been the peculiar boast of Great Britain that her shipping

has been unpatriotic. She has been the impartial carrier of the

whole world. Her shippers may have served their own profit; they

have never served hers. The fluctuations of freight charges may

have been a universal nuisance, but they have certainly not been

an aggressive national conspiracy. It is Britain's case against

any German ascendancy at sea, an entirely convincing case, that

such an ascendancy would be used ruthlessly for the advancement

of German world power. The long-standing freedom of the seas

vanishes at the German touch. So beyond the present war there

opens the agreeable prospect of a mercantile struggle, a bitter

freight war and a war of Navigation Acts for the ultimate control

in the interests of Germany or of the Anti-German allies, of the

world's trade.

Now how in any of these three cases can the bargaining and

trickery of diplomatists and the advantage-hunting of the

belligerents produce any stable and generally beneficial

solution? What all the neutrals want, what every rational and

far-sighted man in the belligerent countries wants, what the

common sense of the whole world demands, is neither the

"ascendancy" of Germany nor the "ascendancy" of Great Britain nor

the "ascendancy" of any state or people or interest in the

shipping of the world. The plain right thing is a world shipping

control, as impartial as the Postal Union. What right and reason

and the welfare of coming generations demand in Poland is a

unified and autonomous Poland, with Cracow, Danzig, and Posen

brought into the same Polish-speaking ring-fence with Warsaw.

What everyone who has looked into the Albanian question desires

is that the Albanians shall pasture their flocks and market their

sheepskins in peace, free of Serbian control. In every country

at present at war, the desire of the majority of people is for a

non-contentious solution that will neither crystallise a triumph

nor propitiate an enemy, but which will embody the economic and

ethnological and geographical common sense of the matter. But

while the formulae of national belligerence are easy,

familiar, blatant, and instantly present, the gentler, greater

formulae of that wider and newer world pacifism has still to

be generally understood. It is so much easier to hate and

suspect than negotiate generously and patiently; it is so much

harder to think than to let go in a shrill storm of hostility.

The rational pacifist is hampered not only by belligerency, but

by a sort of malignant extreme pacifism as impatient and silly as

the extremest patriotism.

I sketch out these ideas of a world pacification from a third-

party standpoint, because I find them crystallising out in men's

minds. I note how men discuss the suggestion that America may

play a large part in such a permanent world pacification. There

I end my account rendered. These things are as much a part of my

impression of the war as a shell-burst on the Carso or the yellow

trenches at Martinpuich. But I do not know how opinion is going

in America, and I am quite unable to estimate the power of these

new ideas I set down, relative to the blind forces of instinct

and tradition that move the mass of mankind. On the whole I

believe more in the reason-guided will-power of men than I did in

the early half of 1914. If I am doubtful whether after all this

war will "end war," I think on the other hand it has had such an

effect of demonstration that it may start a process of thought

and conviction, it may sow the world with organisations and

educational movements considerable enough to grapple with an

either arrest or prevent the next great war catastrophe. I am by

no means sure even now that this is not the last great war in the

experience of men. I still believe it may be.

The most dangerous thing in the business so far is concerned is

the wide disregard of the fact that national economic fighting is

bound to cause war, and the almost universal ignorance of the

necessity of subjecting shipping and overseas and international

trade to some kind of international control. These two things,

restraint of trade and advantage of shipping, are the chief

material causes of anger between modern states. But they would

not be in themselves dangerous things if it were not for the

exaggerated delusions of kind and difference, and the crack-

brained "loyalties" arising out of these, that seem still to rule

men's minds. Years ago I came to the conviction that much of the

evil in human life was due to the inherent vicious disposition of

the human mind to intensify classification.[*See my "First and

Last Things," Book I. and my "Modern Utopia," Chapter X.] I do

not know how it will strike the reader, but to me this war, this

slaughter of eight or nine million people, is due almost entirely

to this little, almost universal lack of clear-headedness; I

believe that the share of wickedness in making war is quite

secondary to the share of this universal shallow silliness of

outlook. These effigies of emperors and kings and statesmen that

lead men into war, these legends of nationality and glory, would

collapse before our universal derision, if they were not stuffed

tight and full with the unthinking folly of the common man.

There is in all of us an indolent capacity for suffering evil and

dangerous things, that I contemplate each year of my life with a

deepening incredulity. I perceive we suffer them; I record the

futile protests of the intelligence. It seems to me incredible

that men should not rise up out of this muddy, bloody, wasteful

mess of a world war, with a resolution to end for ever the shams,

the prejudices, the pretences and habits that have impoverished

their lives, slaughtered our sons, and wasted the world, a

resolution so powerful and sustained that nothing could withstand

it.

But it is not apparent that any such will arises. Does it appear

at all? I find it hard to answer that question because my own

answer varies with my mood. There are moods when it seems to me

that nothing of the sort is happening. This war has written its

warning in letters of blood and flame and anguish in the skies of

mankind for two years and a half. When I look for the collective

response to that warning, I see a multitude of little chaps

crawling about their private ends like mites in an old cheese.

The kings are still in their places, not a royal prince has been

killed in this otherwise universal slaughter; when the fatuous

portraits of the monarchs flash upon the screen the widows and

orphans still break into loyal song. The ten thousand religions

of mankind are still ten thousand religions, all busy at keeping

men apart and hostile. I see scarcely a measurable step made

anywhere towards that world kingdom of God, which is, I assert,

the manifest solution, the only formula that can bring peace to

all mankind. Mankind as a whole seems to have learnt nothing and

forgotten nothing in thirty months of war.

And then on the other hand I am aware of much quiet talking.

This book tells of how I set out to see the war, and it is

largely conversation.... Perhaps men have always expected

miracles to happen; if one had always lived in the night and only

heard tell of the day, I suppose one would have expected dawn to

come as a vivid flash of light. I suppose one would still think

it was night long after the things about one had crept out of the

darkness into visibility. In comparison with all previous wars

there has been much more thinking and much more discussion. If

most of the talk seems to be futile, if it seems as if everyone

were talking and nobody doing, it does not follow that things are

not quietly slipping and sliding out of their old adjustments

amidst the babble and because of the babble. Multitudes of men

must be struggling with new ideas. It is reasonable to argue

that there must be reconsideration, there must be time, before

these millions of mental efforts can develop into a new

collective purpose and really /show/--in consequences.

But that they will do so is my hope always and, on the whole,

except in moods of depression and impatience, my belief. When

one has travelled to a conviction so great as mine it is

difficult to doubt that other men faced by the same universal

facts will not come to the same conclusion. I believe that only

through a complete simplification o religion to its fundamental

idea, to a world-wide realisation of God as the king of the heart

and of all mankind, setting aside monarchy and national egotism

altogether, can mankind come to any certain happiness and

security. The precedent of Islam helps my faith in the creative

inspiration of such a renascence of religion. The Sikh, the

Moslem, the Puritan have shown that men can fight better for a

Divine Idea than for any flag or monarch in the world. It seems

to me that illusions fade and effigies lose credit everywhere.

It is a very wonderful thing to me that China is now a

republic.... I take myself to be very nearly an average man,

abnormal only by reason of a certain mental rapidity. I conceive

myself to be thinking as the world thinks, and if I find no great

facts, I find a hundred little indications to reassure me that

God comes. Even those who have neither the imagination nor the

faith to apprehend God as a reality will, I think, realise

presently that the Kingdom of God over a world-wide system of

republican states, is the only possible formula under which we

may hope to unify and save mankind.

End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of War and the Future by H. G. Wells