WAR

In shaping anticipations of the future of war there arises a certain

difficulty about the point of departure. One may either begin upon such

broad issues as the preceding forecasts have opened, and having

determined now something of the nature of the coming State and the force

of its warlike inclination, proceed to speculate how this vast

ill-organized fourfold organism will fight; or one may set all that

matter aside for a space, and having regard chiefly to the continually

more potent appliances physical science offers the soldier, we may try

to develop a general impression of theoretically thorough war, go from

that to the nature of the State most likely to be superlatively

efficient in such warfare, and so arrive at the conditions of survival

under which these present governments of confusion will struggle one

against the other. The latter course will be taken here. We will deal

first of all with war conducted for its own sake, with a model army, as

efficient as an imaginative training can make it, and with a model

organization for warfare of the State behind it, and then the

experience of the confused modern social organism as it is impelled, in

an uncongenial metamorphosis, towards this imperative and finally

unavoidable efficient state, will come most easily within the scope of

one's imagination.

The great change that is working itself out in warfare is the same

change that is working itself out in the substance of the social fabric.

The essential change in the social fabric, as we have analyzed it, is

the progressive supersession of the old broad labour base by elaborately

organized mechanism, and the obsolescence of the once valid and

necessary distinction of gentle and simple. In warfare, as I have

already indicated, this takes the form of the progressive supersession

of the horse and the private soldier--which were the living and sole

engines of the old time--by machines, and the obliteration of the old

distinction between leaders, who pranced in a conspicuously dangerous

and encouraging way into the picturesque incidents of battle, and the

led, who cheered and charged and filled the ditches and were slaughtered

in a wholesale dramatic manner. The old war was a matter of long dreary

marches, great hardships of campaigning, but also of heroic conclusive

moments. Long periods of campings--almost always with an outbreak of

pestilence--of marchings and retreats, much crude business of feeding

and forage, culminated at last, with an effect of infinite relief, in

an hour or so of "battle." The battle was always a very intimate

tumultuous affair, the men were flung at one another in vast excited

masses, in living fighting machines as it were, spears or bayonets

flashed, one side or the other ceased to prolong the climax, and the

thing was over. The beaten force crumpled as a whole, and the victors as

a whole pressed upon it. Cavalry with slashing sabres marked the

crowning point of victory. In the later stages of the old warfare

musketry volleys were added to the physical impact of the contending

regiments, and at last cannon, as a quite accessory method of breaking

these masses of men. So you "gave battle" to and defeated your enemy's

forces wherever encountered, and when you reached your objective in his

capital the war was done.... The new war will probably have none of

these features of the old system of fighting.

The revolution that is in progress from the old war to a new war,

different in its entire nature from the old, is marked primarily by the

steady progress in range and efficiency of the rifle and of the

field-gun--and more particularly of the rifle. The rifle develops

persistently from a clumsy implement, that any clown may learn to use in

half a day, towards a very intricate mechanism, easily put out of order

and easily misused, but of the most extraordinary possibilities in the

hands of men of courage, character, and high intelligence. Its precision

at long range has made the business of its care, loading and aim

subsidiary to the far more intricate matter of its use in relation to

the contour of the ground within its reach. Even its elaboration as an

instrument is probably still incomplete. One can conceive it provided in

the future with cross-thread telescopic sights, the focussing of which,

corrected by some ingenious use of hygroscopic material, might even find

the range, and so enable it to be used with assurance up to a mile or

more. It will probably also take on some of the characters of the

machine-gun. It will be used either for single shots or to quiver and

send a spray of almost simultaneous bullets out of a magazine evenly and

certainly, over any small area the rifleman thinks advisable. It will

probably be portable by one man, but there is no reason really, except

the bayonet tradition, the demands of which may be met in other ways,

why it should be the instrument of one sole man. It will, just as

probably, be slung with its ammunition and equipment upon bicycle

wheels, and be the common care of two or more associated soldiers.

Equipped with such a weapon, a single couple of marksmen even, by reason

of smokeless powder and carefully chosen cover, might make themselves

practically invisible, and capable of surprising, stopping, and

destroying a visible enemy in quite considerable numbers who blundered

within a mile of them. And a series of such groups of marksmen so

arranged as to cover the arrival of reliefs, provisions, and fresh

ammunition from the rear, might hold out against any visible attack for

an indefinite period, unless the ground they occupied was searched very

ably and subtly by some sort of gun having a range in excess of their

rifle fire. If the ground they occupied were to be properly tunnelled

and trenched, even that might not avail, and there would be nothing for

it but to attack them by an advance under cover either of the night or

of darkness caused by smoke-shells, or by the burning of cover about

their position. Even then they might be deadly with magazine fire at

close quarters. Save for their liability to such attacks, a few hundreds

of such men could hold positions of a quite vast extent, and a few

thousand might hold a frontier. Assuredly a mere handful of such men

could stop the most multitudinous attack or cover the most disorderly

retreat in the world, and even when some ingenious, daring, and lucky

night assault had at last ejected them from a position, dawn would

simply restore to them the prospect of reconstituting in new positions

their enormous advantage of defence.

The only really effective and final defeat such an attenuated force of

marksmen could sustain, would be from the slow and circumspect advance

upon it of a similar force of superior marksmen, creeping forward under

cover of night or of smoke-shells and fire, digging pits during the

snatches of cessation obtained in this way, and so coming nearer and

nearer and getting a completer and completer mastery of the defender's

ground until the approach of the defender's reliefs, food, and fresh

ammunition ceased to be possible. Thereupon there would be nothing for

it but either surrender or a bolt in the night to positions in the rear,

a bolt that might be hotly followed if it were deferred too late.

Probably between contiguous nations that have mastered the art of war,

instead of the pouring clouds of cavalry of the old dispensation,[37]

this will be the opening phase of the struggle, a vast duel all along

the frontier between groups of skilled marksmen, continually being

relieved and refreshed from the rear. For a time quite possibly there

will be no definite army here or there, there will be no controllable

battle, there will be no Great General in the field at all. But

somewhere far in the rear the central organizer will sit at the

telephonic centre of his vast front, and he will strengthen here and

feed there and watch, watch perpetually the pressure, the incessant

remorseless pressure that is seeking to wear down his countervailing

thrust. Behind the thin firing line that is actually engaged, the

country for many miles will be rapidly cleared and devoted to the

business of war, big machines will be at work making second, third, and

fourth lines of trenches that may be needed if presently the firing line

is forced back, spreading out transverse paths for the swift lateral

movement of the cyclists who will be in perpetual alertness to relieve

sudden local pressures, and all along those great motor roads our first

"Anticipations" sketched, there will be a vast and rapid shifting to and

fro of big and very long range guns. These guns will probably be fought

with the help of balloons. The latter will hang above the firing line

all along the front, incessantly ascending and withdrawn; they will be

continually determining the distribution of the antagonist's forces,

directing the fire of continually shifting great guns upon the apparatus

and supports in the rear of his fighting line, forecasting his night

plans and seeking some tactical or strategic weakness in that sinewy

line of battle.

It will be evident that such warfare as this inevitable precision of gun

and rifle forces upon humanity, will become less and less dramatic as a

whole, more and more as a whole a monstrous thrust and pressure of

people against people. No dramatic little general spouting his troops

into the proper hysterics for charging, no prancing merely brave

officers, no reckless gallantry or invincible stubbornness of men will

suffice. For the commander-in-chief on a picturesque horse sentimentally

watching his "boys" march past to death or glory in battalions, there

will have to be a loyal staff of men, working simply, earnestly, and

subtly to keep the front tight, and at the front, every little isolated

company of men will have to be a council of war, a little conspiracy

under the able man its captain, as keen and individual as a football

team, conspiring against the scarcely seen company of the foe over

yonder. The battalion commander will be replaced in effect by the

organizer of the balloons and guns by which his few hundreds of splendid

individuals will be guided and reinforced. In the place of hundreds of

thousands of more or less drunken and untrained young men marching into

battle--muddle-headed, sentimental, dangerous and futile

hobbledehoys--there will be thousands of sober men braced up to their

highest possibilities, intensely doing their best; in the place of

charging battalions, shattering impacts of squadrons and wide

harvest-fields of death, there will be hundreds of little rifle battles

fought up to the hilt, gallant dashes here, night surprises there, the

sudden sinister faint gleam of nocturnal bayonets, brilliant guesses

that will drop catastrophic shell and death over hills and forests

suddenly into carelessly exposed masses of men. For eight miles on

either side of the firing lines--whose fire will probably never

altogether die away while the war lasts--men will live and eat and sleep

under the imminence of unanticipated death.... Such will be the opening

phase of the war that is speedily to come.

And behind the thin firing line on either side a vast multitude of

people will be at work; indeed, the whole mass of the efficients in the

State will have to be at work, and most of them will be simply at the

same work or similar work to that done in peace time--only now as

combatants upon the lines of communication. The organized staffs of the

big road managements, now become a part of the military scheme, will be

deporting women and children and feeble people and bringing up supplies

and supports; the doctors will be dropping from their civil duties into

pre-appointed official places, directing the feeding and treatment of

the shifting masses of people and guarding the valuable manhood of the

fighting apparatus most sedulously from disease;[38] the engineers will

be entrenching and bringing up a vast variety of complicated and

ingenious apparatus designed to surprise and inconvenience the enemy in

novel ways; the dealers in food and clothing, the manufacturers of all

sorts of necessary stuff, will be converted by the mere declaration of

war into public servants; a practical realization of socialistic

conceptions will quite inevitably be forced upon the fighting State. The

State that has not incorporated with its fighting organization all its

able-bodied manhood and all its material substance, its roads, vehicles,

engines, foundries, and all its resources of food and clothing; the

State which at the outbreak of war has to bargain with railway and

shipping companies, replace experienced station-masters by inexperienced

officers, and haggle against alien interests for every sort of supply,

will be at an overwhelming disadvantage against a State which has

emerged from the social confusion of the present time, got rid of every

vestige of our present distinction between official and governed, and

organized every element in its being.

I imagine that in this ideal war as compared with the war of to-day,

there will be a very considerable restriction of the rights of the

non-combatant. A large part of existing International Law involves a

curious implication, a distinction between the belligerent government

and its accredited agents in warfare and the general body of its

subjects. There is a disposition to treat the belligerent government, in

spite of the democratic status of many States, as not fully representing

its people, to establish a sort of world-citizenship in the common mass

outside the official and military class. Protection of the non-combatant

and his property comes at last--in theory at least--within a measurable

distance of notice boards: "Combatants are requested to keep off the

grass." This disposition I ascribe to a recognition of that obsolescence

and inadequacy of the formal organization of States, which has already

been discussed in this book. It was a disposition that was strongest

perhaps in the earliest decades of the nineteenth century, and stronger

now than, in the steady and irresistible course of strenuous and

universal military preparation, it is likely to be in the future. In our

imaginary twentieth century State, organized primarily for war, this

tendency to differentiate a non-combatant mass in the fighting State

will certainly not be respected, the State will be organized as a whole

to fight as a whole, it will have triumphantly asserted the universal

duty of its citizens. The military force will be a much ampler

organization than the "army" of to-day, it will be not simply the fists

but the body and brain of the land. The whole apparatus, the whole staff

engaged in internal communication, for example, may conceivably not be

State property and a State service, but if it is not it will assuredly

be as a whole organized as a volunteer force, that may instantly become

a part of the machinery of defence or aggression at the outbreak of

war.[39] The men may very conceivably not have a uniform, for military

uniforms are simply one aspect of this curious and transitory phase of

restriction, but they will have their orders and their universal plan.

As the bells ring and the recording telephones click into every house

the news that war has come, there will be no running to and fro upon the

public ways, no bawling upon the moving platforms of the central urban

nuclei, no crowds of silly useless able-bodied people gaping at

inflammatory transparencies outside the offices of sensational papers

because the egregious idiots in control of affairs have found them no

better employment. Every man will be soberly and intelligently setting

about the particular thing he has to do--even the rich shareholding sort

of person, the hereditary mortgager of society, will be given something

to do, and if he has learnt nothing else he will serve to tie up parcels

of ammunition or pack army sausage. Very probably the best of such

people and of the speculative class will have qualified as cyclist

marksmen for the front, some of them may even have devoted the leisure

of peace to military studies and may be prepared with novel weapons.

Recruiting among the working classes--or, more properly speaking, among

the People of the Abyss--will have dwindled to the vanishing point;

people who are no good for peace purposes are not likely to be any good

in such a grave and complicated business as modern war. The spontaneous

traffic of the roads in peace, will fall now into two streams, one of

women and children coming quietly and comfortably out of danger, the

other of men and material going up to the front. There will be no

panics, no hardships, because everything will have been amply

pre-arranged--we are dealing with an ideal State. Quietly and

tremendously that State will have gripped its adversary and tightened

its muscles--that is all.

Now the strategy of this new sort of war in its opening phase will

consist mainly in very rapid movements of guns and men behind that thin

screen of marksmen, in order to deal suddenly and unexpectedly some

forcible blow, to snatch at some position into which guns and men may be

thrust to outflank and turn the advantage of the ground against some

portion of the enemy's line. The game will be largely to crowd and

crumple that line, to stretch it over an arc to the breaking point, to

secure a position from which to shell and destroy its supports and

provisions, and to capture or destroy its guns and apparatus, and so

tear it away from some town or arsenal it has covered. And a factor of

primary importance in this warfare, because of the importance of seeing

the board, a factor which will be enormously stimulated to develop in

the future, will be the aerial factor. Already we have seen the captive

balloon as an incidental accessory of considerable importance even in

the wild country warfare of South Africa. In the warfare that will go on

in the highly-organized European States of the opening century, the

special military balloon used in conjunction with guns, conceivably of

small calibre but of enormous length and range, will play a part of

quite primary importance. These guns will be carried on vast mechanical

carriages, possibly with wheels of such a size as will enable them to

traverse almost all sorts of ground.[40] The aeronauts, provided with

large scale maps of the hostile country, will mark down to the gunners

below the precise point upon which to direct their fire, and over hill

and dale the shell will fly--ten miles it may be--to its billet, camp,

massing night attack, or advancing gun.

Great multitudes of balloons will be the Argus eyes of the entire

military organism, stalked eyes with a telephonic nerve in each stalk,

and at night they will sweep the country with search-lights and come

soaring before the wind with hanging flares. Certainly they will be

steerable. Moreover, when the wind admits, there will be freely-moving

steerable balloons wagging little flags to their friends below. And so

far as the resources of the men on the ground go, the balloons will be

almost invulnerable. The mere perforation of balloons with shot does

them little harm, and the possibility of hitting a balloon that is

drifting about at a practically unascertainable distance and height so

precisely as to blow it to pieces with a timed shell, and to do this in

the little time before it is able to give simple and precise

instructions as to your range and position to the unseen gunners it

directs, is certainly one of the most difficult and trying undertakings

for an artilleryman that one can well imagine. I am inclined to think

that the many considerations against a successful attack on balloons

from the ground, will enormously stimulate enterprise and invention in

the direction of dirigible aerial devices that can fight. Few people, I

fancy, who know the work of Langley, Lilienthal, Pilcher, Maxim, and

Chanute, but will be inclined to believe that long before the year A.D.

2000, and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane will have

soared and come home safe and sound. Directly that is accomplished the

new invention will be most assuredly applied to war.

The nature of the things that will ultimately fight in the sky is a

matter for curious speculation. We begin with the captive balloon.

Against that the navigable balloon will presently operate. I am inclined

to think the practicable navigable balloon will be first attained by the

use of a device already employed by Nature in the swimming-bladder of

fishes. This is a closed gas-bag that can be contracted or expanded. If

a gas-bag of thin, strong, practically impervious substance could be

enclosed in a net of closely interlaced fibres (interlaced, for example,

on the pattern of the muscles of the bladder in mammals), the ends of

these fibres might be wound and unwound, and the effect of contractility

attained. A row of such contractile balloons, hung over a long car which

was horizontally expanded into wings, would not only allow that car to

rise and fall at will, but if the balloon at one end were contracted

and that at the other end expanded, and the intermediate ones allowed to

assume intermediate conditions, the former end would drop, the expanded

wings would be brought into a slanting condition over a smaller area of

supporting air, and the whole apparatus would tend to glide downwards in

that direction. The projection of a small vertical plane upon either

side would make the gliding mass rotate in a descending spiral, and so

we have all the elements of a controllable flight. Such an affair would

be difficult to overset. It would be able to beat up even in a fair

wind, and then it would be able to contract its bladders and fall down a

long slant in any direction. From some such crude beginning a form like

a soaring, elongated, flat-brimmed hat might grow, and the possibilities

of adding an engine-driven screw are obvious enough.

It is difficult to see how such a contrivance could carry guns of any

calibre unless they fired from the rear in the line of flight. The

problem of recoil becomes a very difficult one in aerial tactics. It

would probably have at most a small machine-gun or so, which might fire

an explosive shell at the balloons of the enemy, or kill their aeronauts

with distributed bullets. The thing would be a sort of air-shark, and

one may even venture to picture something of the struggle the deadlocked

marksmen of 1950, lying warily in their rifle-pits, will see.

One conceives them at first, each little hole with its watchful,

well-equipped couple of assassins, turning up their eyes in expectation.

The wind is with our enemy, and his captive balloons have been

disagreeably overhead all through the hot morning. His big guns have

suddenly become nervously active. Then, a little murmur along the pits

and trenches, and from somewhere over behind us, this air-shark drives

up the sky. The enemy's balloons splutter a little, retract, and go

rushing down, and we send a spray of bullets as they drop. Then against

our aerostat, and with the wind driving them clean overhead of us, come

the antagonistic flying-machines. I incline to imagine there will be a

steel prow with a cutting edge at either end of the sort of aerostat I

foresee, and conceivably this aerial ram will be the most important

weapon of the affair. When operating against balloons, such a

fighting-machine will rush up the air as swiftly as possible, and then,

with a rapid contraction of its bladders, fling itself like a knife at

the sinking war-balloon of the foe. Down, down, down, through a vast

alert tension of flight, down it will swoop, and, if its stoop is

successful, slash explosively at last through a suffocating moment.

Rifles will crack, ropes tear and snap; there will be a rending and

shouting, a great thud of liberated gas, and perhaps a flare. Quite

certainly those flying machines will carry folded parachutes, and the

last phase of many a struggle will be the desperate leap of the

aeronauts with these in hand, to snatch one last chance of life out of

a mass of crumpling, fallen wreckage.

But in such a fight between flying-machine and flying-machine as we are

trying to picture, it will be a fight of hawks, complicated by bullets

and little shells. They will rush up and up to get the pitch of one

another, until the aeronauts sob and sicken in the rarefied air, and the

blood comes to eyes and nails. The marksmen below will strain at last,

eyes under hands, to see the circling battle that dwindles in the

zenith. Then, perhaps, a wild adventurous dropping of one close beneath

the other, an attempt to stoop, the sudden splutter of guns, a tilting

up or down, a disengagement. What will have happened? One combatant,

perhaps, will heel lamely earthward, dropping, dropping, with half its

bladders burst or shot away, the other circles down in pursuit.... "What

are they doing?" Our marksmen will snatch at their field-glasses,

tremulously anxious, "Is that a white flag or no?... If they drop now we

have 'em!"

But the duel will be the rarer thing. In any affair of ramming there is

an enormous advantage for the side that can contrive, anywhere in the

field of action, to set two vessels at one. The mere ascent of one

flying-ram from one side will assuredly slip the leashes of two on the

other, until the manoeuvring squadrons may be as thick as starlings in

October. They will wheel and mount, they will spread and close, there

will be elaborate manoeuvres for the advantage of the wind, there will

be sudden drops to the shelter of entrenched guns. The actual impact of

battle will be an affair of moments. They will be awful moments, but not

more terrible, not more exacting of manhood than the moments that will

come to men when there is--and it has not as yet happened on this

earth--equal fighting between properly manned and equipped ironclads at

sea. (And the well-bred young gentlemen of means who are privileged to

officer the British Army nowadays will be no more good at this sort of

thing than they are at controversial theology or electrical engineering

or anything else that demands a well-exercised brain.)...

Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies,

the war must become a conflict between a seeing host and one that is

blind. The victor in that aerial struggle will tower with pitilessly

watchful eyes over his adversary, will concentrate his guns and all his

strength unobserved, will mark all his adversary's roads and

communications, and sweep them with sudden incredible disasters of shot

and shell. The moral effect of this predominance will be enormous. All

over the losing country, not simply at his frontier but everywhere, the

victor will soar. Everybody everywhere will be perpetually and

constantly looking up, with a sense of loss and insecurity, with a vague

stress of painful anticipations. By day the victor's aeroplanes will

sweep down upon the apparatus of all sorts in the adversary's rear, and

will drop explosives and incendiary matters upon them,[41] so that no

apparatus or camp or shelter will any longer be safe. At night his high

floating search-lights will go to and fro and discover and check every

desperate attempt to relieve or feed the exhausted marksmen of the

fighting line. The phase of tension will pass, that weakening opposition

will give, and the war from a state of mutual pressure and petty combat

will develop into the collapse of the defensive lines. A general advance

will occur under the aerial van, ironclad road fighting-machines may

perhaps play a considerable part in this, and the enemy's line of

marksmen will be driven back or starved into surrender, or broken up and

hunted down. As the superiority of the attack becomes week by week more

and more evident, its assaults will become more dashing and

far-reaching. Under the moonlight and the watching balloons there will

be swift noiseless rushes of cycles, precipitate dismounts, and the

never-to-be-quite-abandoned bayonet will play its part. And now men on

the losing side will thank God for the reprieve of a pitiless wind, for

lightning, thunder, and rain, for any elemental disorder that will for a

moment lift the descending scale! Then, under banks of fog and cloud,

the victorious advance will pause and grow peeringly watchful and

nervous, and mud-stained desperate men will go splashing forward into an

elemental blackness, rain or snow like a benediction on their faces,

blessing the primordial savagery of nature that can still set aside the

wisest devices of men, and give the unthrifty one last desperate chance

to get their own again or die.

Such adventures may rescue pride and honour, may cause momentary dismay

in the victor and palliate disaster, but they will not turn back the

advance of the victors, or twist inferiority into victory. Presently the

advance will resume. With that advance the phase of indecisive contest

will have ended, and the second phase of the new war, the business of

forcing submission, will begin. This should be more easy in the future

even than it has proved in the past, in spite of the fact that central

governments are now elusive, and small bodies of rifle-armed guerillas

far more formidable than ever before. It will probably be brought about

in a civilized country by the seizure of the vital apparatus of the

urban regions--the water supply, the generating stations for electricity

(which will supply all the heat and warmth of the land), and the chief

ways used in food distribution. Through these expedients, even while the

formal war is still in progress, an irresistible pressure upon a local

population will be possible, and it will be easy to subjugate or to

create afresh local authorities, who will secure the invader from any

danger of a guerilla warfare upon his rear. Through that sort of an

expedient an even very obdurate loser will be got down to submission,

area by area. With the destruction of its military apparatus and the

prospective loss of its water and food supply, however, the defeated

civilized State will probably be willing to seek terms as a whole, and

bring the war to a formal close.

In cases where, instead of contiguous frontiers, the combatants are

separated by the sea, the aerial struggle will probably be preceded or

accompanied by a struggle for the command of the sea. Of this warfare

there have been many forecasts. In this, as in all the warfare of the

coming time, imaginative foresight, a perpetual alteration of tactics, a

perpetual production of unanticipated devices, will count enormously.

Other things being equal, victory will rest with the force mentally most

active. What type of ship may chance to be prevalent when the great

naval war comes is hard guessing, but I incline to think that the naval

architects of the ablest peoples will concentrate more and more upon

speed and upon range and penetration, and, above all, upon precision of

fire. I seem to see a light type of ironclad, armoured thickly only over

its engines and magazines, murderously equipped, and with a ram--as

alert and deadly as a striking snake. In the battles of the open she

will have little to fear from the slow fumbling treacheries of the

submarine, she will take as little heed of the chance of a torpedo as a

barefooted man in battle does of the chance of a fallen dagger in his

path. Unless I know nothing of my own blood, the English and Americans

will prefer to catch their enemies in ugly weather or at night, and then

they will fight to ram. The struggle on the high seas between any two

naval powers (except, perhaps, the English and American, who have both

quite unparalleled opportunities for coaling) will not last more than a

week or so. One or other force will be destroyed at sea, driven into its

ports and blockaded there, or cut off from its supply of coal (or other

force-generator), and hunted down to fight or surrender. An inferior

fleet that tries to keep elusively at sea will always find a superior

fleet between itself and coal, and will either have to fight at once or

be shot into surrender as it lies helpless on the water. Some

commerce-destroying enterprise on the part of the loser may go on, but I

think the possibilities of that sort of thing are greatly exaggerated.

The world grows smaller and smaller, the telegraph and telephone go

everywhere, wireless telegraphy opens wider and wider possibilities to

the imagination, and how the commerce-destroyer is to go on for long

without being marked down, headed off, cut off from coal, and forced to

fight or surrender, I do not see. The commerce-destroyer will have a

very short run; it will have to be an exceptionally good and costly

ship in the first place, it will be finally sunk or captured, and

altogether I do not see how that sort of thing will pay when once the

command of the sea is assured. A few weeks will carry the effective

frontier of the stronger power up to the coast-line of the weaker, and

permit of the secure resumption of the over-sea trade of the former. And

then will open a second phase of naval warfare, in which the submarine

may play a larger part.

I must confess that my imagination, in spite even of spurring, refuses

to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and

founder at sea. It must involve physical inconvenience of the most

demoralizing sort simply to be in one for any length of time. A

first-rate man who has been breathing carbonic acid and oil vapour under

a pressure of four atmospheres becomes presently a second-rate man.

Imagine yourself in a submarine that has ventured a few miles out of

port, imagine that you have headache and nausea, and that some ship of

the _Cobra_ type is flashing itself and its search-lights about whenever

you come up to the surface, and promptly tearing down on your descending

bubbles with a ram, trailing perhaps a tail of grapples or a net as

well. Even if you get their boat, these nicely aerated men you are

fighting know they have a four to one chance of living; while for your

submarine to be "got" is certain death. You may, of course, throw out a

torpedo or so, with as much chance of hitting vitally as you would have

if you were blindfolded, turned round three times, and told to fire

revolver-shots at a charging elephant. The possibility of sweeping for a

submarine with a seine would be vividly present in the minds of a

submarine crew. If you are near shore you will probably be near

rocks--an unpleasant complication in a hurried dive. There would,

probably, very soon be boats out too, seeking with a machine-gun or

pompom for a chance at your occasionally emergent conning-tower. In no

way can a submarine be more than purblind, it will be, in fact,

practically blind. Given a derelict ironclad on a still night within

sight of land, a carefully handled submarine might succeed in groping

its way to it and destroying it; but then it would be much better to

attack such a vessel and capture it boldly with a few desperate men on a

tug. At the utmost the submarine will be used in narrow waters, in

rivers, or to fluster or destroy ships in harbour or with poor-spirited

crews--that is to say, it will simply be an added power in the hands of

the nation that is predominant at sea. And, even then, it can be merely

destructive, while a sane and high-spirited fighter will always be

dissatisfied if, with an indisputable superiority of force, he fails to

take.[42]

No; the naval warfare of the future is for light, swift ships, almost

recklessly not defensive and with splendid guns and gunners. They will

hit hard and ram, and warfare which is taking to cover on land will

abandon it at sea. And the captain, and the engineer, and the gunner

will have to be all of the same sort of men: capable, headlong men, with

brains and no ascertainable social position. They will differ from the

officers of the British Navy in the fact that the whole male sex of the

nation will have been ransacked to get them. The incredible stupidity

that closes all but a menial position in the British Navy to the sons of

those who cannot afford to pay a hundred a year for them for some years,

necessarily brings the individual quality of the British naval officer

below the highest possible, quite apart from the deficiencies that must

exist on account of the badness of secondary education in England. The

British naval officer and engineer are not made the best of, good as

they are, indisputably they might be infinitely better both in quality

and training. The smaller German navy, probably, has an ampler pick of

men relatively, is far better educated, less confident, and more

strenuous. But the abstract navy I am here writing of will be superior

to either of these, and like the American, in the absence of any

distinction between officers and engineers. The officer will be an

engineer.

The military advantages of the command of the sea will probably be

greater in the future than they have been in the past. A fleet with

aerial supports would be able to descend upon any portion of the

adversary's coast it chose, and to dominate the country inland for

several miles with its gun-fire. All the enemy's sea-coast towns would

be at its mercy. It would be able to effect landing and send raids of

cyclist-marksmen inland, whenever a weak point was discovered. Landings

will be enormously easier than they have ever been before. Once a wedge

of marksmen has been driven inland they would have all the military

advantages of the defence when it came to eject them. They might, for

example, encircle and block some fortified post, and force costly and

disastrous attempts to relieve it. The defensive country would stand at

bay, tethered against any effective counter-blow, keeping guns,

supplies, and men in perpetual and distressing movement to and fro along

its sea-frontiers. Its soldiers would get uncertain rest, irregular

feeding, unhealthy conditions of all sorts in hastily made camps. The

attacking fleet would divide and re-unite, break up and vanish,

amazingly reappear. The longer the defender's coast the more wretched

his lot. Never before in the world's history was the command of the sea

worth what it is now. But the command of the sea is, after all, like

military predominance on land, to be insured only by superiority of

equipment in the hands of a certain type of man, a type of man that it

becomes more and more impossible to improvise, that a country must live

for through many years, and that no country on earth at present can be

said to be doing its best possible to make.

All this elaboration of warfare lengthens the scale between theoretical

efficiency and absolute unpreparedness. There was a time when any tribe

that had men and spears was ready for war, and any tribe that had some

cunning or emotion at command might hope to discount any little

disparity in numbers between itself and its neighbour. Luck and

stubbornness and the incalculable counted for much; it was half the

battle not to know you were beaten, and it is so still. Even to-day, a

great nation, it seems, may still make its army the plaything of its

gentlefolk, abandon important military appointments to feminine

intrigue, and trust cheerfully to the homesickness and essential modesty

of its influential people, and the simpler patriotism of its colonial

dependencies when it comes at last to the bloody and wearisome business

of "muddling through." But these days of the happy-go-lucky optimist are

near their end. War is being drawn into the field of the exact sciences.

Every additional weapon, every new complication of the art of war,

intensifies the need of deliberate preparation, and darkens the outlook

of a nation of amateurs. Warfare in the future, on sea or land alike,

will be much more one-sided than it has ever been in the past, much more

of a foregone conclusion. Save for national lunacy, it will be brought

about by the side that will win, and because that side knows that it

will win. More and more it will have the quality of surprise, of

pitiless revelation. Instead of the seesaw, the bickering interchange of

battles of the old time, will come swiftly and amazingly blow, and blow,

and blow, no pause, no time for recovery, disasters cumulative and

irreparable.

The fight will never be in practice between equal sides, never be that

theoretical deadlock we have sketched, but a fight between the more

efficient and the less efficient, between the more inventive and the

more traditional. While the victors, disciplined and grimly intent, full

of the sombre yet glorious delight of a grave thing well done, will,

without shouting or confusion, be fighting like one great national body,

the losers will be taking that pitiless exposure of helplessness in such

a manner as their natural culture and character may determine. War for

the losing side will be an unspeakable pitiable business. There will be

first of all the coming of the war, the wave of excitement, the

belligerent shouting of the unemployed inefficients, the flag-waving,

the secret doubts, the eagerness for hopeful news, the impatience of the

warning voice. I seem to see, almost as if he were symbolic, the grey

old general--the general who learnt his art of war away in the vanished

nineteenth century, the altogether too elderly general with his

epaulettes and decorations, his uniform that has still its historical

value, his spurs and his sword--riding along on his obsolete horse, by

the side of his doomed column. Above all things he is a gentleman. And

the column looks at him lovingly with its countless boys' faces, and the

boys' eyes are infinitely trustful, for he has won battles in the old

time. They will believe in him to the end. They have been brought up in

their schools to believe in him and his class, their mothers have

mingled respect for the gentlefolk with the simple doctrines of their

faith, their first lesson on entering the army was the salute. The

"smart" helmets His Majesty, or some such unqualified person, chose for

them, lie hotly on their young brows, and over their shoulders slope

their obsolete, carelessly-sighted guns. Tramp, tramp, they march, doing

what they have been told to do, incapable of doing anything they have

not been told to do, trustful and pitiful, marching to wounds and

disease, hunger, hardship, and death. They know nothing of what they are

going to meet, nothing of what they will have to do; Religion and the

Ratepayer and the Rights of the Parent working through the

instrumentality of the Best Club in the World have kept their souls and

minds, if not untainted, at least only harmlessly veneered, with the

thinnest sham of training or knowledge. Tramp, tramp, they go, boys who

will never be men, rejoicing patriotically in the nation that has thus

sent them forth, badly armed, badly clothed, badly led, to be killed in

some avoidable quarrel by men unseen. And beside them, an absolute

stranger to them, a stranger even in habits of speech and thought, and

at any rate to be shot with them fairly and squarely, marches the

subaltern--the son of the school-burking, shareholding class--a slightly

taller sort of boy, as ill-taught as they are in all that concerns the

realities of life, ignorant of how to get food, how to get water, how to

keep fever down and strength up, ignorant of his practical equality with

the men beside him, carefully trained under a clerical headmaster to use

a crib, play cricket rather nicely, look all right whatever happens,

believe in his gentility, and avoid talking "shop."... The major you

see is a man of the world, and very pleasantly meets the grey general's

eye. He is, one may remark by the way, something of an army reformer,

without offence, of course, to the Court people or the Government

people. His prospects--if only he were not going to be shot--are

brilliant enough. He has written quite cleverly on the question of

Recruiting, and advocated as much as twopence more a day and billiard

rooms under the chaplain's control; he has invented a military bicycle

with a wheel of solid iron that can be used as a shield; and a war

correspondent and, indeed, any one who writes even the most casual and

irresponsible article on military questions is a person worth his

cultivating. He is the very life and soul of army reform, as it is known

to the governments of the grey--that is to say, army reform without a

single step towards a social revolution....

So the gentlemanly old general--the polished drover to the

shambles--rides, and his doomed column march by, in this vision that

haunts my mind.

I cannot foresee what such a force will even attempt to do, against

modern weapons. Nothing can happen but the needless and most wasteful

and pitiful killing of these poor lads, who make up the infantry

battalions, the main mass of all the European armies of to-day, whenever

they come against a sanely-organized army. There is nowhere they can

come in, there is nothing they can do. The scattered invisible marksmen

with their supporting guns will shatter their masses, pick them off

individually, cover their line of retreat and force them into wholesale

surrenders. It will be more like herding sheep than actual fighting. Yet

the bitterest and cruellest things will have to happen, thousands and

thousands of poor boys will be smashed in all sorts of dreadful ways and

given over to every conceivable form of avoidable hardship and painful

disease, before the obvious fact that war is no longer a business for

half-trained lads in uniform, led by parson-bred sixth-form boys and men

of pleasure and old men, but an exhaustive demand upon very

carefully-educated adults for the most strenuous best that is in them,

will get its practical recognition.[43]...

Well, in the ampler prospect even this haunting tragedy of innumerable

avoidable deaths is but an incidental thing. They die, and their

troubles are over. The larger fact after all is the inexorable tendency

in things to make a soldier a skilled and educated man, and to link him,

in sympathy and organization, with the engineer and the doctor, and all

the continually developing mass of scientifically educated men that the

advance of science and mechanism is producing. We are dealing with the

inter-play of two world-wide forces, that work through distinctive and

contrasted tendencies to a common end. We have the force of invention

insistent upon a progress of the peace organization, which tends on the

one hand to throw out great useless masses of people, the People of the

Abyss, and on the other hand to develop a sort of adiposity of

functionless wealthy, a speculative elephantiasis, and to promote the

development of a new social order of efficients, only very painfully and

slowly, amidst these growing and yet disintegrating masses. And on the

other hand we have the warlike drift of such a social body, the

inevitable intensification of international animosities in such a body,

the absolute determination evident in the scheme of things to smash such

a body, to smash it just as far as it is such a body, under the hammer

of war, that must finally bring about rapidly and under pressure the

same result as that to which the peaceful evolution slowly tends. While

we are as yet only thinking of a physiological struggle, of complex

reactions and slow absorptions, comes War with the surgeon's knife. War

comes to simplify the issue and line out the thing with knife-like

cuts.

The law that dominates the future is glaringly plain. A people must

develop and consolidate its educated efficient classes or be beaten in

war and give way upon all points where its interests conflict with the

interests of more capable people. It must foster and accelerate that

natural segregation, which has been discussed in the third and fourth

chapters of these "Anticipations," or perish. The war of the coming time

will really be won in schools and colleges and universities, wherever

men write and read and talk together. The nation that produces in the

near future the largest proportional development of educated and

intelligent engineers and agriculturists, of doctors, schoolmasters,

professional soldiers, and intellectually active people of all sorts;

the nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes,

exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss; the nation that succeeds

most subtly in checking gambling and the moral decay of women and homes

that gambling inevitably entails; the nation that by wise interventions,

death duties and the like, contrives to expropriate and extinguish

incompetent rich families while leaving individual ambitions free; the

nation, in a word, that turns the greatest proportion of its

irresponsible adiposity into social muscle, will certainly be the nation

that will be the most powerful in warfare as in peace, will certainly be

the ascendant or dominant nation before the year 2000. In the long run

no heroism and no accidents can alter that. No flag-waving, no

patriotic leagues, no visiting of essentially petty imperial personages

hither and thither, no smashing of the windows of outspoken people nor

seizures of papers and books, will arrest the march of national defeat.

And this issue is already so plain and simple, the alternatives are

becoming so pitilessly clear, that even in the stupidest court and the

stupidest constituencies, it must presently begin in some dim way to be

felt. A time will come when so many people will see this issue clearly

that it will gravely affect political and social life. The patriotic

party--the particular gang, that is, of lawyers, brewers, landlords, and

railway directors that wishes to be dominant--will be forced to become

an efficient party in profession at least, will be forced to stimulate

and organize that educational and social development that may at last

even bring patriotism under control. The rulers of the grey, the

democratic politician and the democratic monarch, will be obliged year

by year by the very nature of things to promote the segregation of

colours within the grey, to foster the power that will finally supersede

democracy and monarchy altogether, the power of the scientifically

educated, disciplined specialist, and that finally is the power of

saints, the power of the thing that is provably right. It may be

delayed, but it cannot be defeated; in the end it must arrive--if not

to-day and among our people, then to-morrow and among another people,

who will triumph in our overthrow. This is the lesson that must be

learnt, that some tongue and kindred of the coming time must inevitably

learn. But what tongue it will be, and what kindred that will first

attain this new development, opens far more complex and far less certain

issues than any we have hitherto considered.