I COULD go on now and tell of battles, copiously. In the memory of the
one skirmish I have given I do but taste blood. I would like to go on,
to a large, thick book. It would be an agreeable task. Since I am the
chief inventor and practiser (so far) of Little Wars, there has fallen
to me a disproportionate share of victories. But let me not boast. For
the present, I have done all that I meant to do in this matter. It is
for you, dear reader, now to get a floor, a friend, some soldiers and
some guns, and show by a grovelling devotion your appreciation of this
noble and beautiful gift of a limitless game that I have given you.
And if I might for a moment trumpet! How much better is this amiable
miniature than the Real Thing! Here is a homeopathic remedy for the
imaginative strategist. Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the
strain of accumulating victory or disaster--and no smashed nor
sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated country
sides, no petty cruelties, none of that awful universal boredom and
embitterment, that tiresome delay or stoppage or embarrassment of every
gracious, bold, sweet, and charming thing, that we who are old enough to
remember a real modern war know to be the reality of belligerence. This
world is for ample living; we want security and freedom; all of us in
every country, except a few dull-witted, energetic bores, want to see
the manhood of the world at something better than apeing the little lead
toys our children buy in boxes. We want fine things made for
mankind--splendid cities, open ways, more knowledge and power, and more
and more and more--and so I offer my game, for a particular as well as a
general end; and let us put this prancing monarch and that silly
scare-monger, and these excitable "patriots," and those adventurers, and
all the practitioners of Welt Politik, into one vast Temple of War, with
cork carpets everywhere, and plenty of little trees and little houses to
knock down, and cities and fortresses, and unlimited soldiers--tons,
cellars-full--and let them lead their own lives there away from us.
My game is just as good as their game, and saner by reason of its size.
Here is War, done down to rational proportions, and yet out of the way
of mankind, even as our fathers turned human sacrifices into the eating
of little images and symbolic mouthfuls. For my own part, I am _prepared_.
I have nearly five hundred men, more than a score of guns, and I twirl
my moustache and hurl defiance eastward from my home in Essex across the
narrow seas. Not only eastward. I would conclude this little discourse
with one other disconcerting and exasperating sentence for the admirers
and practitioners of Big War. I have never yet met in little battle any
military gentleman, any captain, major, colonel, general, or eminent
commander, who did not presently get into difficulties and confusions
among even the elementary rules of the Battle. You have only to play at
Little Wars three or four times to realise just what a blundering thing
Great War must be.
Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive
game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion. Not only
are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too
monstrously big for reason, but--the available heads we have for it, are
too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realisation conceivable,
and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.