"War is not now a matter of the stout heart and the strong arm.
Not that these attributes do not have their place and value in
modern warfare; but they are no longer the chief or decisive
factors in the case. The exploits that count in this warfare are
technological exploits; exploits of technological science,
industrial appliances, and technological training. As has been
remarked before, it is no longer a gentleman's war, and the
gentleman, as such, is no better than a marplot in the game as
it is played."
---- Thorstein Veblen in _The Nature of Peace_.
Across a park in Washington I followed the leisurely stride of two
British officers. Their movement, punctuated by long walking-sticks, had
a military deliberation which became their veteran gray hairs. They were
in khaki uniforms and leather leggings, a red strip at the shoulder
marking them as staff officers. Amid groups of loitering nurses and
tethered infants and old men feeding pop-corn to the birds they were as
of a grander race of men. After a pang of civilian inferiority I asked
who they were and learned that one of them was simply a Canadian
lawyer--and that, being a judge advocate, he was obliged to boot and
spur himself in his hotel bedroom every morning and ride up and down the
elevator in polished leggings, for the good of the cause. Never in his
life had he heard a machine-gun fired. Never had he flourished anything
more dangerous than his family carving knife. On inspection his
companion looked similarly martial. The only certain veteran in the
parklet was a shrunken old pensioner feeding tame robins on the grass.
Part of the politico-military art is window-dressing of this
description. It excites the romantic populace, composed of pedestrians
like myself, and serves to advertise the colors. It suggests a leonine
order of values from which the shambling citizen is debarred. But back
of the window-dressing, the rhetoric of costume and medal and prepared
ovation and patriotic tears, there is a reality as different from these
appearances as roots are different from flowers. If I had ever supposed
that the gist of war was to be derived solely from contemplating
uniformed warriors, I came to a new conclusion when I overheard the cool
experts of war.
These experts, such of them as I happened to overhear, had come with the
British mission to America, and they were far other than the common
notion of lords of war. The most impressive of them was a slight figure
who reminded me externally of the Greek professor in Bernard Shaw's
Major Barbara. Before the war he had been a don at Cambridge, a teacher
of economics, and he retained the lucid laboratory manner of an expert
who counts on holding attention. It was not in him, as it is in so many
older pooh-bah professors, to expect a deference to personal garrulity;
but one gained an impression that no words were likely to be wasted on
vacuous listeners by a person with such steel-gray eyes.
From London, since the beginning of the war, this concentrated man had
gone out of Paris, to Rome, to Petrograd, to join counsel with various
allies on the science of providing munitions. It would never have
occurred to any pork packer to employ this fine-faced, sensitive,
quiet-voiced professor to work out the economic killing of cattle. Yet
almost as soon as he had volunteered in England he began on the task of
adapting industry to slaughter, and there was no doubt whatever that his
inclusive mind had procured the quick and effective killing of thousands
of human beings. It was a joy, strange to say, to listen to him. He was
one of those men whom H. G. Wells used to delight in imagining, the sort
of man who could keep cool in a cosmic upheaval, his mind as nimble as
quicksilver while he devised the soundest plan for launching the forces
of his sphere. There was no more trace of priesthood in him than in a
mechanic or a chauffeur. He deliberated the organizing of America for
destructiveness as an engineer might deliberate lining a leaky tunnel
with copper, and there was as little pretension in his manner as there
was sentiment or doubt. His accent was cultivated, he was obviously a
university man, but he had come to the top by virtue of mental
equipment. "Mental equipment" means many things, but plainly he was not
of those remote academicians who go in for cerebral scroll-saw work. He
managed his mind as a woodman manages an ax. The curt swing and drive
and bite of it could escape no one, and for all his almost plaintively
modest demeanor he had instant arresting power. It was he and a few men
like him who had made it feasible for amateur armies to loop round an
empire a burning rain of steel.
This master of munitions was not the only schoolman who had demonstrated
brains. There was another professor, this time the purchaser of guns. He
had come to his role from holding the kind of position that Matthew
Arnold once had held. A meager figure enough, superficially the
scholastic-dyspeptic, he had shown that the bureaucracy of education was
no bad beginning for ordering a new department with small attention to
the tricks, of merchandise, but with every thought as to technological
detail. The conversation that went about did not seem to engage this
man, except as it turned on such engrossing topics as the necessity for
circumventing child labor. For the rest he was as a soft silent cloud
that gathered the ascending vapors, and discharged itself in lightning
decision which made no change in the obscurity from which it came.
Under a lamp at night on Connecticut Avenue I saw one late-working
member of the mission stop wearily to fend off American inquisition. A
training in the Foreign Office had given this distinguished exile a
permanent nostalgia for Olympus--and how Olympian the British Foreign
Office is, few Americans dare to behold. The candidature to this
interesting service of a great democracy is limited to a "narrow circle
of society" by various excellent devices, the first of which is that
official conditions of entry fix the amount of the private means
required at a minimum of L400 a year. "The primary qualification for the
diplomatic service," says one friendly interpreter of it, "is a capacity
to deal on terms of equality with considerable persons and their words
and works. Sometimes, very rarely, this capacity is given, in its
highest form, by something which is hardly examinable--by very great
intellectual powers. Ordinarily, however, this capacity is a result of
nurture in an atmosphere of independence. Unfortunately, it is scarcely
too much to say that the present constitution of society provides this
atmosphere of independence only where there is financial independence.
In a very few cases freedom of mind and character is achieved elsewhere,
but then a great price, not measurable by money, has to be paid for
it--how great a price only those who have paid it know.... The 'property
qualification' is operative as a means of selecting a certain kind of
character; no readjustment of pay could be a substitute for it.
Undoubtedly, as thus operative, it imposes a limitation, but the
limitation imposed is not that of a class-prejudice or of a mere
preference for wealth--it is a limitation imposed by the needs of the
diplomatic service, and those needs are national needs." Out of such a
remarkable background, so redolent of "the present constitution of
society," my exiled diplomat took his weary stand before prying writers
for the press. They wanted to know "the critical shrinking point." They
wished to discuss the "maximum theoretic availability." He had no answer
to make; he merely made diplomatic moan. In the heavy dispatch box that
he set at his feet there were undoubtedly treasured figures, priceless
information for Germany in her jiu jitsu of the sea. That dispatch box
might have been solid metal for any effect it had on the conversation.
He was a kind of expert who took interrogation with pallid mournfulness;
who punctuated silence with, "Look here, you've got hold of absolutely
the wrong man.... Hanged if I know.... My dear sir, I haven't the very
faintest idea."
And yet this member of a caste was only coming through because he too
was paying a technological price. Wheat and nitrate and ore and
rubber--there was nothing his country might need which did not occupy
him, staff officer of vital trafficking, throughout numbered nights.
There were a few business men on the mission--mighty few considering
their lordship in times of peace. Most of the dominant figures either
from Oxford or Cambridge, there was one other intellectual who stood out
as rather an exception to the prevailing type. He was an older man whose
nature brimmed with ideas, a Titan born to laughter and high discourse
and a happy gigantic effervescence. If a reputation brayed too loudly at
him, he named its author an ass. If liberalism were intoned to him, he
called it detestable and cried to knock the English _Nation's_ head
against the _Manchester Guardian's_. Yet he was distinguished from most
of his colleagues as a radical who afforded wild opinions of his own. To
the organization of his country he had contributed one invaluable idea,
and each problem that came up in turn he conducted out of its narrow
immediate importance into the perspective of a natural philosophy. Not
fond of a prearranged system, he irked more than the run of his
countrymen at the stuffiness of badly bundled facts. With a great sweep
of vigor he would start at the proposition of handling war industry, for
example, on a basis not inadequate to the requirements; and out of his
running oration would come a wealth of such suggestions as spring only
from a cross-fertilizing habit of mind.
These are a handful of England's experts in wartime. They do not bear
the brunt of the fight, like the soldiers, but the roots of the flower
of war are in just such depths as employ these hidden minds.