By H.G. Wells.
[Copyright, 1915, by THE NEW YORK TIMES Company.]
The submarine and aircraft have put a new proposition before the
world. It is a proposition that will be stated here as plainly and
simply as possible. These two inventions present mankind with a choice
of two alternatives, or, to vary the phrase, they mark quite
definitely that we are at the parting of two ways; either mankind must
succeed within quite a brief period of years now in establishing a
world State, a world Government of some sort able to prevent war, or
civilization as we know it must break up into a system of warring
communities, perpetually on the warpath, perpetually insecure and
engaged in undying national vendettas. These consequences have been
latent in all the development of scientific warfare that has been
going on during the last century; they are inherent in the
characteristics of the aircraft and of the submarine for any one to
see.
They are so manifestly inherent that even before this war speculative
minds had pointed out the direction to which these inventions pointed,
but now, after more than three-quarters of a year of war, it is
possible to approach this question, no longer as something as yet
fantastically outside the experience of mankind, but as something
supported by countless witnesses, something which the dullest, least
imaginative minds can receive and ponder.
What the submarine and aircraft make manifest and convincing is this
point, which argument alone has never been able to hammer into the
mass of inattentive minds, that if the human intelligence is applied
continuously to the mechanism of war it will steadily develop
destructive powers, but that it will fail to develop any corresponding
power of decision and settlement, because the development of the
former is easy and obvious in comparison with the development of the
latter; it will therefore progressively make war more catastrophic and
less definitive. It will not make war impossible in the ordinary
meaning of the word, the bigger the gun and the viler the lethal
implement the more possible does war become, but it will make war
"impossible" in the slang use of five or six years ago, in the sense,
that is, of its being utterly useless and mischievous, the sense in
which Norman Angell employed it and so brought upon himself an
avalanche of quite unfair derision. No nation ever embarked upon so
fair a prospect of conquest and dominion as the victorious Germans
when, after 1871, they decided to continue to give themselves to the
development of overwhelming military power. And after exertions
unparalleled in the whole history of mankind their net conquests are
nothing; they have destroyed enormously and achieved no other single
thing, and today they repeat on a colossal scale the adventures of
Fort Chabrol and Sidney Street, and are no better than a nation of
murderous outcasts besieged by an outraged world.
Now, among many delusions that this war has usefully dispelled is the
delusion that there can be a sort of legality about war, that you can
make war a little, but not make war altogether, that the civilized
world can look forward to a sort of tame war in the future, a war
crossed with peace, a lap-dog war that will bark but not bite. War is
war; it is the cessation of law and argument, it is outrage, and
Germany has demonstrated on the large scale what our British
suffragettes learned on a small one, that with every failure to
accomplish your end by violent means you are forced to further
outrages. Violence has no reserves but further violence. Each failure
of the violent is met by the desperate cry, the heroical scream: "We
will not be beaten. If you will not give in to us for this much,
then see! We will go further." Wars always do go further. Wars always
end more savagely than they begin. Even our war in South Africa,
certainly the most decently conducted war in all history, got to farm
burning and concentration camps. A side that hopes for victory fights
with conciliation in its mind. Victory and conciliation recede
together. When the German--who is really, one must remember, a human
being like the rest of us, at the worst just merely a little worse in
his upbringing--when he finds he cannot march gloriously into Paris or
Warsaw, then, and only then, does he begin to try to damage Paris and
Warsaw with bombs, when he finds he cannot beat the French Army and
the British fleet, then, and not till then, does he attack and murder
the slumbering civilians of Scarborough and Dunkirk, and lies in wait
for and sinks the Lusitania. If war by the rules will not bring
success, then harsher measures must be taken; let us suddenly torture
and murder our hated enemies with poison gas, let us poison the South
African wells, let us ill-treat prisoners and assassinate civilians.
Let us abolish the noncombatant and the neutral. These are no peculiar
German iniquities, though the Germans have brought them to an
unparalleled perfection; they are the natural psychological
consequences of aggressive war heroically conceived and bitterly
thwarted; they are "fierceness"; they are the logical necessary
outcome of going to war and being disappointed and getting hit hard
and repeatedly. Any military nation in a corner will play the savage,
the wildcat at bay, in this fashion, rather than confess itself done.
And since the prophetic Bloch has been justified and the long
inconclusiveness of modern war, with its intrenchments and
entanglements, has been more than completely demonstrated, this is the
way that every war in the future is likely to go. Fair and open
conquest becoming more and more out of the question, each side will
seek to cow, dismay, and subjugate the spirit of the other, and
particularly the spirit of the noncombatant masses, by more and more
horrible proceedings. "What do you think of that?" said the German
officer, with a grin, as he was led prisoner past one of our soldiers,
dying in agonies of asphyxiation. To that point war brings men.
Probably at the beginning of the war he was quite a decent man. But
once he was committed to war the fatal logic of our new resources in
science laid hold of him. And war is war.
Now there does not appear the slightest hope of any invention that
will make war more conclusive or less destructive; there are, however,
the clearest prospects in many directions that it may be more
destructive and less conclusive. It will be dreadfuller and bitterer;
its horrors will be less and less forgivable; it will leave vast
sundering floods of hate. The submarine and the aircraft are quite
typical of the new order of things. You can sweep a visible fleet off
the seas, you can drive an invading army into its own country, but
while your enemy has a score of miles of coast line or a thousand
square miles of territory left him, you cannot, it seems, keep his
aircraft out of your borders, and still less can you keep his
submarines out of the sea. You can, of course, make reprisals, but you
can not hold him powerless as it was once possible to do. He can work
his bloody mischief on your civil life to the very end of the war, and
you must set your teeth and stick to your main attack. To that pitch
this war has come, and to that pitch every subsequent war will come.
The civil life will be treated as a hostage, and as it becomes more
and more accessible, as it will do, to the antagonist it will be more
and more destroyed. The sinking of the Lusitania is just a sign and a
sample of what war now becomes, its rich and ever richer opportunities
of unforgettable exasperation. Germany is resolved to hurt and destroy
to the utmost, every exasperated militarism will come naturally to
such resolves, and only by pain and destruction, by hurting, shaming
and damaging Germany to the point of breaking the German spirit can
this inflamed and war-mad people be made to relinquish their gigantic
aggression upon the world. Germany, that great camp of warriors, must
be broken as the Red Indians and the Zulus were broken, if
civilization is to have another chance, and its breaking cannot be
done without unparalleled resentments. War is war, and it is not the
Allies who have forced its logic to this bitter end.
Unless this war does help to bring about a lasting peace in the world,
it is idle to pretend that it will have been anything else but a
monstrous experience of evil. If at the end of it we cannot bring
about some worldwide political synthesis, unanimous enough and
powerful enough to prohibit further wars by a stupendous array of
moral and material force, then all this terrible year of stress and
suffering has been no more than a waste of life, and our sons and
brothers and friends and allies have died in vain. If we cannot summon
enough good-will and wisdom in the world to establish a world alliance
and a world congress to control the clash of "legitimate national
aspirations" and "conflicting interests" and to abolish all the
forensic trickeries of diplomacy, then this will be neither the last
war, nor will it be the worst, and men must prepare themselves to face
a harsh and terrible future, to harden their spirits against
continuing and increasing adversity, and to steel their children to
cruelty and danger. Revenge will become the burden of history. That is
the price men will pay for clinging to their little separatist cults
and monarchies and complete independencies, now. The traffic and
wealth of our great and liberal age will diminish, the arts will
dwindle and learning fade, science will cease to advance, and the rude
and hard will inherit the earth. The Warpath or the World State; that
is the choice for mankind.
This lesson of the submarine which destroys much and achieves nothing
has ample support in history. There never was so blind a superstition
as the belief that progress is inevitable. The world has seen the
great civilization of the Western empire give place to the warring
chaos of the baronial castles of the ninth and tenth centuries; it has
seen the Eastern empire for 500 years decay and retrogress under the
militarism of the Turk; it has watched the Red Indians, with rifles in
their hands, grimly engage in mutual extermination. Is it still a
blind world, doomed to blunder down again from such light and order
and hope as we were born to, toward such another millennium of
barbaric hates and aimless wars? That is no mere possibility; it is
the present probability unless men exert themselves to make it
impossible. It is quite conceivable that ours is the last generation
for many generations that will go freely about the world, that will
have abundance of leisure, and science and free speech and abundant
art and much beauty and many varied occupations. We stand about in our
old haunts and try to keep on with our old ways of living and
speculate when the war will be "over," and when we shall be able to go
back to everything just as it was before the war. This war and its
consequences will never be "over," and we have not even begun to
realize what it has cost us.
The course of human history is downward and very dark, indeed, unless
our race can give mind and will now unreservedly in unprecedented
abundance to the stern necessities that follow logically from the
aircraft bomb and the poison gas and that silent, invisible,
unattainable murderer, the submarine.
[Illustration]
"Human Beings and Germans"
By Rudyard Kipling.
Addressing 10,000 persons at a recruiting rally in
Southport, England, on June 21, 1915, Mr. Kipling spoke as
reported in the subjoined cable dispatch to THE NEW YORK
TIMES.
The German went into this war with a mind which had been carefully
trained out of the idea of every moral sense or obligation, private,
public, or international. He does not recognize the existence of any
law, least of all those he has subscribed to himself, in making war
against com-[Transcriber's Note: Text missing from original.] and
children.
All mankind bears witness today that there is no crime, no cruelty, no
abomination that the mind of man can conceive which the German has not
perpetrated, is not perpetrating, and will not perpetrate if he is
allowed to go on.
These horrors and perversions were not invented by him on the spur of
the moment. They were arranged beforehand. Their outlines are laid
down in the German war book. They are part of the system in which
Germany has been scientifically trained. It is the essence of that
system to make such a hell of countries where their armies set foot
that any terms she may offer will seem like heaven to the people whose
bodies she has defiled and whose minds she has broken of set purpose
and intention.
So long as an unbroken Germany exists, so long will life on this
planet be intolerable, not only for us and for our allies, but for all
humanity.
There are only two divisions in the world today, human beings and
Germans, and the German knows it. Human beings have long ago sickened
of him and everything connected with him, of all he does, says,
thinks, or believes.
From the ends of earth to the ends of the earth they desire nothing
more greatly than that this unclean thing should be thrust out from
membership and memory of the nations.
We have no reason to believe that Germany will break up suddenly and
dramatically. She took two generations to prepare herself in every
detail and through every fibre of her national being for this war. She
is playing for the highest stakes in the world--the dominion of the
world. It seems to me that she must either win or bleed to death
almost where her lines run today.
Therefore, we and our allies must continue to pass our children
through fire to Moloch until Moloch perish.
In Belgium at this hour several million Belgians are making war
material or fortifications for their conquerors. They receive enough
food to support life, as the German thinks it should be supported, (by
the way, I believe the United States of America supplies a large part
of that food.) In return they are compelled to work at the point of
the bayonet. If they object, they are shot. They have no more property
and no more rights than cattle, and they cannot lift a hand to protect
the honor of their women.
There has been nothing like the horror of their fate in all history.
If Germany is victorious, every refinement of outrage which is within
the compass of the German imagination will be inflicted on us in every
aspect of our lives. Realize, too, that if the Allies are beaten there
will be no spot on the globe where a soul can escape from the
domination of this enemy of mankind.
There has been childish talk that the Western Hemisphere would offer a
refuge from oppression. Put that thought from your mind. If the Allies
were defeated Germany would not need to send a single battleship over
the Atlantic. She would issue an order, and it would be obeyed.
Civilization would be bankrupt, and the Western world would be taken
over with the rest of the wreckage by Germany, the receiver.
So you see that there is no retreat possible. There are no terms and
no retreat in this war. It must go forward, and with those men of
England, who are eligible for service but who have not yet offered
themselves, the decision of war rests.
This is, for us, in truth a war to death against the power of darkness
with whom any peace except on our own terms would be more terrible
than any war.
Garibaldi's Promise.
By KATHERINE DRAYTON MAYRANT SIMONS, JR.
_O Loveland of the Poets,
In the hour of your pain,
Does Garibaldi's promise
To your heroes hold again?_
There were fisher lads among them,
In the shirt of peasant red,
And mountaineers from Tyrol,
When Garibaldi said:
"I have no prayer to make you,
For to God alone I kneel!
I have no price to pay you,
For your wage is Austrian steel!
"There is naught of knightly emblem
For the honor of the brave,
And the only land I grant you
Will be length to mark your grave!
"I promise cold and hunger
In the stead of drink and meat!
I promise death, my brothers,
Shall be yours before defeat!"
_O Sweetheart of the Nations,
In the hour of your pain,
Does Garibaldi's promise
To Italia hold again?_