No sign of gratitude have I ever had from any of these ninety-six
gentlemen for this extraordinary treatment. Extraordinary it is.
Everybody except myself abuses the Senate. It turned down American
participation in the League of Nations, to the edification of all
mankind. It prevents the United States tangling itself up in treaties,
understandings, and complications of the balance-of-power description.
It makes the United States “different” in the world of international
affairs. America’s representatives abroad never represent her. What
the President signs to-day the Senate revokes to-morrow. The New World
would not be half such a fresh world if it were not for the Senate.
Lately the scolding of the Senate has broken out with revived
bitterness. At Geneva somebody from America agreed to a treaty against
the use of poison gas in warfare, a very silly and mischievous treaty
from any points of view. The Senate cast it out. Embittered idealists
declare that this is due to “lobbying” by the American chemical
industries. Why the American chemical industries should not lobby upon
a question of this sort passes my comprehension. They know about it.
Why should all the arrangements for the warfare of the future be left
to the gold-laced gentlemen who pose as naval and military experts?
The Senate has saved poison gas for warfare. I hope the Senate will
continue to stand for every sort of disagreeable novelty in warfare. I
hope the Senate will save disease germs for warfare and make a stand
about poisoning the water supply. Let war be war and not merely a
tedious cruel game under rules. The more various, open, perplexing,
and unpleasant the available methods of warfare are to professional
soldiers, the less likely the world is to get another large and
deliberate war.
Let us consider how fresh wars are most likely to arise, and what
classes of people lean most heavily towards war. There can be little
dispute that the enormous majority of human beings nowadays hates and
dreads the idea of war; that most financial interests have become chary
of using its possibility as a threat in the game of wealth acquisition;
and that industrialism and trade contemplate an extensive outbreak as
unalloyed disaster. Little bullying punitive wars against small and
uncivilized peoples may still appeal to powerful groups exploiting
natural resources, but even these minor affairs seem to evoke a greater
distaste than they used to do. The war-makers who are trying to force
Britain into hostilities with China and the United States into a
Mexican adventure are meeting with an extremely stiff opposition. Half
a century ago, both adventures would have gone with a click.
The minority which favours war is very largely the professionally
belligerent class officers, their womenkind, and every sort of person
who upon occasion wears uniform and a sword and is entitled to a
salute. Salutes are ten times more intoxicating than absolute alcohol.
They reassure the arrogant; they allay all doubts. This salutable
minority is very strongly entrenched in the political traditions
and misconceptions of mankind. It has an air of being in the scheme
of things. Its heads are highly placed. And it is picturesque. It
photographs easily and is, by that alone, assured of a steady newspaper
publicity. It commands a great supply of bands. It is the custodian
of the flag. The facts that it may be dangerous and useless weigh but
lightly in the common mind against such attractions.
One may doubt if the generality of adorned and salutable soldiers in
the world really want war. They want the possibility of war, of course,
the world parcelled up into competing nations, and so forth, because
otherwise they could have no professional careers, no inferiors to
salute them, and might at any time be retrenched out of existence.
They have to “defend” us against the soldiers next door, and the
soldiers next door have to “defend” the other fellows against our
team, and there you are. That is primary. But war itself one may doubt
their hunger for, and quite evidently war to the utmost is not to the
professional soldiers’ taste.
It is part of the general absurdity with which human affairs are at
present conducted that when we want a discussion of disarmament or
the mitigation and prevention of war we consult “naval and military
experts,” existing by and for professional war, and quite naturally
they advise us on strictly professional lines. They set their faces
against all disturbing novelties that would oblige them to learn
their trade anew or against any proposals that might abolish their
profession, and they do their best to make warfare honourable,
comfortable, and dignified for military gentlemen. This, as people
say, is only human nature. They want _nice_ wars. They will provide
the spectacle, they will face the more sportsmanlike toils and dangers
of the entertainment, and the taxpayers, the civilians, and the common
herd, the “men,” will bear the less agreeable part of the burthen and
stand the racket of the subsequent clearing-up.
These charges are sustained by the proceedings of the experts who
have been discussing “disarmament” at Geneva under the auspices of
the League--as one might call it--for the Preservation of Distinct
Nations and Established Boundaries for Ever. The whole tenor of their
activities is to retain war as a standing institution, by restricting
its expensiveness and keeping its horrors within the bounds of
human endurance. Aeroplanes are to be defined as war aeroplanes (to
be used) and peace aeroplanes (not to be used). Navies are to be
restricted to so many battleships a side. Unsportsmanlike tools and
particularly submarines are to be forbidden. Professional soldiers
found killed by poker blows or poisoned food or other illegitimate
means are to be restored to life by the League of Nations umpires.
Nations found playing more soldiers than are allowed by the rules will
be disqualified. Such, at least, is the spirit of these entertaining
researches, though the complete scheme has still to be produced. So
protected, there is no reason why the professional soldier, dressed in
full uniform, from spurs to feathers, and the professional sea-dog in
blue and gold lace should not strut about the world, “defending” us
all, to the very end of time.
The virtuous proposals of President Coolidge for further naval
agreement are open to precisely the same objection as these Geneva
schemes. They would bar invention. They would professionalize and trade
unionize war. Except as paymaster and victim they would eliminate the
civilian.
My friend, Mr. J. B. S. Haldane, has called this disposition of the
military authorities to give a pleasant and honourable quality to
war, “Bayardism,” because the Chevalier Bayard, that peerless knight,
felt such a funk and detestation of gunpowder that he put every
musketeer who fell into his hands to death. Donne, on the other hand,
says Brigadier-General Hartley--who is really not such a soldier as
that sounds, seeing that he is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a
distinguished chemist--preaching in St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1621,
thanked God for artillery because it brought wars to a quicker end.
Mr. Haldane has written one of the most instructive and well-informed
books about Chemical Warfare that exist; he knows about ten times
as much in this field as most of the worthy gentlemen in gold lace,
tabs, badges, labels, swords, belts, and suchlike adornments who would
in practice have to mismanage it, and his brains are certainly ten
times as good. Consequently his book, which gives away every point of
importance concerning gas warfare, is treated as light literature,
and the real professional soldiers will torture and kill scores of
thousands of conscripts before they learn, horribly and slowly, what he
so charmingly tells them in his little volume.
Just as in the Great War--when in 1914 the French and British soldiers
were a quarter of a century behind-hand with trench warfare, and not a
military expert in Europe would attempt the tank until 1916, although
its use and necessity as a solution of the trench blockade had been
quite lucidly discussed and set forth by civilians as early as 1903.
Brigadier-General Hartley still returns at times to read papers about
gas warfare to the army folk he supplemented so effectively during the
war, though no one supposes they want to take him seriously now. He
has made it clear that a country in which everybody, man, woman, and
child, has a specially efficient gas-mask handy may face the next great
war with a certain qualified equanimity, and his anxiety about the gas
discipline of troops trained since 1918 is only too manifest in all he
says and does in this connection. Meanwhile at the Royal College of
Science in London, young engineers and chemists are beguiled away from
their studies in order to learn saluting and flourishing about with
swords, bayonets, and battle axes in a Cadet corps.
At present the British Army, which is perhaps the liveliest, most
industrious technically, and, according to its lights, the most nearly
up-to-date of all the old armies now surviving in the world, is working
out methods of fighting that are not much more than twenty years behind
the level of contemporary thought and intelligence. Having resisted
the tank for twelve years, having muffed the tank outrageously in the
war, the British Army is now evidently quite enslaved by the tank. It
plays with tanks all day and dreams of them at nights. It exhibits them
with childish pride to Colonial Premiers and Indian princes. It has
dinky one-man tanks now and great big land battleships and transport
tanks and shock tanks. Cavalry is at last at a discount, and the Air
Force practises deadly stunts and does musical drill at pageants very
prettily. Perhaps a new generation of military men, accustomed in their
younger days to driving motor-cars to the public danger, is responsible
for this change of heart, this sudden glorification of the once-hated
tank. But it is to be hoped for the sake of England and all the world
that these exercises will never get beyond the gravity of an expensive
amusement for the British military authorities.
Because, quite apart from the aeroplane gas attack, which is the
really modern mode of warfare, if warfare we must have, there are a
score of ways of countering a tank rush. This tank rush of which the
British Army seems to be dreaming now is as out of date as those vast
cavalry charges the German Emperor loved to rehearse before 1914. There
are pitfalls, there are trailing land torpedoes, gas-poisoned belts,
and zones of sudden flame that would make tanks mere cooking-pots. A
committee of half a dozen alert and intelligent specialists of the
type of Mr. Haldane and General Hartley, men who have given their
minds to biology, chemistry, mechanics, and suchlike sensible pursuits
instead of mere soldiering, could work out twenty schemes to make tanks
impossible in a month or so. The tank may have been all very well in
1907 or thereabouts; 1914 was the time for it. It was the winning card
in the days when Lord Kitchener turned it down as a “mechanical toy.”
Now the only excuse for thinking of it at all is that the professional
soldiers against whom the British professionals will be pitted will
probably be even more backward and unintelligent than they are. Given a
war on the basis of “Back to 1903,” and all may be well with England.
There is nowadays, however, much more danger than there ever was
before that some strange new outcast country, Soviet Russia, for
example, with German science to help her--or even with her own
sedulously stimulated science--will refuse to play the recognized
soldiers’ game according to the rules, and resort directly to
chemists, biologists, and engineers for some entirely unchivalrous
way of destroying a military force. Suppose this eccentric outcast to
concentrate on that. It would need to have a good supply of aviators
and aeroplanes, but no man has ever yet discovered how to prevent the
instantaneous conversion of a civil aeroplane into a military one;
and also it would have to have access to great chemical works. But
given these things, and men to operate them, that enemy need not have
ten thousand soldiers in uniform. It could hold up the huge tank rush
by a few simple expedients of the type I have glanced at above, and
it could set about locating, chasing, and annihilating every sort of
general headquarters and political and directive centre of the orthodox
military people--with gas and germs.
The idea would be to tarnish, suffocate, blister, and burn the
gentlemen in gold lace, and their political associates behind them,
to the pitch of entire disorganization. There would be no necessity
to pester the general enemy population except in regions of chemical
industrialism. That eminent air-archæologist, Mr. O. G. S. Crawford,
can teach any ground soldier who cares to learn how difficult, how
almost impossible it would be, to conceal the lay-out of vital military
centres from an acute air observer. Still less easy would it be to
conceal plant for the accumulation and distribution of munitions. In a
little while the front-line trenches would be telephoning to deaf ears,
and the tanks of the great offensive, until their petrol was all used
up, would be wandering back like sheep without a shepherd.
That sort of thing, a defensive trench and tank-trap system, and an air
and gas offensive against vital spots, is the really contemporary form
of war--if we must have war. That is the best way of achieving disaster
for the other side. It is, from first to last, a job for technicians
and artisans. There is no more use for drilled troops in it than there
is for the Greek phalanx. The military experts as a class loathe and
detest the new methods, and will do everything they can to set up a
flimsy barrier of treaties against their use, for the simple reason
that they abolish the military class. The whole world owes a debt of
gratitude to the American Senate for thwarting their endeavours.
It may seem paradoxical at first, but it is not nearly as paradoxical
as it sounds, to say that the evolution of war is abolishing the
soldier altogether. Suppose we drop considering whether war is out of
date or whether it pays, and assume that it is still a current concern.
It does not follow in the least that we still want soldiers to wage
it. I am inclined to think that on most scores we do not. If we were
not so profoundly obsessed by tradition and romance, I think we should
come to see that now, even for the direct purposes of war, for the
defence of a state from intruders, for the destruction of peoples and
institutions that have aroused our animosity to the murder pitch, and
for the imposition of some national or imperial will on recalcitrant
populations, all these handsome individuals running about or galloping
about in tabs and buttons and gold lace are of no earthly use at all.
We keep them because we are creatures of habit and wont. We endure them
because we have still to realize how unnecessary they are. But the
soldier in uniform is as out of date to-day as the man in armour was in
1600.
Drill, uniform, salutes, and the segregation of soldiers from most
human interests and all mental stimuli in barracks and camps have
always been so deeply impressed upon our minds as the proper way of
war, that it is only nowadays that this question becomes debatable. Few
of us realize how much of the old soldiering is already superseded.
Flags have long since disappeared from the modern battlefield. To-day
they wave chiefly for public occasions, at political meetings, and
in the advertisements of goods not otherwise attractive. Military
bands leave their instruments at home, or take them only as far as
the base, and the common soldier is deprived of all his conspicuous
regimental characters and clapped into a severely practical outfit
directly fighting begins. But we still think that the disciplines
and recognizable uniforms demanded by the mass fighting of departed
conditions are somehow imperative if war is to continue. We have not
yet made full allowance for the fact that while victory in the past was
generally conceded to rigidity, obstinacy, and a blind obedience, it is
now more and more the reward of flexibility, knowledge, invention, and
a witty use of modern resources. It is the country that has the courage
to scrap its army most completely which may come nearest winning in the
next great war--if human foolishness does contrive another great war
and a final delirium.
But while the abandonment of an army as the instrument of warfare and
the handing over the business of defensive and offensive killing as a
special problem to chemists, biologists, and engineers would probably
increase the military efficiency of a country very greatly, it would
also greatly diminish its disposition for war. The man of science
and organizing ability would be much more likely to regard war as a
tiresome distraction than as a great and glorious opportunity. The
needs and ambitions of the uniform-wearing classes would cease to
be a power in the land because they would cease to be in the land.
They would have dropped out altogether in favour of the Haldanes and
Hartleys and practical people of that kind, who would probably prefer
to work in laboratory overalls.
To me it seems almost certain that neither the war of 1870 nor the
Great War would have occurred if France and Germany had remained
republics after 1848. France succumbed to Napoleon III, who was
nothing if not Napoleonic. Germany after 1870 set out to be a great
modern state, and she found herself fatally entangled with a dynasty
whose chief interest in life was to exhibit itself in belligerent
costumes and attitudes. Each of the countries, when it reverted to
monarchy, broke out into a vivid rash of uniforms, and after that the
disease had to run its course. German militarism was not a necessity
to an expanding Germany; it was a reversion that wrecked an expanding
Germany. Germany to-day is much more likely to take a great place in
a united Europe than she ever was before, because of the wholesome
surgery that has been done upon her. She has had her Hohenzollerns
removed. Her state of health will be displayed and judged by the
disappearance of uniforms from her complexion.
Several European countries, in spite of the monstrous futile victories
and ineffective defeats of the Great War, are still gravely infected by
these antiquated armies and their traditions and sentimentalities. But
in view of what has been advanced in this article, it is quite possible
that the free advancement of belligerent science may be the true way to
achieve the peace of mankind. The improvement of war may be synonymous
with the ending of war.
_6 March, 1927._