1
Such are the landscapes and method of modern war. It is more difficult
in its nature from war as it was waged in the nineteenth century than
that was from the nature of the phalanx or the legion. The nucleus
fact--when I talked to General Joffre he was very insistent upon
this point--is still as ever the ordinary fighting man, but all the
accessories and conditions of his personal encounter with the fighting
man of the other side have been revolutionised in a quarter of a
century. The fighting together in a close disciplined order, shoulder
to shoulder, which has held good for thousands of years as the best and
most successful fighting, has been destroyed; the idea of _breaking_
infantry formation as the chief offensive operation has disappeared, the
cavalry charge and the cavalry pursuit are as obsolete as the cross-bow.
The modern fighting man is as individualised as a half back or a centre
forward in a football team. Personal fighting has become “scrapping”
again, an individual adventure with knife, club, bomb, revolver or
bayonet. In this war we are working out things instead of thinking them
out, and these enormous changes are still but imperfectly apprehended.
The trained and specialised military man probably apprehends them as
feebly as anyone.
This is a thing that I want to state as emphatically as possible. It is
the pith of the lesson I have learnt at the front. The whole method of
war has been so altered in the past five and twenty years as to make
it a new and different process altogether. Much the larger part of this
alteration has only become effective in the last two years. Everyone is
a beginner at this new game; everyone is experimenting and learning.
The idea has been put admirably by _Punch._ That excellent picture
of the old-fashioned sergeant who complains to his officer of the new
recruit; “'E's all right in the trenches, Sir; 'e's all right at a
scrap; but 'e won't never make a soldier,” is the quintessence of
everything I am saying here. And were there not the very gravest doubts
about General Smuts in British military circles because he had “had no
military training”? A Canadian expressed the new view very neatly on
being asked, in consequence of a deficient salute, whether he wanted to
be a soldier, by saying, “Not I! I want to be a fighter!”
The professional officer of the old dispensation was a man specialised
in relation to one of the established “arms.” He was an infantryman, a
cavalryman, a gunner or an engineer. It will be interesting to trace the
changes that have happened to all these arms.
Before this war began speculative writers had argued that infantry drill
in close formation had now no fighting value whatever, that it was no
doubt extremely necessary for the handling, packing, forwarding and
distribution of men, but that the ideal infantry fighter was now a
highly individualised and self-reliant man put into a pit with a machine
gun, and supported by a string of other men bringing him up supplies and
ready to assist him in any forward rush that might be necessary.
The opening phases of the war seemed to contradict this. It did not
at first suit the German game to fight on this most modern theory,
and isolated individual action is uncongenial to the ordinary German
temperament and opposed to the organised social tendencies of German
life. To this day the Germans attack only in close order; they are
unable to produce a real modern infantry for aggressive purposes, and it
is a matter of astonishment to military minds on the English side that
our hastily trained new armies should turn out to be just as good at
the new fighting as the most “seasoned troops.” But there is no reason
whatever why they should not be. “Leading,” in the sense of going
ahead of the men and making them move about mechanically at the word of
command, has ceased. On the British side our magnificent new subalterns
and our equally magnificent new non-commissioned officers play the part
of captains of football teams; they talk their men individually into
an understanding of the job before them; they criticise style and
performance. On the French side things have gone even farther. Every man
in certain attacks has been given a large scale map of the ground over
which he has to go, and has had his own individual job clearly marked
and explained to him. All the Allied infantrymen tend to become
specialised, as bombers, as machine-gun men, and so on. The
unspecialised common soldier, the infantryman who has stood and marched
and moved in ranks and ranks, the “serried lines of men,” who are the
main substance of every battle story for the last three thousand years,
are as obsolete as the dodo. The rifle and bayonet very probably are
becoming obsolete too. Knives and clubs and revolvers serve better in
the trenches. The krees and the Roman sword would be as useful. The fine
flourish of the bayonet is only possible in the rare infrequent open.
Even the Zulu assegai would serve as well.
The two operations of the infantry attack now are the rush and the
“scrap.” These come after the artillery preparation. Against the rush,
the machine gun is pitted. The machine gun becomes lighter and more and
more controllable by one man; as it does so the days of the rifle draw
to a close. Against the machine gun we are now directing the “Tank,”
which goes ahead and puts out the machine gun as soon as it begins to
sting the infantry rush. We are also using the swooping aeroplane with a
machine gun. Both these devices are of British origin, and they promise
very well.
After the rush and the scrap comes the organisation of the captured
trench. “Digging in” completes the cycle of modern infantry fighting.
You may consider this the first or the last phase of an infantry
operation. It is probably at present the least worked-out part of the
entire cycle. Here lies the sole German superiority; they bunch and
crowd in the rush, they are inferior at the scrap, but they do dig like
moles. The weakness of the British is their failure to settle down. They
like the rush and the scrap; they press on too far, they get outflanked
and lost “in the blue”; they are not naturally clever at the excavating
part of the work, and they are not as yet well trained in making
dug-outs and shelter-pits rapidly and intelligently. They display most
of the faults that were supposed to be most distinctively French before
this war came to revolutionise all our conceptions of French character.
2
Now the operations of this modern infantry, which unlike any preceding
infantry in the history of war does not fight in disciplined formations
but as highly individualised specialists, are determined almost
completely by the artillery preparation. Artillery is now the most
essential instrument of war. You may still get along with rather bad
infantry; you may still hold out even after the loss of the aerial
ascendancy, but so soon as your guns fail you approach defeat.
The backbone process of the whole art of war is the manufacture in
overwhelming quantities, the carriage and delivery of shell upon the
vulnerable points of the enemy's positions. That is, so to speak,
the essential blow. Even the infantryman is now hardly more than the
residuary legatee after the guns have taken their toll.
I have now followed nearly every phase in the life history of a shell
from the moment when it is a segment of steel bar just cut off, to the
moment when it is no more than a few dispersed and rusting rags and
fragments of steel--pressed upon the stray visitor to the battlefield as
souvenirs. All good factories are intensely interesting places to visit,
but a good munition factory is romantically satisfactory. It is as
nearly free from the antagonism of employer and employed as any factory
can be. The busy sheds I visited near Paris struck me as being the most
living and active things in the entire war machine. Everywhere else I
saw fitful activity, or men waiting. I have seen more men sitting about
and standing about, more bored inactivity, during my tour than I have
ever seen before in my life. Even the front line trenches seem to
slumber; the Angel of Death drowses over them, and moves in his sleep
to crush out men's lives. The gunfire has an indolent intermittence.
But the munition factories grind on night and day, grinding against
the factories in Central Europe, grinding out the slow and costly and
necessary victory that should end aggressive warfare in the world for
ever.
It would be very interesting if one could arrange a meeting between
any typical Allied munition maker on the one hand, and the Kaiser and
Hindenburg, those two dominant effigies of the German nationalists'
dream of “world might.” Or failing that, Mr. Dyson might draw the
encounter. You imagine these two heroic figures got up for the
interview, very magnificent in shining helms and flowing cloaks,
decorations, splendid swords, spurs. “Here,” one would say, “is the
power that has held you. You were bolstered up very loyally by the Krupp
firm and so forth, you piled up shell, guns, war material, you hoped to
snatch your victory before the industrialisation and invention of the
world could turn upon you. But you failed. You were not rapid enough.
The battle of the Marne was your misfortune. And Ypres. You lost some
chances at Ypres. Two can play at destructive industrialism, and now
we out-gun you. We are piling up munitions now faster than you. The
essentials of this Game of the War Lord are idiotically simple, but it
was not of our choosing. It is now merely a question of months before
you make your inevitable admission. This is no war to any great
commander's glory. This gentleman in the bowler hat is the victor, Sire;
not you. Assisted, Sire, by these disrespectful-looking factory girls in
overalls.”
For example, there is M. Citroen. Before the war I understand he made
automobiles; after the war he wants to turn to and make automobiles
again. For the duration of the war he makes shell. He has been
temporarily diverted from constructive to destructive industrialism. He
did me the honours of his factory. He is a compact, active man in dark
clothes and a bowler hat, with a pencil and notebook conveniently at
hand. He talked to me in carefully easy French, and watched my face with
an intelligent eye through his pince-nez for the signs of comprehension.
Then he went on to the next point.
He took me through every stage of his process. In his office he showed
me the general story. Here were photographs of certain vacant fields
and old sheds--“this place”--he indicated the altered prospect from the
window--“at the outbreak of the war.” He showed me a plan of the first
undertaking. “Now we have rather over nine thousand workpeople.”
He showed me a little row of specimens. “These we make for Italy. These
go to Russia. These are the Rumanian pattern.”
Thence to the first stage, the chopping up of the iron bars, the
furnace, the punching out of the first shape of the shell; all this is
men's work. I had seen this sort of thing before in peace ironworks,
but I saw it again with the same astonishment, the absolute precision
of movement on the part of the half-naked sweating men, the calculated
efficiency of each worker, the apparent heedlessness, the real
certitude, with which the blazing hot cylinder is put here, dropped
there, rolls to its next appointed spot, is chopped up and handed on,
the swift passage to the cooling crude, pinkish-purple shell shape. Down
a long line one sees in perspective a practical symmetry, of furnace
and machine group and the shells marching on from this first series
of phases to undergo the long succession of operations, machine after
machine, across the great width of the shed in which eighty per cent
of the workers are women. There is a thick dust of sounds in the air, a
rumble of shafting, sudden thuddings, clankings, and M. Citroen has
to raise his voice. He points out where he has made little changes in
procedures, cut out some wasteful movement.... He has an idea and makes
a note in the ever-ready notebook.
There is a beauty about all these women, there is extraordinary grace in
their finely adjusted movements. I have come from an after-lunch coffee
upon the boulevards and from watching the ugly fashion of our time;
it is a relief to be reminded that most women can after all be
beautiful--if only they would not “dress.” these women wear simple
overalls and caps. In the cap is a rosette. Each shed has its own colour
of rosette.
“There is much esprit de corps here,” says M. Citroen.
“And also,” he adds, showing obverse as well as reverse of the world's
problem of employment and discipline, “we can see at once if a woman is
not in her proper shed.”
Across the great sheds under the shafting--how fine it must look at
night!--the shells march, are shaped, cut, fitted with copper bands,
calibrated, polished, varnished....
Then we go on to another system of machines in which lead is reduced to
plastic ribbons and cut into shrapnel bullets as the sweetstuff
makers pull out and cut up sweetstuff. And thence into a warren of hot
underground passages in which run the power cables. There is not a cable
in the place that is not immediately accessible to the electricians. We
visit the dynamos and a vast organisation of switchboards....
These things are more familiar to M. Citroen than they are to me. He
wants me to understand, but he does not realise that I would like a
little leisure to wonder. What is interesting him just now, because it
is the newest thing, is his method of paying his workers. He lifts
a hand gravely: “I said, what we must do is abolish altogether the
counting of change.”
At a certain hour, he explained, came pay-time. The people had done; it
was to his interest and their that they should get out of the works
as quickly as possible and rest and amuse themselves. He watched them
standing in queues at the wickets while inside someone counted; so many
francs, so many centimes. It bored him to see this useless, tiresome
waiting. It is abolished. Now at the end of each week the worker goes
to a window under the initial of his name, and is handed a card on which
these items have been entered:
Balance from last week. So many hours at so much. Premiums.
The total is so many francs, so many centimes. This is divided into
the nearest round number, 100, 120, 80 francs as the case may be, and a
balance of the odd francs and centimes. The latter is carried forward to
the next week's account. At the bottom of the card is a tear-off coupon
with a stamp, coloured to indicate the round sum, green, let us say, for
100, blue for 130 francs. This is taken to a wicket marked 100 or 130 as
the case may be, and there stands a cashier with his money in piles of
100 or 130 francs counted ready to hand; he sweeps in the coupon, sweeps
out the cash. “_Next!_”
I became interested in the worker's side of this organisation. I insist
on seeing the entrances, the clothes-changing places, the lavatories,
and so forth of the organisation. As we go about we pass a string of
electric trolleys steered by important-looking girls, and loaded with
shell, finished as far as these works are concerned and on their way
to the railway siding. We visit the hospital, for these works demand a
medical staff. It is not only that men and women faint or fall ill, but
there are accidents, burns, crushings, and the like. The war casualties
begin already here, and they fall chiefly among the women. I saw a
wounded woman with a bandaged face sitting very quietly in the corner.
The women here face danger, perhaps not quite such obvious danger as the
women who, at the next stage in the shell's career, make and pack the
explosives in their silk casing, but quite considerable risk. And they
work with a real enthusiasm. They know they are fighting the Bloches as
well as any men. Certain of them wear Russian decorations. The women of
this particular factory have been thanked by the Tsar, and a number of
decorations were sent by him for distribution among them.
3
The shell factory and the explosives shed stand level with the drill
yard as the real first stage in one of the two essential _punches_ in
modern war. When one meets the shell again it is being unloaded from the
railway truck into an ammunition dump. And here the work of control is
much more the work of a good traffic manager than of the old-fashioned
soldier.
The dump I best remember I visited on a wet and windy day. Over a great
space of ground the sidings of the rail-head spread, the normal gauge
rail-head spread out like a fan and interdigitated with the narrow gauge
lines that go up practically to the guns. And also at the sides camions
were loading, and an officer from the Midi in charge of one of these was
being dramatically indignant at five minutes' delay. Between these
two sets of lines, shells were piled of all sizes, I should think some
hundreds of thousands of shells altogether, wet and shining in the rain.
French reservists, soldiers from Madagascar, and some Senegalese were
busy at different points loading and unloading the precious freights.
A little way from me were despondent-looking German prisoners handling
timber. All this dump was no more than an eddy as it were in the path
of the shell from its birth from the steel bars near Paris to the
accomplishment of its destiny in the destruction or capture of more
Germans.
And next the visitor meets the shell coming up upon a little trolley to
the gun. He sees the gunners, as drilled and precise as the men he saw
at the forges, swing out the breech block and run the shell, which
has met and combined with its detonators and various other industrial
products since it left the main dump, into the gun. The breech
closes like a safe door, and hides the shell from the visitor. It is
“good-bye.” He receives exaggerated warning of the danger to his ears,
stuffs his fingers into them, and opens his mouth as instructed, hears a
loud but by no means deafening report, and sees a spit of flame near the
breech. Regulations of a severe character prevent his watching from an
aeroplane the delivery of the goods upon the customers opposite.
I have already described the method of locating enemy guns and so forth
by photography. Many of the men at this work are like dentists rather
than soldiers; they are busy in carefully lit rooms, they wear white
overalls, they have clean hands and laboratory manners. The only really
romantic figure in the whole of this process, the only figure that has
anything of the old soldierly swagger about him still, is the aviator.
And, as one friend remarked to me when I visited the work of the
British flying corps, “The real essential strength of this arm is the
organisation of its repairs. Here is one of the repair vans through
which our machine guns go. It is a motor workshop on wheels. But at any
time all this park, everything, can pack up and move forward like
Barnum and Bailey's Circus. The machine guns come through this shop in
rotation; they go out again, cleaned, repaired, made new again. Since we
got all that working we have heard nothing of a machine gun jamming in
any air fight at all.”...
The rest of the career of the shell after it has left the gun one must
imagine chiefly from the incoming shell from the enemy. You see suddenly
a flying up of earth and stones and anything else that is movable in the
neighbourhood of the shell-burst, the instantaneous unfolding of a dark
cloud of dust and reddish smoke, which comes very quickly to a certain
size and then begins slowly to fray out and blow away. Then, after
seeing the cloud of the burst you hear the hiss of the shell's approach,
and finally you are hit by the sound of the explosion. This is the
climax and end of the life history of any shell that is not a dud
shell. Afterwards the battered fuse may serve as some journalist's
paper-weight. The rest is scrap iron.
Such is, so to speak, the primary process of modern warfare. I will
not draw the obvious pacifist moral of the intense folly of human
concentration upon such a process. The Germans willed it. We Allies
have but obeyed the German will for warfare because we could not do
otherwise, we have taken up this simple game of shell delivery, and we
are teaching them that we can play it better, in the hope that so we
and the world may be freed from the German will-to-power and all its
humiliating and disgusting consequences henceforth for ever. Europe
now is no more than a household engaged in holding up and if possible
overpowering a monomaniac member.
4
Now the whole of this process of the making and delivery of a shell,
which is the main process of modern warfare, is one that can be far
better conducted by a man accustomed to industrial organisation or
transit work than by the old type of soldier. This is a thing that
cannot be too plainly stated or too often repeated. Germany nearly won
this way because of her tremendously modern industrial resources; but
she blundered into it and she is losing it because she has too many men
in military uniform and because their tradition and interests were to
powerful with her. All the state and glories of soldiering, the bright
uniforms, the feathers and spurs, the flags, the march-past, the
disciplined massed advance, the charge; all these are as needless and
obsolete now in war as the masks and shields of an old-time Chinese
brave. Liberal-minded people talk of the coming dangers of militarism in
the face of events that prove conclusively that professional militarism
is already as dead as Julius Caesar. What is coming is not so much the
conversion of men into soldiers as the socialisation of the economic
organisation of the country with a view to both national and
international necessities. We do not want to turn a chemist or
a photographer into a little figure like a lead soldier, moving
mechanically at the word of command, but we do want to make his
chemistry or photography swiftly available if the national organisation
is called upon to fight.
We have discovered that the modern economic organisation is in itself a
fighting machine. It is so much so that it is capable of taking on and
defeating quite easily any merely warrior people that is so rash as to
pit itself against it. Within the last sixteen years methods of fighting
have been elaborated that have made war an absolutely hopeless adventure
for any barbaric or non-industrialised people. In the rush of larger
events few people have realised the significance of the rapid squashing
of the Senussi in western Egypt, and the collapse of De Wet's rebellion
in South Africa. Both these struggles would have been long, tedious
and uncertain even in A.D. 1900. This time they have been, so to speak,
child's play.
Occasionally into the writer's study there come to hand drifting
fragments of the American literature upon the question of
“preparedness,” and American papers discussing the Mexican situation. In
none of these is there evident any clear realisation of the fundamental
revolution that has occurred in military methods during the last two
years. It looks as if a Mexican war, for example, was thought of as an
affair of rather imperfectly trained young men with rifles and horses
and old-fashioned things like that. A Mexican war on that level might be
as tedious as the South African war. But if the United States preferred
to go into Mexican affairs with what I may perhaps call a 1916 autumn
outfit instead of the small 1900 outfit she seems to possess at present,
there is no reason why America should not clear up any and every Mexican
guerilla force she wanted to in a few weeks.
To do that she would need a plant of a few hundred aeroplanes, for the
most part armed with machine guns, and the motor repair vans and so
forth needed to go with the aeroplanes; she would need a comparatively
small army of infantry armed with machine guns, with motor transport,
and a few small land ironclads. Such a force could locate, overtake,
destroy and disperse any possible force that a country in the present
industrial condition of Mexico could put into the field. No sort of
entrenchment or fortification possible in Mexico could stand against
it. It could go from one end of the country to the other without serious
loss, and hunt down and capture anyone it wished....
The practical political consequence of the present development of
warfare, of the complete revolution in the conditions of warfare since
this century began, is to make war absolutely hopeless for any
peoples not able either to manufacture or procure the very complicated
appliances and munitions now needed for its prosecution. Countries like
Mexico, Bulgaria, Serbia, Afghanistan or Abyssinia are no more capable
of going to war without the connivance and help of manufacturing states
than horses are capable of flying. And this makes possible such a
complete control of war by the few great states which are at the
necessary level of industrial development as not the most Utopian of us
have hitherto dared to imagine.
5
Infantrymen with automobile transport, plentiful machine guns, Tanks and
such-like accessories; that is the first Arm in modern war. The factory
hand and all the material of the shell route from the factory to the gun
constitute the second Arm. Thirdly comes the artillery, the guns and the
photographic aeroplanes working with the guns. Next I suppose we
must count sappers and miners as a fourth Arm of greatly increased
importance. The fifth and last combatant Arm is the modern substitute
for cavalry; and that also is essentially a force of aeroplanes
supported by automobiles. Several of the French leaders with whom I
talked seemed to be convinced that the horse is absolutely done with in
modern warfare. There is nothing, they declared, that cavalry ever did
that cannot now be done better by aeroplane.
This is something to break the hearts of the Prussian junkers and
of old-fashioned British army people. The hunt across the English
countryside, the preservation of the fox as a sacred animal, the race
meeting, the stimulation of betting in all classes of the public; all
these things depend ultimately upon the proposition that the “breed
of horses” is of vital importance to the military strength of Great
Britain. But if the arguments of these able French soldiers are sound,
the cult of the horse ceases to be of any more value to England than the
elegant activities of the Toxophilite Society. Moreover, there has
been a colossal buying of horses for the British army, a tremendous
organisation for the purchase and supply of fodder, then employment
of tens of thousands of men as grooms, minders and the like, who would
otherwise have been in the munition factories or the trenches.
To what possible use can cavalry be put? Can it be used in attack?
Not against trenches; that is better done by infantrymen following up
gunfire. Can it be used against broken infantry in the open? Not if the
enemy has one or two machine guns covering their retreat. Against expose
infantry the swooping aeroplane with a machine gun is far more deadly
and more difficult to hit. Behind it your infantry can follow to receive
surrenders; in most circumstances they can come up on cycles if it is
a case of getting up quickly across a wide space. Similarly for
pursuit the use of wire and use of the machine gun have abolished the
possibility of a pouring cavalry charge. The swooping aeroplane does
everything that cavalry can do in the way of disorganising the enemy,
and far more than it can do in the way of silencing machine guns. It can
capture guns in retreat much more easily by bombing traction engines
and coming down low and shooting horses and men. An ideal modern
pursuit would be an advance of guns, automobiles full of infantry, motor
cyclists and cyclists, behind a high screen of observation aeroplanes
and a low screen of bombing and fighting aeroplanes. Cavalry _might_
advance across fields and so forth, but only as a very accessory part of
the general advance....
And what else is there for the cavalry to do?
It may be argued that horses can go over country that is impossible for
automobiles. That is to ignore altogether what has been done in this war
by such devices as caterpillar wheels. So far from cavalry being able to
negotiate country where machines would stick and fail, mechanism can now
ride over places where any horse would flounder.
I submit these considerations to the horse-lover. They are not my
original observations; they have been put to me and they have convinced
me. Except perhaps as a parent of transport mules I see no further part
henceforth for the horse to play in war.
6
The form and texture of the coming warfare--if there is still warfare
to come--are not yet to be seen in their completeness upon the modern
battlefield. One swallow does not make a summer, nor a handful of
aeroplanes, a “Tank” or so, a few acres of shell craters, and a village
here and there, pounded out of recognition, do more than foreshadow
the spectacle of modernised war on land. War by these developments has
become the monopoly of the five great industrial powers; it is their
alternative to end or evolve it, and if they continue to disagree, then
it must needs become a spectacle of majestic horror such as no man
can yet conceive. It has been wise of Mr. Pennell therefore, who has
recently been drawing his impressions of the war upon stone, to make
his pictures not upon the battlefield, but among the huge industrial
apparatus that is thrusting behind and thrusting up through the war of
the gentlemen in spurs. He gives us the splendours and immensities of
forge and gun pit, furnace and mine shaft. He shows you how great they
are and how terrible. Among them go the little figures of men, robbed of
all dominance, robbed of all individual quality. He leaves it for you to
draw the obvious conclusion that presently, if we cannot contrive to
put an end to war, blacknessess like these, enormities and flares
and towering threats, will follow in the track of the Tanks and come
trampling over the bickering confusion of mankind.
There is something very striking in these insignificant and incidental
men that Mr. Pennell shows us. Nowhere does a man dominate in all these
wonderful pictures. You may argue perhaps that that is untrue to the
essential realities; all this array of machine and workshop, all this
marshalled power and purpose, has been the creation of inventor and
business organiser. But are we not a little too free with that word
“_creation_”? Falstaff was a “creation” perhaps, or the Sistine sibyls;
there we have indubitably an end conceived and sought and achieved; but
did these inventors and business organisers do more than heed certain
unavoidable imperatives? Seeking coal they were obliged to mine in a
certain way; seeking steel they had to do this and this and not that and
that; seeking profit they had to obey the imperative of the economy. So
little did they plan their ends that most of these manufacturers speak
with a kind of astonishment of the deadly use to which their works are
put. They find themselves making the new war as a man might wake out of
some drugged condition to find himself strangling his mother.
So that Mr. Pennell's sketchy and transient human figures seem
altogether right to me. He sees these forges, workshops, cranes and the
like, as inhuman and as wonderful as cliffs or great caves or icebergs
or the stars. They are a new aspect of the logic of physical necessity
that made all these older things, and he seizes upon the majesty and
beauty of their dimensions with an entire impartiality. And they are
as impartial. Through all these lithographs runs one present motif, the
motif of the supreme effort of western civilisation to save itself and
the world from the dominance of the reactionary German Imperialism of
modern science. The pictures are arranged to shape out the life of a
shell, from the mine to the great gun; nothing remains of their
history to show except the ammunition dump, the gun in action and the
shell-burst. Upon this theme all these great appearances are strung
to-day. But to-morrow they may be strung upon some other and nobler
purpose. These gigantic beings of which the engineer is the master
and slave, are neither benevolent nor malignant. To-day they produce
destruction, they are the slaves of the spur; to-morrow we hope they
will bridge and carry and house and help again.
For that peace we struggle against the dull inflexibility of the German
Will-to-Power.