3.19. MODERN WAR.
In our contemporary world, in our particular phase, military and naval
organization loom up, colossal and unprecedent facts. They have the
effect of an overhanging disaster that grows every year more tremendous,
every year in more sinister contrast with the increasing securities and
tolerations of the everyday life. It is impossible to imagine now what a
great war in Europe would be like; the change in material and method has
been so profound since the last cycle of wars ended with the downfall of
the Third Napoleon. But there can be little or no doubt that it would
involve a destruction of property and industrial and social
disorganization of the most monstrous dimensions. No man, I think, can
mark the limits of the destruction of a great European conflict were it
to occur at the present time; and the near advent of practicable flying
machines opens a whole new world of frightful possibilities.
For my own part I can imagine that a collision between such powers as
Great Britain, Germany or America, might very well involve nearly every
other power in the world, might shatter the whole fabric of credit upon
which our present system of economics rests and put back the orderly
progress of social construction for a vast interval of time. One figures
great towns red with destruction while giant airships darken the sky,
one pictures the crash of mighty ironclads, the bursting of tremendous
shells fired from beyond the range of sight into unprotected cities. One
thinks of congested ways swarming with desperate fighters, of torrents
of fugitives and of battles gone out of the control of their generals
into unappeasable slaughter. There is a vision of interrupted
communications, of wrecked food trains and sunken food ships, of vast
masses of people thrown out of employment and darkly tumultuous in the
streets, of famine and famine-driven rioters. What modern population
will stand a famine? For the first time in the history of warfare the
rear of the victor, the rear of the fighting line becomes insecure,
assailable by flying machines and subject to unprecedented and
unimaginable panics. No man can tell what savagery of desperation these
new conditions may not release in the soul of man. A conspiracy of
adverse chances, I say, might contrive so great a cataclysm. There is no
effectual guarantee that it could not occur.
But in spite of that, I believe that on the whole there is far more good
than evil in the enormous military growths that have occurred in the
last half century. I cannot estimate how far the alternative to war is
lethargy. It is through military urgencies alone that many men can be
brought to consent to the collective endowment of research, to public
education and to a thousand interferences with their private
self-seeking. Just as the pestilence of cholera was necessary before men
could be brought to consent to public sanitation, so perhaps the dread
of foreign violence is an unavoidable spur in an age of chaotic
industrial production in order that men may be brought to subserve the
growth of a State whose purpose might otherwise be too high for them to
understand. Men must be forced to care for fleets and armies until they
have learnt to value cities and self development and a beautiful social
life.
The real danger of modern war lies not in the disciplined power of the
fighting machine but in the undisciplined forces in the collective mind
that may set that machine in motion. It is not that our guns and ships
are marvellously good, but that our press and political organizations
are haphazard growths entirely inferior to them. If this present phase
of civilization should end in a debacle, if presently humanity finds
itself beginning again at a lower level of organization, it will not be
because we have developed these enormous powers of destruction but
because we have failed to develop adequate powers of control for them
and collective determination. This panoply of war waits as the test of
our progress towards the realization of that collective mind which I
hold must ultimately direct the evolution of our specific being. It is
here to measure our incoherence and error, and in the measure of those
defects to refer us back to our studies.
Just as we understand does war become needless.
But I do not think that war and military organization will so much
disappear as change its nature as the years advance. I think that the
phase of universal military service we seem to be approaching is one
through which the mass of mankind may have to pass, learning something
that can be learnt in no other way, that the uniforms and flags, the
conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and
devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion and universal
responsibility, will remain a permanent acquisition, though the last
ammunition has been used ages since in the pyrotechnic display that
welcomed the coming of the ultimate Peace.
