The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind

by H. G. Wells

Nothing could be more illustrative of this fatigue inertia than the expressed ideas of military men at this time. It will round off this chapter in an entirely significant way, and complete our picture of the immense world interrogation on which our history must end, if we give here the briefest summary of a lecture that was delivered to a gathering of field-marshals, generals, major-generals, and the like by Major-General Sir Louis Jackson, at the Royal United Service Institution in London one day in December, 1919. Lord Peel, the British Under-Secretary for War, presided, and the reader must picture to himself the not too large and quite dignified room of assembly in that building, and all these fine, grave, soldierly figures quietly intent upon the lecturer’s words. He is describing, with a certain subdued enthusiasm, the probable technical developments of military method in the “next war.”

Outside, through the evening twilight of Whitehall, flows the London traffic, not quite so abundant as in 1914, but still fairly abundant; the omnibuses all overcrowded because there are now not nearly enough of them, and the clothing of people generally shabbier. Some little way down Whitehall is a temporary erection, the Cenotaph, with its base smothered with a vast, pathetic heap of decaying wreaths, bunches of flowers, and the like, a cenotaph to commemorate the eight hundred thousand young men of the Empire who have been killed in the recent struggle. A few people are putting fresh flowers and wreaths there. One or two are crying.

The prospect stretches out beyond this gathering into the grey vastness of London, where people are now crowded as they have never been crowded before, whose food is dear and employment more uncertain than it has ever been. But let not the spectacle be one of unrelieved gloom; Regent Street, Oxford Street, and Bond Street are bright with shoppers and congested with new automobiles, because we must remember that everybody does not lose by a war. Beyond London the country sinks into night, and across the narrow sea are North France and Belgium devastated, Germany with scores of thousands of her infants dwindling and dying for want of milk, all Austria starving. Half the population of Vienna, it is believed, unless American relief comes quickly, is doomed to die of hardship before the spring. Beyond that bleak twilight stretches the darkness of Russia. There, at least, no rich people are buying anything, and no military men are reading essays on the next war. But in icy Petrograd is little food, little wood, and no coal. All the towns of Russia southward as far as the snow reaches are in a similar plight, and in the Ukraine and to the south a ragged and dingy war drags to its end. Europe is bankrupt, and people’s pockets rustle with paper money whose purchasing power dwindles as they walk about with it.

But now we will return to Sir Louis in the well-lit room at the United Service Institution.

He was of opinion—we follow the report in next morning’s Times[525]—that we were merely on the eve of the most extensive modifications of the art of war known to history. It behoved us, therefore—us being, of course, the British and not the whole of mankind—to get on with our armaments and to keep ahead; a fine opening generalization. “It was necessary to develop new arms.... The nation which best did so would have a great advantage in the next war. There were people who were crying aloud for a reduction of armaments——”

(But there the Director of Trench Warfare and Supplies was wrong. They were just crying at the cenotaph, poor, soft, and stupid souls, because a son or a brother or a father was dead.)

Sir Louis believed that one of the greatest developments in the art of warfare would be brought about in mechanical transport. The tank he treated with ingratitude. These military gentlemen are ungrateful to an invention which shoved and butted them into victory almost in spite of themselves. The tank, said Sir Louis, was “a freak.... The outstanding feature” of the tank, he said, was that it made mechanical transport independent of the roads. Hitherto armies on the march had only been able to spoil the roads; now their transport on caterpillar wheels would advance in open order on a broad front carrying guns, munitions, supplies, bridging equipment, rafts, and men—and incidentally ploughing up and destroying hedges, ditches, fields, and cultivation generally. Armies would wallow across the country, leaving nothing behind but dust and mud.

So our imaginations are led up to the actual hostilities.

Sir Louis was in favour of gas. For punitive expeditions particularly, gas was to be recommended. And here he startled and disconcerted his hearers by a gleam of something approaching sentimentality. “It might be possible,” he said, “to come to some agreement that no gas should be used which caused unnecessary suffering.” But there his heart spoke rather than his head; it should have been clear to him that if law can so far override warfare as to prohibit any sort of evil device whatever, it can override warfare to the extent of prohibiting it altogether. And where would Sir Louis Jackson and his audience be then? War is war; its only law is the law that the maximum destruction of the forces of the enemy is necessary. To that law in warfare all considerations of humanity and justice are subordinate.

From gas Sir Louis passed to the air. Here he predicted “most important advances.... We need not trouble ourselves yet with flying destroyers or flying concrete forts, but in twenty years’ time the Air Force Estimates might be the most important part of our preparations for war.” He discussed the conversion of commercial flying machines to bombing and reconnaissance uses, and the need for special types of fighting machine in considerable numbers and always ready. He gave reasons for supposing that the bombers in the next war would not have the same targets near the front of the armies, and would secure better results by going further afield and bombing the centres “where stores are being manufactured and troops trained.” As everyone who stayed in London or the east of England in 1917-18 knows, this means the promiscuous bombing of any and every centre of population. But, of course, the bombing of those ‘prentice days would be child’s play to the bombing of the “next war.” There would be countless more aeroplanes, bigger and much nastier bombs....