"And that isn't all either," he said. "It goes far beyond strikes."
"War?" said somebody. Everybody in the Club knows Hay and his talk.
Hay nodded. "You'll see where speed comes in then—speed and the absence of warning. The nation that can get a thousand bombing-planes into the air first will be able to do what it likes with the others."
"Oh, come, Major!" somebody laughed. "That's rather looking for trouble, isn't it?"
"No good shutting your eyes to it," Hay returned. "Turner said something about transport just now. They're talking a lot about relieving London's traffic congestion. Well, it wants relieving; but do you know how I'd relieve it? I'd dig new ways ... well underground. Big ones, to hold plenty of people. Tube Stations won't be much good the next time. And I'd start digging them now."
"Hay's had a hint from the League of Nations."
"Well, I'm a League of Nations man up to a point. Up to this point—that the next show's going to be so unutterably ghastly that a generation that leaves anything undone to prevent it ought to be wiped off the map—anything undone, you understand, whether you personally believe in it or whether you don't. We're only at the beginning of the New War, and it will be far more 'lightning' than any of Turner's New Strikes."
"Democracy'll prevent it."
"As it's doing in Russia, eh? Just as likely to make it. Democracy's got such damnably high-falutin ideals and so little sense of ordinary decency. For an inhuman thing that belongs to everybody and pleases nobody give me the Will of the People. If you read your history you'll find that hot air's usually followed by bloodshed. And they won't stick at much. Personally I prefer a King's war with guns to a democratic one with black typhus germs."
"Sunny soul, our Major, isn't he?" somebody laughed again.