PARIS
THE FUTURE OF WAR
It is no purpose of this little book to discuss whether a repetition of war is likely or unlikely, or to speculate on the dawn of universal peace. The writer prefers to take his stand on universal experience, as contained in history, observing that the path of history is strewn with idealistic tombstones—the Holy Alliance, the mid-Victorian Manchester School, the Hague Conventions. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was to inaugurate a Golden Age, to be the concrete symbol of the millennium, yet within a decade the four chief Powers in Europe had reconverted their ploughshares into swords, and the North American continent was torn by a fratricidal conflict. To abolish war we must remove its cause, which lies in the imperfections of human nature. The way to “peace on earth” is by the progressive and general growth of “good-will towards men,” by a transformation of the spirit of man instead of a futile attempt to bind his fists—cords from which he can easily break free, if so disposed. This changed spirit must be world-wide, for peace-loving nations, especially if prosperous and possessed of rich territory who abandon their defences, invite and indeed provoke aggression as much as a flock of well-nourished sheep with a lean and hungry wolf in the fold. In the seventeenth century the Protestant states of North Germany complaining that the expense of maintaining armed forces exceeded the possible benefit of their protection, prated thus—“let us behave with justice to all men, and all men will behave with justice towards us.” They speedily found the fallacy of this faith in an imperfect world, their protests of neutrality an inadequate shield against the rapacity of their neighbours.
In the years immediately following the Great War, idealists thought to cure the ills of the body politic, as well as human, by a monotonous repetition of the jingle, “Day by day, and in every way, we are getting better and better,” but disillusionment came, and the peoples of the world are realizing that international Couéism is as futile to cure real disease as its pseudo-medical counterpart.
Regarding war as a hard fact, as a doctor called in to a sick patient views disease, our concern here is simply with the course of the malady, our object being to gauge its future tendencies, in order, if possible, to limit its ravages and by scientific treatment ensure the speedy and complete recovery of the patient. As diagnosis comes before treatment, the first step is to examine the patient, estimate the gravity of his condition, and discover the seat of the trouble.
The Great War caused the direct sacrifice of eight million lives, to which the British Isles alone contributed three-quarters of a million. So ineffectual was the treatment prescribed by the military practitioners who were called in that the illness took over four years to run its course, during which the financial temperature mounted daily, until for this country alone it reached a cost of £8,000,000 a day. Our total war expenditure was nearly ten thousand million pounds; our National Debt has been increased tenfold. Moreover, these long years of strain and want so impaired the physical health of the peoples that they fell an easy prey to epidemic diseases, and the influenza scourge of 1918 and 1919 cost, among the civilian population of the world, more than twice as many lives as were lost in battle.
It is surely clear that any further wars conducted on similar methods must mean the breakdown of Western civilization. Is there an alternative? To answer this question the obvious course is to ascertain what were the foundations on which the military leaders of the Great War built their doctrine of war, and then to examine these in the light of reason and experience—as embodied in history. The traditional military mind is notoriously sensitive to any breath of criticism, and any attempt to tear aside the veil of its mystery is apt to be greeted by the cry of “sacrilege.” Occasionally some daring soldier has done so—and has paid the penalty for exposing to lay eyes the emptiness of the shrine. Thus Marshal Saxe in his eighteenth-century Reveries on the art of war, declared that “custom and prejudice confirmed by ignorance are its sole foundation and support,” for which temerity Carlyle, the disciple and mouthpiece of the Frederician dogmas, poured scorn on his book as “a strange military farrago, dictated, as I should think, under opium.”
Similarly, a generation before the Great War, Monsieur Bloch, the civilian banker of Warsaw, forecast its nature with extraordinary prescience, only to be ridiculed by the General Staffs of Europe. Yet the stalemate that he predicted would arise from the clash of “nations in arms” came true—with the sole difference that he underestimated the blind obstinacy of the leaders and the passivity of the led in continuing for four more years to run their heads against a brick wall.