Among the singularities of the latterday situation, in this connection, and brought out by the experiences of the great war, is a close resemblance between latterday warlike operations and the ordinary processes of industry. Modern warfare and modern industry alike are carried on by technological processes subject to surveillance and direction by mechanical engineers, or perhaps rather experts in engineering science of the mechanistic kind.
War is not now a matter of the stout heart and strong arm. Not that these attributes do not have their place and value in modern warfare; but they are no longer the chief or decisive factors in the case. The exploits that count in this warfare are technological exploits; exploits of technological science, industrial appliances, and technological training. As has been remarked before, it is no longer a gentlemen's war, and the gentleman, as such, is no better than a marplot in the game as it is played.
Certain consequences follow from this state of the case. Technology and industrial experience, in large volume and at a high proficiency, are indispensable to the conduct of war on the modern plan, as well as a large, efficient and up-to-date industrial community and industrial plant to supply the necessary material of this warfare. At the same time the discipline of the campaign, as it impinges on the rank and file as well as on the very numerous body of officers and technicians, is not at cross purposes with the ordinary industrial employments of peace, or not in the same degree as has been the case in the past, even in the recent past. The experience of the campaign does not greatly unfit the men who survive for industrial uses; nor does it come in as a sheer interruption of their industrial training, or break the continuity of that range of habits of thought which modern industry of the technological order induces; not in the same degree as was the case under the conditions of war as carried on in the nineteenth century. The cultural, and particularly the technological, incidence of this modern warfare should evidently be appreciably different from what has been experienced in the past, and from what this past experience has induced students of these matters to look for among the psychological effects of warlike experience.
It remains true that the discipline of the campaign, however impersonal it may tend to become, still inculcates personal subordination and unquestioning obedience; and yet the modern tactics and methods of fighting bear somewhat more on the individual's initiative, discretion, sagacity and self-possession than once would have been true. Doubtless the men who come out of this great war, the common men, will bring home an accentuated and acrimonious patriotism, a venomous hatred of the enemies whom they have missed killing; but it may reasonably be doubted if they come away with a correspondingly heightened admiration and affection for their betters who have failed to make good as foremen in charge of this teamwork in killing. The years of the war have been trying to the reputation of officials and officers, who have had to meet uncharted exigencies with not much better chance of guessing the way through than their subalterns have had.
By and large, it is perhaps not to be doubted that the populace now under arms will return from the experience of the war with some net gain in loyalty to the nation's honour and in allegiance to their masters; particularly the German subjects,—the like is scarcely true for the British; but a doubt will present itself as to the magnitude of this net gain in subordination, or this net loss in self-possession. A doubt may be permitted as to whether the common man in the countries of the Imperial coalition, e.g., will, as the net outcome of this war experience, be in a perceptibly more pliable frame of mind as touches his obligations toward his betters and subservience to the irresponsible authority exercised by the various governmental agencies, than he was at the outbreak of the war. At that time, there is reason to believe, there was an ominous, though scarcely threatening, murmur of dis
content beginning to be heard among the working classes of the industrial towns. It is fair to presume, however, that the servile discipline of the service and the vindictive patriotism bred of the fight should combine to render the populace of the Fatherland more amenable to the irresponsible rule of the Imperial dynasty and its subaltern royal establishments, in spite of any slight effect of a contrary character exercised by the training in technological methods and in self-reliance, with which this discipline of the service has been accompanied. As to the case of the British population, under arms or under compulsion of necessity at home, something has already been said in an earlier passage; and much will apparently depend, in their case, on the further duration of the war. The case of the other nationalities involved, both neutrals and belligerents, is even more obscure in this bearing, but it is also of less immediate consequence for the present argument.
The essentially feudal virtues of loyalty and bellicose patriotism would appear to have gained their great ascendency over all men's spirit within the Western civilisation by force of the peculiarly consistent character of the discipline of life under feudal conditions, whether in war or peace; and to the same uniformity of these forces that shaped the workday habits of thought among the feudal nations is apparently due that profound institutionalisation of the preconceptions of patriotism and loyalty, by force of which these preconceptions still hold the modern peoples in an unbreakable web of prejudice, after the conditions favoring their acquirement have in great part ceased to operate. These preconceptions of national solidarity and international enmity have come down from
the past as an integral part of the unwritten constitution underlying all these modern nations, even those which have departed most widely from the manner of life to which the peoples owe these ancient preconceptions. Hitherto, or rather until recent times, the workday experience of these peoples has not seriously worked at cross purposes with the patriotic spirit and its bias of national animosity; and what discrepancy there has effectively been between the discipline of workday life and the received institutional preconceptions on this head, has hitherto been overborne by the unremitting inculcation of these virtues by interested politicians, priests and publicists, who speak habitually for the received order of things.