desperate duel who keeps on trying to make it a game of cricket. Most of
these soldiers detest every sort of mechanical device; the tanks, for
example, which, used with imagination, might have given the British and
French overwhelming victory on the western front, were subordinated to
the usual cavalry "break through" idea. I am not making any particular
complaint against the British and French generals in saying this. It is
what must happen to any country which entrusts its welfare to soldiers.
A soldier has to be a severely disciplined man, and a severely
disciplined man cannot be a versatile man, and on the whole the British
army has been as receptive to novelties as any. The German generals have
done no better; indeed, they have not done so well as the generals of
the Allies in this respect. But after the war, if the world does not
organize rapidly for peace, then as resources accumulate a little, the
mechanical genius will get to work on the possibilities of these ideas
that have merely been sketched out in this war. We shall get big land
ironclads which will smash towns. We shall get air offensives--let the
experienced London reader think of an air raid going on hour after hour,
day after day--that will really burn out and wreck towns, that will
drive people mad by the thousand. We shall get a very complete cessation
of sea transit. Even land transit may be enormously hampered by aerial
attack. I doubt if any sort of social order will really be able to stand
the strain of a fully worked out modern war. We have still, of course,
to feel the full shock effects even of this war. Most of the combatants
are going on, as sometimes men who have incurred grave wounds will still
go on for a time--without feeling them. The educational, biological,
social, economic punishment that has already been taken by each of the
European countries is, I feel, very much greater than we yet realize.
Russia, the heaviest and worst-trained combatant, has indeed shown the
effects and is down and sick, but in three years' time all Europe will
know far better than it does now the full price of this war. And the