War and the Future

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WAR AND THE FUTURE

Italy, France and Britain at War


by H. G. Wells




Contents

The Passing of the Effigy

The War in Italy (August, 1916)
I. The Isonzo Front
II. The Mountain War
III. Behind the Front

The Western War (September, 1916)
I. Ruins
II. The Grades of War
III. The War Landscape
IV. New Arms for Old Ones
V. Tanks

How People Think About the War
I. Do they Really Think at all?
II. The Yielding Pacifist and the Conscientious Objector
III. The Religious Revival
IV. The Riddle of the British
V. The Social Changes in Progress
VI. The Ending of the War




THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY


1

One of the minor peculiarities of this unprecedented war is the Tour of
the Front. After some months of suppressed information--in which even
the war correspondent was discouraged to the point of elimination--it
was discovered on both sides that this was a struggle in which Opinion
was playing a larger and more important part than it had ever done
before. This wild spreading weed was perhaps of decisive importance;
the Germans at any rate were attempting to make it a cultivated flower.
There was Opinion flowering away at home, feeding rankly on rumour;
Opinion in neutral countries; Opinion getting into great tangles
of misunderstanding and incorrect valuation between the Allies. The
confidence and courage of the enemy; the amiability and assistance of
the neutral; the zeal, sacrifice, and serenity of the home population;
all were affected. The German cultivation of opinion began long
before the war; it is still the most systematic and, because of the
psychological ineptitude of the Germans, it is probably the clumsiest.
The French _Maison de la Presse_ is certainly the best organisation in
existence for making things clear, counteracting hostile suggestion, the
British official organisations are comparatively ineffective; but what
is lacking officially is very largely made up for by the good will
and generous efforts of the English and American press. An interesting
monograph might be written upon these various attempts of the
belligerents to get themselves and their proceedings explained.

Because there is perceptible in these developments, quite over and
above the desire to influence opinion, a very real effort to get things
explained. It is the most interesting and curious--one might almost
write touching--feature of these organisations that they do not
constitute a positive and defined propaganda such as the Germans
maintain. The German propaganda is simple, because its ends are simple;
assertions of the moral elevation and loveliness of Germany; of the
insuperable excellences of German Kultur, the Kaiser, and Crown Prince,
and so forth; abuse of the "treacherous" English who allied themselves
with the "degenerate" French and the "barbaric" Russians; nonsense about
"the freedom of the seas"--the emptiest phrase in history--childish
attempts to sow suspicion between the Allies, and still more childish
attempts to induce neutrals and simple-minded pacifists of allied
nationality to save the face of Germany by initiating peace
negotiations. But apart from their steady record and reminder of German
brutalities and German aggression, the press organisations of the Allies
have none of this definiteness in their task. The aim of the national
intelligence in each of the allied countries is not to exalt one's own
nation and confuse and divide the enemy, but to get a real understanding
with the peoples and spirits of a number of different nations, an
understanding that will increase and become a fruitful and permanent
understanding between the allied peoples. Neither the English, the
Russians, the Italians, nor the French, to name only the bigger European
allies, are concerned in setting up a legend, as the Germans are
concerned in setting up a legend of themselves to impose upon mankind.
They are reality dealers in this war, and the Germans are effigy
mongers. Practically the Allies are saying each to one another, "Pray
come to me and see for yourself that I am very much the human stuff that
you are. Come and see that I am doing my best--and I think that is
not so very bad a best...." And with that is something else still more
subtle, something rather in the form of, "And please tell me what you
think of me--and all this."

So we have this curious byplay of the war, and one day I find Mr.
Nabokoff, the editor of the _Retch_, and Count Alexy Tolstoy, that
writer of delicate short stories, and Mr. Chukovsky, the subtle critic,
calling in upon me after braving the wintry seas to see the British
fleet; M. Joseph Reinach follows them presently upon the same errand;
and then appear photographs of Mr. Arnold Bennett wading in the trenches
of Flanders, Mr. Noyes becomes discreetly indiscreet about what he has
seen among the submarines, and Mr. Hugh Walpole catches things from Mr.
Stephen Graham in the Dark Forest of Russia. All this is quite over and
above such writing of facts at first hand as Mr. Patrick McGill and a
dozen other real experiencing soldiers--not to mention the soldiers'
letters Mr. James Milne has collected, or the unforgettable and
immortal _Prisoner of War_ of Mr. Arthur Green--or such admirable war
correspondents' work as Mr. Philip Gibbs or Mr. Washburne has done. Some
of us writers--I can answer for one--have made our Tour of the Fronts
with a very understandable diffidence. For my own part I did not want
to go. I evaded a suggestion that I should go in 1915. I travel badly,
I speak French and Italian with incredible atrocity, and am an extreme
Pacifist. I hate soldiering. And also I did not want to write anything
"under instruction". It is largely owing to a certain stiffness in the
composition of General Delme-Radcliffe is resolved that Italy shall not
feel neglected by the refusal of the invitation from the Comando
Supremo by anyone who from the perspective of Italy may seem to be a
representative of British opinion. If Herbert Spencer had been
alive General Radcliffe would have certainly made him come,
travelling-hammock, ear clips and all--and I am not above confessing
that I wish that Herbert Spencer was alive--for this purpose. I found
Udine warm and gay with memories of Mr. Belloc, Lord Northcliffe, Mr.
Sidney Low, Colonel Repington and Dr. Conan Doyle, and anticipating the
arrival of Mr. Harold Cox. So we pass, mostly in automobiles that bump
tremendously over war roads, a cloud of witnesses each testifying after
his manner. Whatever else has happened, we have all been photographed
with invincible patience and resolution under the direction of Colonel
Barberich in a sunny little court in Udine.

My own manner of testifying must be to tell what I have seen and what
I have thought during this extraordinary experience. It has been my
natural disposition to see this war as something purposeful and epic,
as it is great, as an epoch, as "the War that will end War"--but of
that last, more anon. I do not think I am alone in this inclination to a
dramatic and logical interpretation. The caricatures in the French shops
show civilisation (and particularly Marianne) in conflict with a huge
and hugely wicked Hindenburg Ogre. Well, I come back from this tour with
something not so simple as that. If I were to be tied down to one word
for my impression of this war, I should say that this war is _Queer._ It
is not like anything in a really waking world, but like something in a
dream. It hasn't exactly that clearness of light against darkness or
of good against ill. But it has the quality of wholesome instinct
struggling under a nightmare. The world is not really awake. This vague
appeal for explanations to all sorts of people, this desire to exhibit
the business, to get something in the way of elucidation at present
missing, is extraordinarily suggestive of the efforts of the mind to
wake up that will sometimes occur at a deep crisis. My memory of this
tour I have just made is full of puzzled-looking men. I have seen
thousands of _poilus_ sitting about in cafes, by the roadside, in
tents, in trenches, thoughtful. I have seen Alpini sitting restfully and
staring with speculative eyes across the mountain gulfs towards unseen
and unaccountable enemies. I have seen trainloads of wounded staring
out of the ambulance train windows as we passed. I have seen these dim
intimations of questioning reflection in the strangest juxtapositions;
in Malagasy soldiers resting for a spell among the big shells they were
hoisting into trucks for the front, in a couple of khaki-clad Maoris
sitting upon the step of a horse-van in Amiens station. It is always the
same expression one catches, rather weary, rather sullen, inturned. The
shoulders droop. The very outline is a note of interrogation. They look
up as the privileged tourist of the front, in the big automobile or
the reserved compartment, with his officer or so in charge,
passes--importantly. One meets a pair of eyes that seems to say:
"Perhaps _you_ understand....

"In which case---...?"

It is a part, I think, of this disposition to investigate what makes
everyone collect "specimens" of the war. Everywhere the souvenir forces
itself upon the attention. The homecoming permissionaire brings with
him invariably a considerable weight of broken objects, bits of shell,
cartridge clips, helmets; it is a peripatetic museum. It is as if he
hoped for a clue. It is almost impossible, I have found, to escape these
pieces in evidence. I am the least collecting of men, but I have brought
home Italian cartridges, Austrian cartridges, the fuse of an Austrian
shell, a broken Italian bayonet, and a note that is worth half a franc
within the confines of Amiens. But a large heavy piece of exploded shell
that had been thrust very urgently upon my attention upon the Carso I
contrived to lose during the temporary confusion of our party by the
arrival and explosion of another prospective souvenir in our close
proximity. And two really very large and almost complete specimens of
some species of _Ammonites_ unknown to me, from the hills to the east
of the Adige, partially wrapped in a back number of the _Corriere
della Sera_, that were pressed upon me by a friendly officer, were
unfortunately lost on the line between Verona and Milan through the
gross negligence of a railway porter. But I doubt if they would have
thrown any very conclusive light upon the war.


2

I avow myself an extreme Pacifist. I am against the man who first takes
up the weapon. I carry my pacifism far beyond the ambiguous little group
of British and foreign sentimentalists who pretend so amusingly to be
socialists in the _Labour Leader_, whose conception of foreign policy is
to give Germany now a peace that would be no more than a breathing time
for a fresh outrage upon civilisation, and who would even make heroes of
the crazy young assassins of the Dublin crime. I do not understand those
people. I do not merely want to stop this war. I want to nail down war
in its coffin. Modern war is an intolerable thing. It is not a thing
to trifle with in this Urban District Council way, it is a thing to
end forever. I have always hated it, so far that is as my imagination
enabled me to realise it; and now that I have been seeing it, sometimes
quite closely for a full month, I hate it more than ever. I never
imagined a quarter of its waste, its boredom, its futility, its
desolation. It is merely a destructive and dispersive instead of a
constructive and accumulative industrialism. It is a gigantic, dusty,
muddy, weedy, bloodstained silliness. It is the plain duty of every man
to give his life and all that he has if by so doing he may help to end
it. I hate Germany, which has thrust this experience upon mankind, as
I hate some horrible infectious disease. The new war, the war on the
modern level, is her invention and her crime. I perceive that on our
side and in its broad outlines, this war is nothing more than a gigantic
and heroic effort in sanitary engineering; an effort to remove German
militarism from the life and regions it has invaded, and to bank it
in and discredit and enfeeble it so that never more will it repeat its
present preposterous and horrible efforts. All human affairs and all
great affairs have their reservations and their complications, but that
is the broad outline of the business as it has impressed itself on my
mind and as I find it conceived in the mind of the average man of the
reading class among the allied peoples, and as I find it understood in
the judgement of honest and intelligent neutral observers.

It is my unshakeable belief that essentially the Allies fight for a
permanent world peace, that primarily they do not make war but resist
war, that has reconciled me to this not very congenial experience of
touring as a spectator all agog to see, through the war zones. At any
rate there was never any risk of my playing Balaam and blessing the
enemy. This war is tragedy and sacrifice for most of the world, for
the Germans it is simply the catastrophic outcome of fifty years of
elaborate intellectual foolery. Militarism, Welt Politik, and here we
are! What else _could_ have happened, with Michael and his infernal War
Machine in the very centre of Europe, but this tremendous disaster?

It is a disaster. It may be a necessary disaster; it may teach a lesson
that could be learnt in no other way; but for all that, I insist, it
remains waste, disorder, disaster.

There is a disposition, I know, in myself as well as in others, to
wriggle away from this verity, to find so much good in the collapse that
has come to the mad direction of Europe for the past half-century as to
make it on the whole almost a beneficial thing. But at most I can find
it in no greater good than the good of a nightmare that awakens the
sleeper in a dangerous place to a realisation of the extreme danger of
his sleep. Better had he been awake--or never there. In Venetia Captain
Pirelli, whose task it was to keep me out of mischief in the war zone,
was insistent upon the way in which all Venetia was being opened up
by the new military roads; there has been scarcely a new road made in
Venetia since Napoleon drove his straight, poplar-bordered highways
through the land. M. Joseph Reinach, who was my companion upon the
French front, was equally impressed by the stirring up and exchange of
ideas in the villages due to the movement of the war. Charles Lamb's
story of the discovery of roast pork comes into one's head with an
effect of repartee. More than ideas are exchanged in the war zone,
and it is doubtful how far the sanitary precautions of the military
authorities avails against a considerable propaganda of disease. A more
serious argument for the good of war is that it evokes heroic qualities
that it has brought out almost incredible quantities of courage,
devotion, and individual romance that did not show in the suffocating
peace time that preceded the war. The reckless and beautiful zeal of
the women in the British and French munition factories, for example, the
gaiety and fearlessness of the common soldiers everywhere; these things
have always been there--like champagne sleeping in bottles in a cellar.
But was there any need to throw a bomb into the cellar?

I am reminded of a story, or rather of the idea for a story that I
think I must have read in that curious collection of fantasies and
observations, Hawthorne's _Note Book._ It was to be the story of a man
who found life dull and his circumstances altogether mediocre. He had
loved his wife, but now after all she seemed to be a very ordinary human
being. He had begun life with high hopes--and life was commonplace. He
was to grow fretful and restless. His discontent was to lead to some
action, some irrevocable action; but upon the nature of that action I do
not think the _Note Book_ was very clear. It was to carry him in such
a manner that he was to forget his wife. Then, when it was too late,
he was to see her at an upper window, stripped and firelit, a glorious
thing of light and loveliness and tragic intensity....

The elementary tales of the world are very few, and Hawthorne's story
and Lamb's story are, after all, only variations upon the same
theme. But can we poor human beings never realise our quality without
destruction?


3

One of the larger singularities of the great war is its failure to
produce great and imposing personalities, mighty leaders, Napoleons,
Caesars. I would indeed make that the essential thing in my reckoning
of the war. It is a drama without a hero; without countless incidental
heroes no doubt, but no star part. Even the Germans, with a national
predisposition for hero-cults and living still in an atmosphere of
Victorian humbug, can produce nothing better than that timber image,
Hindenburg.

It is not that the war has failed to produce heroes so much as that
it has produced heroism in a torrent. The great man of this war is the
common man. It becomes ridiculous to pick out particular names. There
are too many true stories of splendid acts in the past two years ever to
be properly set down. The V.C.'s and the palms do but indicate samples.
One would need an encyclopaedia, a row of volumes, of the gloriousness
of human impulses. The acts of the small men in this war dwarf all the
pretensions of the Great Man. Imperatively these multitudinous heroes
forbid the setting up of effigies. When I was a young man I imitated
Swift and posed for cynicism; I will confess that now at fifty and
greatly helped by this war, I have fallen in love with mankind.

But if I had to pick out a single figure to stand for the finest quality
of the Allies' war, I should I think choose the figure of General
Joffre. He is something new in history. He is leadership without vulgar
ambition. He is the extreme antithesis to the Imperial boomster of
Berlin. He is as it were the ordinary common sense of men, incarnate. He
is the antithesis of the effigy.

By great good luck I was able to see him. I was delayed in Paris on my
way to Italy, and my friend Captain Millet arranged for a visit to the
French front at Soissons and put me in charge of Lieutenant de Tessin,
whom I had met in England studying British social questions long before
this war. Afterwards Lieutenant de Tessin took me to the great hotel--it
still proclaims "_Restaurant_" in big black letters on the garden
wall--which shelters the General Headquarters of France, and here I
was able to see and talk to Generals Pelle and Castelnau as well as to
General Joffre. They are three very remarkable and very different men.
They have at least one thing in common; it is clear that not one of
them has spent ten minutes in all his life in thinking of himself as
a Personage or Great Man. They all have the effect of being active and
able men doing an extremely complicated and difficult but extremely
interesting job to the very best of their ability. With me they had all
one quality in common. They thought I was interested in what they were
doing, and they were quite prepared to treat me as an intelligent man of
a different sort, and to show me as much as I could understand....

Let me confess that de Tessin had had to persuade me to go to
Headquarters. Partly that was because I didn't want to use up even
ten minutes of the time of the French commanders, but much more was it
because I have a dread of Personages.

There is something about these encounters with personages--as if one was
dealing with an effigy, with something tremendous put up to be seen.
As one approaches they become remoter; great unsuspected crevasses are
discovered. Across these gulfs one makes ineffective gestures. They do
not meet you, they pose at you enormously. Sometimes there is something
more terrible than dignity; there is condescension. They are affable. I
had but recently had an encounter with an imported Colonial statesman,
who was being advertised like a soap as the coming saviour of England.
I was curious to meet him. I wanted to talk to him about all sorts of
things that would have been profoundly interesting, as for example his
impressions of the Anglican bishops. But I met a hoarding. I met a thing
like a mask, something surrounded by touts, that was dully trying--as we
say in London--to "come it" over me. He said he had heard of me. He
had read _Kipps._ I intimated that though I had written _Kipps_ I had
continued to exist--but he did not see the point of that. I said certain
things to him about the difference in complexity between political
life in Great Britain and the colonies, that he was manifestly totally
capable of understanding. But one could as soon have talked with one of
the statesmen at Madame Tussaud's. An antiquated figure.

The effect of these French commanders upon me was quite different from
my encounter with that last belated adventurer in the effigy line. I
felt indeed that I was a rather idle and flimsy person coming into the
presence of a tremendously compact and busy person, but I had none of
that unpleasant sensation of a conventional role, of being expected to
play the minute worshipper in the presence of the Great Image. I was so
moved by the common humanity of them all that in each case I broke
away from the discreet interpretations of de Tessin and talked to them
directly in the strange dialect which I have inadvertently made for
myself out of French, a disemvowelled speech of epicene substantives and
verbs of incalculable moods and temperaments, "_Entente Cordiale._" The
talked back as if we had met in a club. General Pelle pulled my leg
very gaily with some quotations from an article I had written upon the
conclusion of the war. I think he found my accent and my idioms very
refreshing. I had committed myself to a statement that Bloch has been
justified in his theory that under modern conditions the defensive wins.
There were excellent reasons, and General Pelle pointed them out, for
doubting the applicability of this to the present war.

Both he and General Castelnau were anxious that I should see a French
offensive sector as well as Soissons. Then I should understand.
And since then I have returned from Italy and I have seen and I do
understand. The Allied offensive was winning; that is to say, it was
inflicting far greater losses than it experienced; it was steadily
beating the spirit out of the German army and shoving it back towards
Germany. Only peace can, I believe, prevent the western war ending in
Germany. And it is the Frenchmen mainly who have worked out how to do
it.

But of that I will write later. My present concern is with General
Joffre as the antithesis of the Effigy. The effigy,

"Thou Prince of Peace,
Thou God of War,"

as Mr. Sylvester Viereck called him, prances on a great horse, wears a
Wagnerian cloak, sits on thrones and talks of shining armour and "unser
Gott." All Germany gloats over his Jovian domesticities; when I was
last in Berlin the postcard shops were full of photographs of a sort
of procession of himself and his sons, all with long straight noses and
sidelong eyes. It is all dreadfully old-fashioned. General Joffre
sits in a pleasant little sitting-room in a very ordinary little villa
conveniently close to Headquarters. He sits among furniture that has no
quality of pose at all, that is neither magnificent nor ostentatiously
simple and hardy. He has dark, rather sleepy eyes under light eyelashes,
eyes that glance shyly and a little askance at his interlocutor and
then, as he talks, away--as if he did not want to be preoccupied by your
attention. He has a broad, rather broadly modelled face, a soft voice,
the sort of persuasive reasoning voice that many Scotchmen have. I had
a feeling that if he were to talk English he would do so with a Scotch
accent. Perhaps somewhere I have met a Scotchman of his type. He sat
sideways to his table as a man might sit for a gossip in a cafe.

He is physically a big man, and in my memory he grows bigger and bigger.
He sits now in my memory in a room like the rooms that any decent people
might occupy, like that vague room that is the background of so many
good portraits, a great blue-coated figure with a soft voice and rather
tired eyes, explaining very simply and clearly the difficulties that
this vulgar imperialism of Germany, seizing upon modern science and
modern appliances, has created for France and the spirit of mankind.

He talked chiefly of the strangeness of this confounded war. It was
exactly like a sanitary engineer speaking of the unexpected difficulties
of some particularly nasty inundation. He made little stiff horizontal
gestures with his hands. First one had to build a dam and stop the rush
of it, so; then one had to organise the push that would send it back. He
explained the organisation of the push. They had got an organisation
now that was working out most satisfactorily. Had I seen a sector? I
had seen the sector of Soissons. Yes, but that was not now an offensive
sector. I must see an offensive sector; see the whole method. Lieutenant
de Tessin must see that that was arranged....