War and the Future

H >> H. G. Wells >> War and the Future


Let me relate two trivial anecdotes.

X came to my hotel in Paris one day to take me to see a certain
munitions organisation. He took from his pocket a picture postcard that
had been sent him by a well-meaning American acquaintance from America.
It bore a portrait of General Lafayette, and under it was printed the
words, "General Lafayette, _Colonel in the United States army._"

"Oh! These Americans!" said X with a gesture.

And as I returned to Paris from the French front, our train stopped at
some intermediate station alongside of another train of wounded
men. Exactly opposite our compartment was a car. It arrested our
conversation. It was, as it were, an ambulance _de grand luxe_; it was a
thing of very light, bright wood and very golden decorations; at one end
of it was painted very large and fair the Stars and Stripes, and at the
other fair-sized letters of gold proclaimed--I am sure the lady will
not resent this added gleam of publicity--"Presented by Mrs. William
Vanderbilt."

My companions were French writers and French military men, and they were
discussing with very keen interest that persistent question, "the ideal
battery." But that ambulance sent a shaft of light into our carriage,
and we stared together.

Then Colonel Z pointed with two fingers and remarked to us, without any
excess of admiration:

"_America!_"

Then he shrugged his shoulders and pulled down the corners of his mouth.

We felt there was nothing more to add to that, and after a little pause
the previous question was resumed.

I state these things in order to make it clear that America will start
at a disadvantage when she starts upon the mission of salvage and
reconciliation which is, I believe, her proper role in this world
conflict. One would have to be blind and deaf on this side to be
ignorant of European persuasion of America's triviality. I would not
like to be an American travelling in Europe now, and those I meet here
and there have some of the air of men who at any moment may be
dunned for a debt. They explode without provocation into excuses and
expostulations.

And I will further confess that when Viscount Grey answered the
intimations of President Wilson and ex-President Taft of an American
initiative to found a World League for Peace, by asking if America
was prepared to back that idea with force, he spoke the doubts of all
thoughtful European men. No one but an American deeply versed in the
idiosyncrasies of the American population can answer that question, or
tell us how far the delusion of world isolation which has prevailed in
America for several generations has been dispelled. But if the answer
to Lord Grey is "Yes," then I think history will emerge with a complete
justification of the obstinate maintenance of neutrality by America. It
is the end that reveals a motive. It is our ultimate act that sometimes
teaches us our original intention. No one can judge the United States
yet. Were you neutral because you are too mean and cowardly, or too
stupidly selfish, or because you had in view an end too great to be
sacrificed to a moment of indignant pride and a force in reserve too
precious to dispel? That is the still open question for America.

Every country is a mixture of many strands. There is a Base America,
there is a Dull America, there is an Ideal and Heroic America. And I
am convinced that at present Europe underrates and misjudges the
possibilities of the latter.

All about the world to-day goes a certain freemasonry of thought. It is
an impalpable and hardly conscious union of intention. It thinks not
in terms of national but human experience; it falls into directions and
channels of thinking that lead inevitably to the idea of a world-state
under the rule of one righteousness. In no part of the world is this
modern type of mind so abundantly developed, less impeded by antiquated
and perverse political and religious forms, and nearer the sources of
political and administrative power, than in America. It does not seem to
matter what thousand other things America may happen to be, seeing that
it is also that. And so, just as I cling to the belief, in spite of
hundreds of adverse phenomena, that the religious and social stir of
these times must ultimately go far to unify mankind under the kingship
of God, so do I cling also to the persuasion that there are intellectual
forces among the rational elements in the belligerent centres, among
the other neutrals and in America, that will co-operate in enabling the
United States to play that role of the Unimpassioned Third Party, which
becomes more and more necessary to a generally satisfactory ending of
the war.


4

The idea that the settlement of this war must be what one might call an
unimpassioned settlement or, if you will, a scientific settlement or a
judicial and not a treaty settlement, a settlement, that is, based upon
some conception of what is right and necessary rather than upon the
relative success or failure of either set of belligerents to make its
Will the standard of decision, is one that, in a great variety of forms
and partial developments, I find gaining ground in the most different
circles. The war was an adventure, it was the German adventure under the
Hohenzollern tradition, to dominate the world. It was to be the last of
the Conquests. It has failed. Without calling upon the reserve strength
of America the civilised world has defeated it, and the war continues
now partly upon the issue whether it shall be made for ever impossible,
and partly because Germany has no organ but its Hohenzollern
organisation through which it can admit its failure and develop its
latent readiness for a new understanding on lines of mutual toleration.
For that purpose nothing more reluctant could be devised than
Hohenzollern imperialism. But the attention of every new combatant--it
is not only Germany now--has been concentrated upon military
necessities; every nation is a clenched nation, with its powers of
action centred in its own administration, bound by many strategic
threats and declarations, and dominated by the idea of getting and
securing advantages. It is inevitable that a settlement made in a
conference of belligerents alone will be shortsighted, harsh, limited by
merely incidental necessities, and obsessed by the idea of hostilities
and rivalries continuing perennially; it will be a trading of advantages
for subsequent attacks. It will be a settlement altogether different in
effect as well as in spirit from a world settlement made primarily to
establish a new phase in the history of mankind.

Let me take three instances of the impossibility of complete victory
_on either side_ giving a solution satisfactory to the conscience and
intelligence of reasonable men.

The first--on which I will not expatiate, for everyone knows of its
peculiar difficulty--is Poland.

The second is a little one, but one that has taken hold of my
imagination. In the settlement of boundaries preceding this war the
boundary between Serbia and north-eastern Albania was drawn with an
extraordinary disregard of the elementary needs of the Albanians of that
region. It ran along the foot of the mountains which form their summer
pastures and their refuge from attack, and it cut their mountains off
from their winter pastures and market towns. Their whole economic life
was cut to pieces and existence rendered intolerable for them. Now an
intelligent Third Party settling Europe would certainly restore these
market towns, Ipek, Jakova, and Prisrend, to Albania. But the Albanians
have no standing in this war; theirs is the happy lot that might have
fallen to Belgium had she not resisted; the war goes to and fro through
Albania; and when the settlement comes, it is highly improbable that
the slightest notice will be taken of Albania's plight in the region. In
which case these particular Albanians will either be driven into exile
to America or they will be goaded to revolt, which will be followed no
doubt by the punitive procedure usual in the Balkan peninsula.

For my third instance I would step from a matter as small as three
market towns and the grazing of a few thousand head of sheep to a matter
as big as the world. What is going to happen to the shipping of the
world after this war? The Germans, with that combination of cunning
and stupidity which baffles the rest of mankind, have set themselves to
destroy the mercantile marine not merely of Britain and France but of
Norway and Sweden, Holland, and all the neutral countries. The German
papers openly boast that they are building up a big mercantile marine
that will start out to take up the world's overseas trade directly peace
is declared. Every such boast receives careful attention in the British
press. We have heard a very great deal about the German will-to-power
in this war, but there is something very much older and tougher and less
blatant and conspicuous, the British will. In the British papers there
has appeared and gained a permanent footing this phrase, "ton for ton."
This means that Britain will go on fighting until she has exacted and
taken over from Germany the exact equivalent of all the British shipping
Germany has submarined. People do not realise that a time may come when
Germany will be glad and eager to give Russia, France and Italy all that
they require of her, when Great Britain may be quite content to let
her allies make an advantageous peace and herself still go on fighting
Germany. She does not intend to let that furtively created German
mercantile marine ship or coal or exist upon the high seas--so long as
it can be used as an economic weapon against her. Neither Britain nor
France nor Italy can tolerate anything of the sort.

It has been the peculiar boast of Great Britain that her shipping has
been unpatriotic. She has been the impartial carrier of the whole world.
Her shippers may have served their own profit; they have never served
hers. The fluctuations of freight charges may have been a universal
nuisance, but they have certainly not been an aggressive national
conspiracy. It is Britain's case against any German ascendancy at sea,
an entirely convincing case, that such an ascendancy would be used
ruthlessly for the advancement of German world power. The long-standing
freedom of the seas vanishes at the German touch. So beyond the present
war there opens the agreeable prospect of a mercantile struggle, a
bitter freight war and a war of Navigation Acts for the ultimate control
in the interests of Germany or of the Anti-German allies, of the world's
trade.

Now how in any of these three cases can the bargaining and trickery of
diplomatists and the advantage-hunting of the belligerents produce any
stable and generally beneficial solution? What all the neutrals want,
what every rational and far-sighted man in the belligerent countries
wants, what the common sense of the whole world demands, is neither the
"ascendancy" of Germany nor the "ascendancy" of Great Britain nor the
"ascendancy" of any state or people or interest in the shipping of the
world. The plain right thing is a world shipping control, as impartial
as the Postal Union. What right and reason and the welfare of coming
generations demand in Poland is a unified and autonomous Poland,
with Cracow, Danzig, and Posen brought into the same Polish-speaking
ring-fence with Warsaw. What everyone who has looked into the Albanian
question desires is that the Albanians shall pasture their flocks and
market their sheepskins in peace, free of Serbian control. In every
country at present at war, the desire of the majority of people is for
a non-contentious solution that will neither crystallise a triumph nor
propitiate an enemy, but which will embody the economic and ethnological
and geographical common sense of the matter. But while the formulae
of national belligerence are easy, familiar, blatant, and instantly
present, the gentler, greater formulae of that wider and newer world
pacifism has still to be generally understood. It is so much easier to
hate and suspect than negotiate generously and patiently; it is so
much harder to think than to let go in a shrill storm of hostility. The
rational pacifist is hampered not only by belligerency, but by a sort
of malignant extreme pacifism as impatient and silly as the extremest
patriotism.


5

I sketch out these ideas of a world pacification from a third-party
standpoint, because I find them crystallising out in men's minds. I note
how men discuss the suggestion that America may play a large part in
such a permanent world pacification. There I end my account rendered.
These things are as much a part of my impression of the war as a
shell-burst on the Carso or the yellow trenches at Martinpuich. But I
do not know how opinion is going in America, and I am quite unable to
estimate the power of these new ideas I set down, relative to the blind
forces of instinct and tradition that move the mass of mankind. On the
whole I believe more in the reason-guided will-power of men than I did
in the early half of 1914. If I am doubtful whether after all this war
will "end war," I think on the other hand it has had such an effect of
demonstration that it may start a process of thought and conviction,
it may sow the world with organisations and educational movements
considerable enough to grapple with an either arrest or prevent the next
great war catastrophe. I am by no means sure even now that this is not
the last great war in the experience of men. I still believe it may be.

The most dangerous thing in the business so far is concerned is the wide
disregard of the fact that national economic fighting is bound to cause
war, and the almost universal ignorance of the necessity of subjecting
shipping and overseas and international trade to some kind of
international control. These two things, restraint of trade and
advantage of shipping, are the chief material causes of anger between
modern states. But they would not be in themselves dangerous things if
it were not for the exaggerated delusions of kind and difference, and
the crack-brained "loyalties" arising out of these, that seem still to
rule men's minds. Years ago I came to the conviction that much of the
evil in human life was due to the inherent vicious disposition of the
human mind to intensify classification.[*See my "First and Last Things,"
Book I. and my "Modern Utopia," Chapter X.] I do not know how it will
strike the reader, but to me this war, this slaughter of eight or nine
million people, is due almost entirely to this little, almost universal
lack of clear-headedness; I believe that the share of wickedness in
making war is quite secondary to the share of this universal shallow
silliness of outlook. These effigies of emperors and kings and statesmen
that lead men into war, these legends of nationality and glory, would
collapse before our universal derision, if they were not stuffed tight
and full with the unthinking folly of the common man.

There is in all of us an indolent capacity for suffering evil and
dangerous things, that I contemplate each year of my life with a
deepening incredulity. I perceive we suffer them; I record the futile
protests of the intelligence. It seems to me incredible that men should
not rise up out of this muddy, bloody, wasteful mess of a world war,
with a resolution to end for ever the shams, the prejudices, the
pretences and habits that have impoverished their lives, slaughtered our
sons, and wasted the world, a resolution so powerful and sustained that
nothing could withstand it.

But it is not apparent that any such will arises. Does it appear at all?
I find it hard to answer that question because my own answer varies with
my mood. There are moods when it seems to me that nothing of the sort
is happening. This war has written its warning in letters of blood and
flame and anguish in the skies of mankind for two years and a half. When
I look for the collective response to that warning, I see a multitude
of little chaps crawling about their private ends like mites in an old
cheese. The kings are still in their places, not a royal prince has been
killed in this otherwise universal slaughter; when the fatuous portraits
of the monarchs flash upon the screen the widows and orphans still break
into loyal song. The ten thousand religions of mankind are still ten
thousand religions, all busy at keeping men apart and hostile. I see
scarcely a measurable step made anywhere towards that world kingdom of
God, which is, I assert, the manifest solution, the only formula that
can bring peace to all mankind. Mankind as a whole seems to have learnt
nothing and forgotten nothing in thirty months of war.

And then on the other hand I am aware of much quiet talking. This
book tells of how I set out to see the war, and it is largely
conversation.... Perhaps men have always expected miracles to happen;
if one had always lived in the night and only heard tell of the day, I
suppose one would have expected dawn to come as a vivid flash of light.
I suppose one would still think it was night long after the things about
one had crept out of the darkness into visibility. In comparison with
all previous wars there has been much more thinking and much more
discussion. If most of the talk seems to be futile, if it seems as if
everyone were talking and nobody doing, it does not follow that things
are not quietly slipping and sliding out of their old adjustments
amidst the babble and because of the babble. Multitudes of men must be
struggling with new ideas. It is reasonable to argue that there must
be reconsideration, there must be time, before these millions of mental
efforts can develop into a new collective purpose and really _show_--in
consequences.

But that they will do so is my hope always and, on the whole, except in
moods of depression and impatience, my belief. When one has travelled
to a conviction so great as mine it is difficult to doubt that other men
faced by the same universal facts will not come to the same conclusion.
I believe that only through a complete simplification o religion to its
fundamental idea, to a world-wide realisation of God as the king of the
heart and of all mankind, setting aside monarchy and national egotism
altogether, can mankind come to any certain happiness and security. The
precedent of Islam helps my faith in the creative inspiration of such
a renascence of religion. The Sikh, the Moslem, the Puritan have shown
that men can fight better for a Divine Idea than for any flag or monarch
in the world. It seems to me that illusions fade and effigies lose
credit everywhere. It is a very wonderful thing to me that China is now
a republic.... I take myself to be very nearly an average man, abnormal
only by reason of a certain mental rapidity. I conceive myself to be
thinking as the world thinks, and if I find no great facts, I find a
hundred little indications to reassure me that God comes. Even those who
have neither the imagination nor the faith to apprehend God as a
reality will, I think, realise presently that the Kingdom of God over
a world-wide system of republican states, is the only possible formula
under which we may hope to unify and save mankind.