THE WAR 
 AND THE FUTURE 
 
 JOHN MASE FIELD 
 
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 COPBUGKT DEPOSm 
 
THE WAR AND THE 
 FUTURE 
 
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 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NSW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO - DALLAS 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd, 
 
 TORONTO 
 
THE WAR AND THE 
 FUTURE 
 
 JOHN MASEFIELD ' 
 
 Author of "Gallipoli," "The Everlasting Mercy," 
 "The Widow in the Bye Street," etc. 
 
 ii3eto gotfe 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1918 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 at 
 

 COPYBIGHT, 1918 
 
 By JOHN MASEFIELD 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published, July, 1918 
 
 AUG 28 1918 
 ^CI,A5(J1594 
 
 f 
 
TO 
 
 THOMAS W. LAMONT 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 St. George and the Dragon i 
 
 A Speech for St. George's Day, April 23rd, 
 1918. 
 
 The War and the Future 44 
 
 A Lecture Given in America January-May, 
 1918. 
 
ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON 
 
 A SPEECH FOR ST. GEORGE'S DAY, 
 APRIL 23rd, 1918 
 
THE WAR AND THE 
 FUTURE 
 
 ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON 
 
 A Speech for St. George's Day, 
 April 2Srd, igi8 
 
 Friends, for a long time I did not know what 
 to say to you in this second speaking here. I 
 could fill a speech with thanks and praise : thanks 
 for the kindness and welcome which has met me 
 up and down this land wherever I have gone, 
 and praise for the great national effort which 
 I have seen in so many places and felt every- 
 where. We, who, like you, have had to lay 
 by our pleasant ways, and take up hard ones, 
 and go up a bitter path to an end men cannot 
 see, know how great your sacrifice and your 
 effort are. But I could not thank you or praise 
 you enough, and even if I could, the best praise 
 and thanks are silent. If and when I return 
 to England, I will speak your praise. 
 
a? The War and the Future 
 
 So, casting about for a theme, I thought, that 
 today is St. George's Day, the day of the Patron 
 Saint of England, and that today, in the far 
 past, that great knight of God rode out. In the 
 Eastern country, and killed a dragon which had 
 been devouring women, and that Englishmen 
 had thought that deed a holy, and most beauti- 
 ful and manly thing, and had chosen St. George 
 from among all saints to be their saint, and had 
 taken his banner to be their banner, and called 
 upon him, century after century, when they 
 went into battle. For they felt that such a man 
 lived on after death, and would surely help all 
 holy and beautiful and manly men for ever and 
 for ever. 
 
 And I thought, too, that on this day, 354 
 years ago, the child, William Shakespeare, was 
 born. In that old house In Stratford which so 
 many of you have gone to see. And that on 
 this same day, after he had done his day's 
 work, he passed out of this life, into that King- 
 dom of England which is In the kindling mind, 
 In all Its moments of beauty, and that there he, 
 too, lives for ever, to give peace, even as St. 
 George gives a sword, to all who call upon him. 
 
 So, thinking these things, all the more keenly, 
 because I am far from England, In this sweet 
 
The War and the Future 3 
 
 season of April, when the apple blossom is 
 beginning, I felt that I would talk of England. 
 Not of any England of commerce or of history, 
 nor of any state called England, but of that 
 idea of England for which men are dying, as I 
 speak, along 5,000 miles of war. 
 
 I believe that the people of a country build 
 up a spirit of that country, build up a soul, 
 which never dies, but lingers about the land 
 for ever. I believe that every manly and beau- 
 tiful and generous and kindling act is eternal, 
 and makes that soul still greater and more liv- 
 ing, till in the land where manly and kindling 
 souls have lived, there is everywhere about the 
 earth, present like beauty, like inspiration, this 
 living gift of the dead, this soul. And nations 
 are only great when they are true to that soul. 
 Men can only be great when they are true to the 
 best they have imagined. And I believe that in 
 times of stress, in national danger, in calamity, 
 the soul behind a nation kindles and quickens 
 and Is alive and enters Into men, and the men 
 of the nation get strength and power from it. 
 
 I believe that that great soul, made by the 
 courage and beauty and wisdom of the millions 
 of the race, Is the god of the race, to protect 
 it and guide it and to lead It Into safety. And 
 
4 The War and the Future 
 
 men turning to it in time of trouble and calamity 
 are helped and guarded by it, and brought out 
 of the land of Egypt by it into their pleasant 
 heritage. 
 
 Yet nations, like men, sometimes turn away 
 from their true selves to follow false selves, and 
 to serve false gods. All the old Bible is full 
 of stories of a little nation sometimes true, 
 sometimes false to its soul, and falling into 
 calamity, and then being quickened and helped, 
 and returning to the truth and coming to mar- 
 vellous things, to the green pastures, where 
 goodness and loving kindness follow men all 
 the days of their life. 
 
 Understanding is the only thing worth while 
 In this life. Art is nothing but complete under- 
 standing of something. All writers long to un- 
 derstand the spirit of their race. 
 
 Let me say now, that 25 years ago, it 
 would have been difficult for an Englishman 
 to speak here, about the spirit of England, and 
 to claim that It Is something of the spirit of St. 
 George, a manly and beautiful spirit, ready to 
 help some one weaker, and something of the 
 spirit of Shakespeare, a just and tender spirit, 
 fond of fun and kindness and of the rough and 
 busy life of men. That delicate, shy, gentle. 
 
The War and the Future 5 
 
 humorous and most manly soul is the soul of 
 England. It is in Chaucer, in Shakespeare, in 
 Dickens. It is in the old ballads and tales of 
 Robin Hood, who stood up for the poor, and 
 was merry walking in the green forest. It is 
 in the little villages of the land, in the old 
 homes, in the churches, in countless old carvings, 
 in old bridges, in old tunes, and in the old acts 
 of the English, a shy, gentle, humorous and 
 most manly soul, that stood up for the poor 
 and cared for beauty. No finer thing can be 
 said of men than that, that they stood up for 
 the poor and cared for beauty; that they cared 
 to be just and wise. 
 
 Nearly 300 years ago, the life of England 
 suffered a rude change in seven years of civil 
 war. The ways of life which had been settled 
 for 'kvt generations were suddenly and com- 
 pletely changed. There followed a turbulent 
 and unsettled century, during which, for reasons 
 of party, a foreign king, and line of kings, with 
 foreign interests, and foreign methods, came 
 into our land. 
 
 And at the same time, something else came 
 into our land. Industry and adventure had 
 long been virtues of the English; but now the 
 two together began to create competitive com- 
 
6 The War and the Future 
 
 mercialism. And just as competitive commer- 
 cialism began, a small clique of corrupt politi- 
 cians, gathered under the foreign king, and by 
 bribery and iniquity of every kind, seized the 
 common lands of the villages of England and 
 enclosed them. Until then, the country folk 
 in England had shared large tracts of land, so 
 that, though they were poor, they still had graz- 
 ing for cows and sheep and geese, and wood- 
 land for firing. Now by various acts of legal 
 robbery these lands were taken from them, and 
 they were reduced to an extreme poverty. 
 They were forced into a position very like 
 slavery. They had no possessions except their 
 right hands. There was no St. George to stand 
 up for them, nor any Robin Hood, except that 
 coarse and bitter truth-teller, William Cobbett. 
 They had the choice to be the slaves of the land- 
 owners or of the factory-owners, and the great 
 mass of the populace ceased to have any share 
 of what life offers. The enclosing of the com- 
 mons robbed them of leisure and independence, 
 the coming of the factories took them from the 
 fields and the old communities, and flung them 
 into new ones, which were allowed to grow up 
 anyhow, without art, without thought, without 
 faith or hope or charity, till the face of the land 
 
The War and the Future 7 
 
 was blackened, and the soul of the land under a 
 cloud. 
 
 If you consider the thought and the voices 
 of that time, you can see that the soul of the 
 land was under a cloud. The thought and the 
 voices of that time are things divorced from 
 the body of the people. The thought is the 
 possession of a few leisured men. It is not 
 the joy of a great body of men. The voices 
 are the voices of a few men crying in the wil- 
 derness that things are evil. 
 
 The thought of that time was the thought of 
 Dr. Johnson's Club, and of Joshua Reynolds' 
 patrons. The voices are the voices of Wm. 
 Blake crying aloud that he would rebuild the 
 city of God among those black Satanic mills, 
 and of Wm. Wordsworth, who saw that poetry, 
 which should be the delight of all, was become 
 an unknown tongue to the multitude. And 
 later the voices become more passionate and 
 wilder and bitterer. They are the voices of 
 Byron, who saw the foreign king, that royal 
 lunatic, and his drunken but jovial son, and the 
 bought-and-sold politicians who ran the country, 
 for what they were, and mocked them. And 
 the voice of Shelley, who cried to the men of 
 England to shake themselves free, and the 
 
8 The War and the Future 
 
 voice of Carlyle, who saw no hope anywhere 
 but in the drill sergeant, and the voice of Rus- 
 kin, who saw no hope anywhere but in the 
 coming back of St. George. 
 
 There was only one question to those men, 
 the-condition-of-England question. Thinking 
 men might justly be proud of certain achieve- 
 ments in those years, many things were invented, 
 many things were thought out, great books were 
 written, and the world was charted and navi- 
 gated and exploited, but there was no peace in 
 that England for the men with souls to be 
 saved. 
 
 The machine worked, it did great things, men 
 could point to its results, but the great men, the 
 seeing men, were unanimous that England was 
 not a merry England for rich or poor. It was 
 still a land where there was kindness and man- 
 liness and a love of life and sport and country. 
 But with this, there was an apathy to things 
 which were vital and kindling. The nation was 
 drunken, and that was looked on with apathy, 
 the nation had ceased to care, as It once had 
 cared, with a most noble, intense, and pas- 
 sionate pride, for things of beauty and of style, 
 in life, and art and music and the means of 
 living. And this deadness and apathy and stu- 
 
The War and the Future 9 
 
 pldlty were become even matters of pride to 
 some. Then the nation, with all its wealth, was 
 an ill-taught, an ill-fed, and an ill-clad nation, 
 so that in every city in the land a vast number 
 of souls were ignorant, and a vast number of 
 bodies had not enough to eat nor enough to put 
 on. And the rich, who owned the wealth, had 
 lost the old English sense of splendour of Hfe. 
 They watched the beggary and the drunkenness 
 with apathy. They watched the waste and the 
 degradation of genius without lifting a finger. 
 One of the most delicate silversmiths of our 
 time died of consumption as a seller of cat's 
 meat. One of our most delicate lyric poets 
 died of consumption as a seller of matches in 
 the street. Not all the efforts of all the writers 
 of England could get a theatre for the fit and 
 frequent playing of Shakespeare. Not all the 
 wealth nor all the industry could reduce the 
 paupers of England, the men and women who 
 could not make a living, to less than a mil- 
 lion in the year. 
 
 So that, early in 19 14, England was a 
 troubled and yet an apathetic country, with 
 small minorities breaking their hearts and some- 
 times people's windows in an effort to bring 
 about a change, and with a vast, powerful, un- 
 
lO The War and the Future 
 
 thinking selfish weight of prejudice and priv- 
 ilege keeping things in the old ruts and the old 
 grooves laid down by the foreign king a cen- 
 tury and a half before. 
 
 And yet, with it all, there was immense virtue 
 in the land. Work was well done. English 
 goods were well made. And we were not 
 afraid to let any nation compete with us in the 
 open market. The nations could sell their 
 goods In our markets on equal terms. We had 
 no quarrel with any one. We wished to show 
 that we had no quarrel with any one. During 
 the years before the war, we increased our 
 Navy, so that no enemy should attack us with 
 impunity, but we reduced our tiny army by some 
 divisions, and our auxiliary army by an army 
 corps. 
 
 People say now that we were wrong. We 
 may have been. At any rate, we did the gen- 
 erous thing, and I don't know that the gen- 
 erous thing is ever wrong. And in any case, 
 we have paid the price. 
 
 In the first week of July, 19 14, I was In an 
 old house In Berkshire, a house built eight 
 centuries before by the monks, as a place of 
 rest and contemplation and beauty. I had 
 never seen England so beautiful as then, and a 
 
The War and the Future il 
 
 little company of lovely friends was there. 
 Rupert Brooke was one of them, and we read 
 poems in that old haunt of beauty, and wan- 
 dered on the Downs. I remember saying that 
 the Austro-Serbian business might cause a Eu- 
 ropean war, in which we might be involved, but 
 the others did not think this likely; they 
 laughed. 
 
 Then came more anxious days, and then a 
 week of terror, and then good-bye to that old 
 life, and my old home in Berkshire was a billet 
 for cavalry, and their chargers drank at the 
 moat. I saw them there. And the next time 
 I saw them they were in Gallipoli, lying in rank 
 in the sand under Chocolate Hill, and Rupert 
 was in his grave in Skyros. 
 
 We were at war. We were at war with the 
 greatest military power in the world. We had 
 an army of about 180,000 men, scattered all 
 over the world, to pit against an army of five 
 or six millions of men, already concentrated. 
 We had, suddenly, at a day's notice, with the 
 knife at our throats, to make an army of six 
 or seven million of men, and we had perhaps 
 trained officers enough for an army of 300,000. 
 We had to enlist, house, tent, train and officer 
 that army. We had to buy its horses and 
 
12 The War and the Future 
 
 mules, build Its cars and wagons and travelling 
 kitchens. We had to make its uniforms and 
 straps, blankets, boots and knapsacks; and, 
 worst of all, we had to make its weapons. 
 
 We had the plant for making (I suppose) 50 
 big guns and 500 machine guns and 50,000 
 rifles in the year, with proportionate ammuni- 
 tion. Suddenly we wanted 50,000 big guns, 
 and 500,000 machine guns and 10,000,000 
 rifles with unlimited ammunition, more ammu- 
 nition than men could dream of, with all sorts 
 of new kinds of ammunition, bombs, hand- 
 grenades, aerial torpedoes, or flying pigs, flying 
 pineapples, egg-bombs, hairbrush-bombs, Mills 
 bombs, trench mortar bombs, such as men had 
 never used. And those things were wanted in 
 a desperate hurry and we had the plant for not 
 one-fiftieth part of them, nor the workmen to 
 use the plant when made, nor the workmen to 
 make the plant. 
 
 It is said that It takes one year to make the 
 plant for the making of the modern big gun, 
 and to train the workmen to make the countless 
 delicate machines with which men kill each other 
 in modern war. That was the proposition we 
 were up against, and meanwhile, just across the 
 water, well within earshot of our eastern coun- 
 
The War and the Future 13 
 
 ties, the enemy, like an armed burglar, was 
 breaking Into our neighbours' house, and killing 
 our neighbours' children, taking his goods, abus- 
 ing his women and burning the house over the 
 victims. 
 
 In the first eight days of the war we sent two- 
 thirds of our Httle army to France (about 
 120,000 men all told). They marched up to 
 take position, singing, " It's a long, long way 
 to Tipperary." It was not to be a long way to 
 those brave men, for half of them were gone 
 within eight weeks. They were not too well- 
 equipped with guns, nor had they many machine 
 guns, but every man In the army was a very 
 carefully trained rifle-shot. Against them came 
 enemy armies numbering nearly half a milUon 
 of men. 
 
 They came Into touch on August 23rd, near 
 Mons, against odds of five or six to one. 
 They were driven back, of course. That little 
 line was turned and almost enveloped. There 
 has been little fighting in this war to equal that 
 first fighting. But one man cannot fight six 
 men : so our army fell back, fighting desperately, 
 in hot weather, for nine days. 
 
 Often in that blazing weather, divisions were 
 so footsore that they could go no farther. 
 
14 The War and the Future 
 
 Then they would take position and lie down and 
 fight. The only rest they had was when they 
 could lie down to fight. And at night, when 
 they got to their bleeding feet again and 
 plodded on in the dark, a sort of refrain passed 
 from rank to rank, " We're the bloody rear- 
 guard, and bloody rearguards don't eat and 
 bloody rearguards don't sleep, but we're up, 
 we're up, we're up the blooming spout." 
 
 They fell back for nine days and nights, till 
 the enemy was at the gates of Paris, and the 
 Allied cause seemed lost. You know how the 
 enemy swept Into Belgium and into Northern 
 France, with his myriads of picked men, his 
 aeroplanes and overwhelming numbers of guns. 
 They marched singing and they came on like a 
 tide, supping up cities, Liege, Namur, Mons, 
 Cambrai, as though they were the sea itself. 
 They beat back everything. The French were 
 not ready, the Belgians were only a handful, we 
 were only a handful. And then, when they 
 were at the gates of Paris, the miracle hap- 
 pened. That great army outran Its supplies. 
 It advanced so swiftly that the heavy loads of 
 shells could not keep pace with It. Then In 
 September, 19 14, that great calm soldier Mar- 
 shal Joffre wrote those words which will be 
 
The War and the Future 15 
 
 remembered as long as this war is remembered : 
 *' The time has come for going back no further, 
 but to die where you stand if you cannot ad- 
 vance." Then came the battle of the Marne, 
 and people knew that whatever happened there 
 would be no overwhelming victory for the 
 enemy. He was beaten and had to fall back 
 to gather strength for another effort, and all 
 his dreams of sudden conquest collapsed. 
 
 But though our armies won at the Marne, it 
 was only by miracle; and the essence of miracles 
 is that they are not repeated. Our side was 
 not ready for war. We were weaker than the 
 enemy in guns, men and equipment. Our task 
 was still to hold the line somehow, with- 
 out guns, and almost without men, but 
 by bluff and barbed wire, while guns could 
 be forged and men trained. The enemy 
 was ready for a second spring long before we 
 were ready to resist him, and this second spring 
 was not to fail, as the Marne had failed, 
 through want of munitions. 
 
 This second spring took place at the end of 
 October, 19 14, when we had lost about half our 
 original army and had altogether about 100,000 
 men in the line, many of them drafts who had 
 not had one month's training. This 100,000 
 
1 6 The War and the Future 
 
 were outgunned and outnumbered. All are 
 agreed that the enemy brought against that 
 100,000 not less than six times its strength, and 
 the battle that followed (the first battle of 
 Ypres) lasted for twenty-seven days and nights 
 of continuous and bloody fighting. To this day 
 no soldier can understand why the enemy 
 didn't break through. Our line was so thinly 
 held that in many places there were no supports 
 and no reliefs of any kind, and the men stayed 
 in the trenches till they were killed or wounded. 
 That little and weary army underwent a test 
 such as no other army has had to stand. The 
 enemy shelled our line, with a great concentra- 
 tion of guns, and attacked with a great concen- 
 tration of men, and broke the line at Gheluvelt, 
 near Ypres. It has been thought by some that 
 the enemy had only to advance to crumple the 
 whole army; and destroy the Allied Cause. 
 And then two men (according to the story) 
 saved the issue. Two English soldiers, named 
 Pugh and Black, gathered up small parties of 
 men, regimental cooks and servants, stretcher 
 bearers, and walking wounded, and held the 
 enemy in check, till what was left of the Worces- 
 ter Battalion, about four hundred men, could 
 be put in to retake the village. Those four 
 
The War and the Future 17 
 
 hundred men saved the Hne and prevented a 
 defeat. Our generals were writing an order 
 for retreat when a staff officer came galloping 
 up to them, in wild excitement, and without a 
 hat, to shout out that the Worcesters had re- 
 stored the line. 
 
 In that most bloody battle of " First Ypres,'' 
 one English battalion was obliterated, another 
 was remade two and a half times between Oc- 
 tober and Christmas, a third, which went in 
 987 strong, came out 70 strong; in a fourth, an 
 officer who returned to duty after two months 
 in hospital, found only one man left who had 
 been In the battalion two months before; all the 
 rest had gone. 
 
 After that battle, the mud set in, and stopped 
 all great movements of men and guns. Both 
 sides dug and fortified the lines they were hold- 
 ing, and the war became an affair of siege, until 
 the spring. 
 
 Then the enemy launched a third attack 
 against us, which was by much the most dan- 
 gerous attack of the early months of the war. 
 He began this attack by an intense bombard- 
 ment of the English and French lines near 
 Ypres. Then, at nightfall. In the April even- 
 ing, while this bombardment was at its height. 
 
1 8 The War and the Future 
 
 he let loose a great green cloud of chlorine gas, 
 which floated across the No Man's Land to our 
 lines. Wherever this gas reached the lines it 
 choked the men dead, by a death which is un- 
 speakably terrible, even for this war. 
 
 The men watched the gas coming. They 
 thought that it was a smoke-screen or barrage, 
 designed to hide the advance of enemy infantry. 
 Suddenly they found the green cloud upon them, 
 and their comrades choking and retching their 
 lives away in every kind of agony. For a 
 while there was a panic. The men In the front 
 lines were either killed or put out of action. 
 The communication trenches were filled with 
 choking and gasping men, flying from the terror 
 and dropping as they fled. Night was falling. 
 It was nearly dark, and the whole area was 
 under an Intense enemy shell-fire. The line 
 was broken on a front of four and a half miles; 
 and for the time It seemed as though the whole 
 front would go. 
 
 The gas had come just at the point where the 
 French and the English armies joined each 
 other; at a point, that Is, where all words of 
 command had to be given In several languages, 
 and where any confusion was certain to be In- 
 tensified tenfold; there were many Colonial and 
 
The War and the Future 19 
 
 native troops there, Turcos, Indians, Senega- 
 lese, Moroccans, as well as Canadians, French 
 and English. All the troops there were shaken 
 by this unexpected and terrible death, against 
 which they had no guard. 
 
 Then a few officers, whose names, perhaps, 
 we may never know, gathered together the 
 stragglers and the panic-stricken, and called to 
 them to put handkerchiefs and caps and rags of 
 blankets and strips of shirt in iPront of their 
 faces, and with these as respirators they 
 marched the men back into that cloud of death, 
 and though many were killed in the attempt, 
 enough survived to hold the line, and so we 
 were saved for the third time. 
 
 All nations use gas now, but that was the 
 first time it was used. It is a very terrible 
 thing. I have seen many men dying of it. It 
 rots the lungs and the victims gasp away their 
 lives. There is a saying, " If you sell your 
 soul to the Devil, be sure you get a good price." 
 The use of that gas was a selling of the soul, 
 and yet the price gotten in exchange was noth- 
 ing. They had our line broken with it and for 
 weeks they could have beaten us by it. It was 
 weeks before our men had proper respirators 
 in any number. I do not know why they didn't 
 
20 The War and the Future 
 
 beat us then; nobody knows. Some think that 
 it was because their General Staff did not trust 
 their chemists. 
 
 Just at the time when the gas attack was 
 preparing outside Ypres, a little army of the 
 Allies was landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula, 
 " to assist the passage of the fleets through the 
 Dardanelles." 
 
 I have been asked about the Gallipoli cam- 
 paign. People have complained to me that it 
 was a blunder. I don't agree. It had to be 
 undertaken; to keep Bulgaria quiet, to keep 
 Greece from coming in against us, to protect 
 Egypt and to draw the Turkish Army from 
 the Caucasus, where Russia was hard pressed. 
 People say, " Well, at least it was a blunder to 
 attack in the way you did." I say that when 
 we did attack, we attacked with the only men 
 and the only weapons we had, and in the only 
 possible places. 
 
 In war one has to attempt many things, not 
 because they are wise or likely to succeed, but 
 because they have to be done. In this war, we 
 had to attempt them with insufficient means, be- 
 cause we were unprepared for war. 
 
 Consider what that attempt meant. 
 
 In the original scheme, the Russians were to 
 
The War and the Future 21 
 
 co-operate with us, by landing 40,000 nrien on 
 the shores of the Bosphorus, so as to divert 
 from us a large force of enemy soldiers. We 
 brought our men 3,000 miles across the sea, 
 and we said to them. In effect, " There are the 
 Turks, entrenched, with machine guns and guns 
 and shells. You have only rifles. We have no 
 guns nor shells to give you. Now land on 
 those mined beaches, and take those trenches. 
 The Russians will help to some extent; it will 
 not be so hard." So the men went ashore and 
 took those trenches. Nine days after they were 
 ashore, we learned that the Russians could not 
 land any men on the Bosphorus, and that we 
 were alone In the venture. And then we said 
 to our survivors, " The Russians can't come to 
 help you, after all. We have no guns nor 
 shells to give you. We are so hard pressed In 
 France that we can't send you any reinforce- 
 ments. The enemy Is entrenched with plenty 
 of guns, and lots of shells, but you've got rifles, 
 so go and take those trenches, too." So the 
 men went and took them. Then we said. In 
 effect, " Men and guns are needed In France, 
 we can't send you any more just yet." So 
 everything was delayed, till the men and guns 
 were ready, and then, when they were ready, the 
 
22 The War and the Future 
 
 enemy was ready, too, and dysentery was rag- 
 ing and it was very hot, and there was little to 
 drink, and it is a God forgotten land to fight in, 
 so we did not win the Peninsula, nor anything 
 else, except honor from thinking men. 
 
 I know that every man who was in Gallipoli, 
 is and will be prouder of having been there, 
 than of anything in his life, past, present, or to 
 come. Our men kept a flag flying there to 
 which the beaten men of all time will turn in 
 trial. 
 
 As you know, in 19 15, the war settled down 
 into a struggle between opposing lines of 
 trenches, with daily shelling and sniping and oc- 
 casional raiding, mining and bombing. The 
 next great attack was the attack on Verdun, 
 when the enemy launched an army of specially 
 fed, trained and rested soldiers, under a hail 
 of shells, to break through the French lines. 
 That attack lasted with little intermission for 
 four months, and it did not break the line. It 
 very nearly broke it, but not quite. Perhaps 
 nothing can break the line of a free people 
 sworn to hold the gates for freedom. Often 
 in that fight, little bodies of French and German 
 soldiers were shut off for days together by shell- 
 fire, men died from hunger and thirst in the 
 
The War and the Future 23 
 
 wreck of the forts, and those parties of French 
 and Germans would count heads to see which 
 side had won. 
 
 And while the attack was at its height, and 
 while Verdun was still in danger, the English 
 and French together counter-attacked in force 
 on a line of 25 miles, further to the north, in 
 the Department of the Somme, and beat the 
 enemy out of his main position there. That 
 put an end to the attack on Verdun. The bat- 
 tle of the Somme gave another use for the 
 enemy's men and guns. The city was saved. 
 And a great deal more than the city; for the 
 battle of the Somme beat the enemy out of a 
 strip of France G^ miles long by from 12 to 20 
 deep, where today the great battle of this war 
 is being fought. 
 
 This Battle of the Somme was an attack upon 
 some of the most elaborate field fortifications 
 ever made. On the right of the attack, where 
 the French attacked, much of the ground is flat, 
 and without good defensive position, but on 
 the left, where the English attacked, the 
 ground is a succession of rolling chalk down- 
 land, rising some hundreds of feet above little 
 valleys. On this rolling downland, the enemy 
 had dug himself in, when he was strong and 
 
24 The War and the Future 
 
 we were weak. He had made himself so 
 strong there, that he openly boasted that his 
 position was impregnable. He had all the 
 good positions there. His line was so placed, 
 that it was almost always a little above us, and 
 he worked to improve these positions night and 
 day for nearly two years. 
 
 Perhaps not many here have seen a first rate 
 enemy field fortification. I'll try to explain 
 what the Somme position was like. 
 
 As you know, the main defence in a modern 
 line is the front line system of trenches. 
 
 In front of his front line, the enemy had a 
 very elaborate strong tangle of wire, about 4 
 feet high and 40 yards across, each wire as 
 thick as a double rope yarn and with 16 barbs 
 to the foot. 
 
 Hidden in this wire, under the ground, in 
 converted shell holes, or in very cunningly con- 
 trived little pits, were stations for machine gun- 
 ners. Some of these stations were connected 
 with the enemy trenches by tunnels, so that the 
 gunners could crawl to them under cover. 
 
 In some places, the ground of the wire en- 
 tanglement was strewn with trip wire, so near 
 the ground as to be invisible, yet high enough 
 to catch the feet. In the trip wire were spikes 
 
The War and the Future 25 
 
 to transfix the men who caught in the trip wire 
 
 and fell. 
 
 Behind the wire tangle were the enemy first 
 
 line trenches. 
 
 These were immense works, designed as per- 
 manent field fortresses. They were always 
 well made and well sited. In many important 
 points of the line they were twelve feet deep, 
 and strongly revetted with plank and wicker. 
 At intervals of about 50 yards, in some parts of 
 the line, were little concrete forts for observers 
 and machine guns. These forts were so well 
 concealed that they could not be seen from 
 without. The slit for the observer or for the 
 machine gun to fire through is very tiny, and 
 well hidden in the mud of the trench para- 
 pet. 
 
 These forts were immensely strong, and very 
 small. A man inside one could only be de- 
 stroyed by the direct hit of a big shell or by the 
 lucky chance of a bullet coming through the nar- 
 row slit. You must remember that one cool 
 soldier with a machine gun has in his hands the 
 concentrated destructive power of 40 or 50 rifle 
 
 men. 
 
 In the wall of the trench parapets on this 
 front line, at intervals of 30 to 40 yards, were 
 
26 The War and the Future 
 
 shafts of stairs leading down 20 or 30 feet into 
 the earth. At the bottom of the shafts were 
 great underground living rooms, each big 
 enough to hold 50 or 100 men. In some places 
 shafts led down another 20 feet below these 
 living rooms to a second level or storey of dug- 
 outs. 
 
 These places were fairly safe in normal 
 times, though apt to be foul and ill smelling. 
 In bombardments the men kept below in the 
 dugouts, out of danger from the shells, till the 
 instant of the attack, when they could race up 
 the stairs in time to man the fire step, and to 
 get their machine guns into action. During the 
 intense bombardments, the shafts and stairs 
 were blown in, and a good many of the enemy 
 were buried alive in these dugouts. Our men, 
 when they had captured these trenches, usually 
 preferred to sleep in the trenches, not in the 
 dugouts, as they said that they would rather 
 be killed outright than buried alive. 
 
 In some parts of the battlefield of the 
 Somme, the ground is channelled with deep, 
 steep-sided, narrow gullies in the chalk, some- 
 times 40 feet deep and only 40 feet across, 
 like great natural trenches. Three of these 
 gullies were made into enemy arsenals and bar- 
 
The War and the Future 27 
 
 racks of immense strength and capacity. These 
 were, the tunnel at St. Pierre Divion, dug mto 
 the chalk, so that some thousands of men could 
 live under ground within one-quarter mile of the 
 front line, in perfect safety; the barracks at the 
 Y Ravine, about a mile further north, and the 
 barracks in Quarry Gulley, near the Y Ravine. 
 In all these immense underground works, the 
 enemy had elaborate homes, lit with electricity, 
 hung with cretonne and panelled with wood. 
 Little stairs led from these dwellings to neat 
 machine gun posts overlooking the front line. 
 In one of these elaborate underground dwell- 
 ings there were cots for children and children's 
 toys, and some lady's clothes. It was thought 
 that the artillery general who lived there had 
 had his family there for the week end. 
 
 Behind all these works, were support and re- 
 serve trenches of equal strength, often fully 
 wired in, but with fewer dugouts. Then about 
 a mile or two miles behind the front Ime, on a 
 great crest or table of high chalk downland, 
 was the second line, stronger than the front 
 line on even more difficult ground, where you 
 cannot walk a yard without treading on dust 
 of English blood. 
 
 Words cannot describe the strength ot that 
 
28 The War and the Future 
 
 old fortified line. It was done with the greatest 
 technical skill. If you went along it, you 
 would notice here and there some little Irregu- 
 larity or strangeness, and then you would look 
 about, till you could see what devilish purpose 
 that little strangeness served. And there was 
 always one. The little irregularity gave some 
 little advantage, which might make all the dif- 
 ference in a battle. The little thing in war al- 
 ters the destinies of nations. A grain of sand 
 in the body of Napoleon altered the campaign 
 of 1 8 12. I know of one great and tragical bat- 
 tle In this war which was lost mainly through 
 a sprained ankle. 
 
 Our old lines faced these great fortresses at 
 a distance of about 200 yards. Our lines are 
 nothing like the enemy lines. There were no 
 deep dugouts. The wire was comparatively 
 slight. The trenches were Inferior. It looked 
 as though the work of amateurs was pitted 
 against the work of professionals. Yet the 
 amateurs held the professionals. 
 
 When Lord Kitchener went to Galllpoll, he 
 visited Anzac. At that time, life In Galllpoll 
 was becoming anxious, because some 17-Inch 
 Skoda gims had been brought down by the 
 Turks and were shelling the position. Our 
 
The War and the Future 29 
 
 men had dug some dugouts 10 or 15 feet deep 
 to protect them from these shells. They 
 showed them to Kitchener with pride. Kitch- 
 ener said, " Of course, they may do for Galli- 
 poli, but they aren't nearly deep enough for 
 France. We never go down less than 30 feet 
 in France." 
 
 So, when the Peninsula men came to France, 
 they came with the modest feeling that they 
 knew nothing about modern war, nor about 
 digging dugouts, and they went into the trenches 
 expecting to see dugouts like Egyptian cata- 
 combs. They found that the only dugouts were 
 pieces of corrugated iron with a few sand bags 
 on the top and some shovelsful of mud over all. 
 
 In places where the two lines approached 
 each other at a crest, there had been a two years' 
 struggle for the possession of the crest; for 
 modern war is mainly a struggle for the post 
 from which one can see. In all these places 
 the space between the lines was a vast and 
 ghastly succession of mine pits, fifty or a hun- 
 dred feet deep, marked with the wrecks of old 
 dugouts, and heads and hands and bodies, and 
 sometimes half full of evil water. 
 
 Within the 16 mile limit of the English sec- 
 tor of the Somme field, there were in the enemy 
 
30 The War and the Future 
 
 front line 8 strongholds which the enemy 
 boasted were impregnable. 
 
 The Battle of the Somme was the first real 
 measuring of strength between the enemy and 
 the English. In the early battles, the picked 
 men of our race had met their picked men and 
 held them. But the picked men were now 
 dead, and the armies which fought on the 
 Somme were the average mass of the race. 
 
 I must describe the Battle of the Somme. 
 On the right, where the ground is flat and there 
 is no real defensive position, the French caught 
 the enemy by surprise, officers shaving in their 
 dugouts, men at breakfast, gun teams going 
 down to water. The French made a royal and 
 victorious advance at once. 
 
 Our men attacking the strongholds where the 
 enemy expected us, lost 50,000 men in the first 
 day's fighting and took in that day, the first of 
 the 8 impregnable forts. 
 
 I don't think you realize what the Battle of 
 the Somme became. It went on for 8 Y^ months 
 of intense, bloody and bitter battles for small 
 pieces of hill, for the sites of vanished villages, 
 
The War and the Future 31 
 
 for the stumps of blasted woods and the cellars 
 of obliterated farms. 
 
 We got the second of the 8 impregnable 
 forts on the fourth day, the third on the seven- 
 teenth day, the fourth and fifth on the seventy- 
 sixth day, the sixth and strongest on the one 
 hundred and twenty-eighth day, and the last two 
 at the end. 
 
 I cannot tell you how bitter and bloody the 
 fighting in that battle was. The fight for Del- 
 ville Wood lasted for nearly two months, and 
 in those two months, 400 shells fell every min- 
 ute on Delville Wood, and not less than 300,000 
 men were killed and wounded there. That 
 wood during the battle was a scene of death, 
 bloodshed and smash such as cannot be imag- 
 ined. You walked in the mud on the bones and 
 the flesh of men and on fresh blood dripping 
 out of stretchers. By the side of the track was 
 a poor starved cat eating the brain of a man. 
 
 In High Wood they fought till the rags and 
 bones of dead men hung from the wrecks of the 
 trees. In Pozieres, men lived for days and 
 nights under a never ceasing barrage designed 
 to blow them off the ridge which they had won. 
 They were buried and unburied and reburied by 
 
32 The War and the Future 
 
 shells. There were 20,000 casualties on that 
 ghastly table, and the shell-shock cases leaped 
 and shook and twittered in every clearing sta- 
 tion. 
 
 Twenty-thousand men were killed and 
 wounded in the taking of the nest of machine 
 guns in the subterranean fort of Mouquet Farm. 
 Our men went down into the shafts of that 
 fort and fought in the darkness under ground 
 there, till the passages were all seamed with 
 bullets. 
 
 We lost half a million men in that great bat- 
 tle, and we had our reward. For in the winter 
 of 19 1 7, in the winter night a great and shat- 
 tering barrage raged up along the front. It 
 was the barrage which covered the attack on 
 Miraumont and drove the enemy from the 
 Ancre Valley. The next day came the news 
 that Serre had fallen, and we went up and stood 
 in Serre. And Gommecourt fell, and the rain 
 of shells ceased upon Loupart and La Barque, 
 and the news ran along like wildfire, that the 
 enemy was going back. 
 
 It was a soaking thaw after frost, and the 
 roads, such roads as remained, were over ankle 
 deep in mud, and our muddy army got up from 
 the mud and went forward through it. 
 
The War and the Future 33 
 
 All the roads leading to the front were 
 thronged by our army, battalion on battalion, 
 division on division, guns and transport columns, 
 camp kitchens, and artillery transport, going up 
 in the mud after the enemy. 
 
 You could see them bringing the railway for- 
 ward under fire, under heavy fire, along the 
 Ancre Valley. They made the railway and 
 the road side by side, with shells falling on 
 them and the stink of gas blowing over 
 them. And not a man died there, but died In 
 exultation, knowing that over his death the 
 army was passing to victory. 
 
 Today, as you know, the greatest battle of 
 this war Is being fought on that ground. And 
 so far, as you know, our men have been hard 
 pressed and driven back. 
 
 It is not easy to stand here, while there, over 
 the sea, those men are standing in the mud, 
 waiting for death to come to them. 
 
 It is no light thing to face death in a modern 
 battle, to have been living in the mud, on scanty 
 food, with no rest, In all the terror and filth, 
 among the blood, the rags of flesh, the half 
 buried bodies half eaten with rats, the crashing 
 and screaming of shells, all the confusion of a 
 stunt, and the cries for stretcher bearers. Only 
 
34 The War and the Future 
 
 two things are any help in the battlefield, cour- 
 age and the comrade beside you. 
 
 And I know that there is no man in the 
 French and English armies today, standing-to 
 in the mud, waiting for death, who does not 
 stand the steadier from the knowledge that this 
 country stands behind him, and that the men 
 of this country are in the line at his side. 
 
 We here are not helping In the fight; but we 
 can help in the fight. We can build up behind 
 those men a great wall of love and admiration 
 and courage, so that they can feel it, and rest 
 their backs against it when they are hard 
 pressed. 
 
 It is as well to face the facts of the battle. 
 We have lost a tract of France, and our old 
 graveyards of the Somme, our huts and water- 
 pipes, some guns and dumps of stores and a 
 great many men. 
 
 Fortune Is like that in war. When Cortes 
 had burnt his ships, and was marching Into 
 Mexico, his men growled that they had a hard 
 time, with little food and no rest and bloody 
 fighting. And Cortes told them that they 
 didn^t come there to eat cakes of Utrera, but 
 to take their luck as It came and their medicine 
 
The War and the Future 35 
 
 as it tasted. We came into this war on those 
 terms; so did you. 
 
 I've no news to tell you and no comfort to 
 give you. The enemy had more aeroplanes 
 than we had, and hid his preparations from 
 us. He made a big concentration of men and 
 guns, and when the weather favoured him he 
 put them in, with skill and courage, against that 
 part of the line where there are no good natural 
 defensive positions. He took the 5th army by 
 surprise and drove it back. As it fell back, 
 it uncovered the right of the 3rd army, which 
 held the good defensive positions. The 3rd 
 army had to bend back in conformity, till the 
 two armies together reached some sort of a 
 line which could be held. Then the enemy 
 switched his divisions north, and put in his at- 
 tack on Ypres. 
 
 He was able to do this, because his lateral 
 communications, behind his lines, are better 
 than ours. People may ask, in some surprise, 
 "Why are they better?" They are better 
 because the enemy has at his disposal a great 
 body of slave labour which we have not. He 
 has the enslaved populations of Belgium, North 
 France and Poland to work for him. 
 
26 The War and the Future 
 
 Then, In all this fighting, our armies have 
 been outnumbered by the enemy. We have 
 had concentrated against us not less than two 
 millions of the enemy. People have asked, In 
 some surprise, " How comes It, that you have 
 been outnumbered?" 
 
 We have been outnumbered, presumably be- 
 cause the Allied High Command has judged, 
 that this Is not the time for the fighting of the 
 decisive battle of this war, and that the line 
 must be held with comparatively few troops so 
 that the reserves for the decisive battle may be 
 as large as possible. 
 
 We must be patient, and wait for the counter, 
 trusting the goodness of our cause. 
 
 But In thinking of British man-power you 
 must remember that though all the belligerent 
 countries have to reckon with three big armies, 
 we have to reckon with seven. All belligerent 
 countries have to reckon with their army of the 
 living, their army of the wounded, and their 
 army of the dead. We have to reckon all 
 these, and our armies of the dead and wounded 
 would alone mount up to nearly 2j^ millions 
 of men. But we have also to maintain four 
 armies which the other belligerent countries 
 do not have to have. 
 
The War and the Future 37 
 
 First, an army of defence, against invasion. 
 This is a small army consisting mainly of 
 elderly men and of lads in training. We have 
 to maintain it; it may be necessary; and " it is 
 better to be sure than sorry." 
 
 Then we have armies abroad in distant parts 
 of this war, the army in Italy, the army in Sa- 
 lonika, and the big garrisons in India and Egypt 
 which feed the armies in Mesopotamia and in 
 Palestine. All of these armies and garrisons 
 melt away continually in the fire of war, and 
 everywhere on the roads to those armies, are 
 the reinforcements and the drafts swallowing 
 up more and yet more men. 
 
 In Gibraltar, and Malta and Alexandria and 
 Port Said, you will see, every day, some ship 
 filled with our men going out to death in those 
 far fields, and you will see the men standing on 
 the deck and cheering, as the ship draws away 
 and leaves home and sweetness and pleasant 
 life behind, for ever. 
 
 Then, besides these, we have the army of 
 the sick. The great epidemical scourges of 
 ancient armies have been nearly eliminated 
 from this war; but we have been forced to 
 maintain armies in distant outposts of this war, 
 in Gallipoli, in Salonika, and in Mesopotamia 
 
38 The War and the Future 
 
 where the men have suffered much from trop- 
 ical diseases, dysentery and malarial fever. 
 We have some hundreds of thousands of men 
 who have been weakened by these complaints; 
 not wrecked by them, but so weakened that 
 they cannot stand the life in the trenches. 
 
 And besides all those armies, we have a vast 
 army of the very flower of our race, both men 
 and women. It may consist of four or five 
 millions of men and women who work in treble 
 shifts, day and night, as they have worked for 
 the last three years, making the things of war, 
 not only for ourselves but for our Allies. Our 
 Allies are not manufacturing people. Russia 
 made few things, France's coal and steel are in 
 the hands of the enemy, Italy makes few things. 
 We have had to supply these people not only 
 with equipment of all kinds, guns, clothing and 
 shells, but with ships and coal. Not less than 
 half a million men have done nothing in England 
 since the war began but get and ship coal for 
 the Allies. They have sent not less than 60 
 million tons of coal to the Allies since the war 
 began. 
 
 Then a part of that army builds ships, and 
 ever more ships, and yet never enough ships for 
 
The War and the Future 39 
 
 the needs of this great war and for the sup- 
 ply of our friends. 
 
 The enemy spreads abroad lies concerning 
 us. I am not going to answer them. Lies do 
 not last long. 
 
 There is no need to lie about a people. Still 
 less is there any need to lay claim to this or 
 that glory. No nation is so bad that it has 
 not something very good in it; and none so 
 glorious that it has not some taint of self. 
 
 And I'm not here to sing my country's 
 praises. No one will do that. Patriotism, as 
 I see it, is not a fine drawing of the sword, be- 
 hind some winged and glittering Victory. It is 
 nothing at all of all that. It is a very sad thing 
 and a very deep thing and a very stern thing. 
 
 St. George did not go out against the dragon 
 like that divine calm youth in Carpaccio's pic- 
 ture, nor like that divine calm man in Dona- 
 tello's statue. He went out, I think, after 
 some taste of defeat, knowing that it was going 
 to be bad, and that the dragon would breathe 
 fire and that very likely his spear would break 
 and that he wouldn't see his children again and 
 people would call him a fool. He went out, 
 I think, as the battalions of our men went out, 
 
40 The War and the Future 
 
 a little trembling and a little sick and not know- 
 ing much about it, except that it had to be 
 done, and then stood up to the dragon in the 
 mud of that far land, and waited for him to 
 come on. 
 
 I know what England was, before the war. 
 She was a nation which had outgrown her ma- 
 chine, a nation which had forgotten her soul, a 
 nation which had destroyed Jerusalem among 
 her dark Satanic mills. 
 
 And then, at a day's notice, at the blowing of 
 a horn, at the cry from a little people in dis- 
 tress, all that was changed, and she re-made 
 her machine, and she remembered her soul, 
 which was the soul of St. George who fought 
 the dragon, and she cried, " I will rebuild 
 Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land or 
 die in the attempt." 
 
 Don't think that this was due to this or that 
 man, to Kitchener, or to another, or to another. 
 It was due to something kindling and alive in 
 the nation's soul. 
 
 When I first went to the Somme, it was on 
 the day we took Martinpuich and Flers. And 
 on my way up, I passed a battalion going in. 
 They were being played up by the band, to the 
 tune of " It's a long, long trail awinding to the 
 
The War and the Future 41 
 
 land of my dreams." It wasn't a long trail, 
 nor a winding trail to most of those men, but 
 only a few miles of a quite straight road to 
 le Sars, where I found their graves afterwards. 
 
 That tune is perhaps the favourite tune of the 
 army today. The army knows that it is a long, 
 long trail, and a winding one, to the land of 
 our dreams. 
 
 And if in this war it has seemed, that we 
 have done little. If it has seemed, that we re- 
 treated at Mons, and only just held at Ypres, 
 and withdrew from Gallipoll, and stood still at 
 Salonika, and were driven back at St. Quentin 
 and are hard pressed on the Ridge, I think 
 you somehow feel, that with It all, no matter 
 how long the trail is, nor how winding, nor 
 how bitter nor how bloody, we'll stick It, as 
 long as we've a light to go by, even If we're not 
 so clever as some, nor so attractive. 
 
 And what Is the land of our dreams? We 
 must think of that. 
 
 In the Bible there Is the story of King David, 
 who was a very generous and very bloody yet 
 very noble man. And David, besieging a city 
 In the summer, was faint from thirst, and he 
 said, " I wish I had some of the water from 
 that pool by the city gate." And three men 
 
42 The War and the Future 
 
 heard him and they took bottles and broke 
 through the enemy pickets and filled their 
 bottles and brought the water to David. But 
 David would not drink water brought to him 
 at such risk. He said, it would be like drink- 
 ing blood; so he poured it out to his God. 
 
 The men of those armies in the mud are 
 bringing us water at the risk of their lives, the 
 living water of peace, that peace which I think 
 will be the peace that passes all understanding, 
 peace to have our lives again and do our work 
 again and be with our loves again. But if we 
 go back to the world of before the war, that 
 peace won't serve us, it will be a drinking of the 
 blood of all those millions of young men. 
 
 I said some time ago, that the only things 
 which matter in war are courage and the love 
 of your comrades. When this war ends, we 
 shall need all our courage and all our com- 
 rades, in that re-making of the world, which 
 will follow this destruction. And I hope that 
 when that time comes, you will not think of us 
 again, as cold, or contemptuous, or oppressive, 
 but as a race of men who went down to the 
 death for a friend in trouble, as St. George did, 
 on this day, so many centuries ago. 
 
 And in the light of that adventure I hope 
 
The War and the Future 43 
 
 that we may stand together to remake this 
 broken world, a little nearer to the heart's de- 
 sire. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 
 
 A Lecture Given in America 
 January-May, igi8 
 
 I HAVE been sent to you, to speak about the war, 
 and about the future, after the war. 
 
 You know more than I do about the future. 
 No one can doubt that this country holds the fu- 
 ture. I will try to tell you about the war. I've 
 seen it close to, and I've seen its results. 
 
 English people who know America, and who 
 have a pride in the fair fame of England, know, 
 that in the old days, we did this country a great 
 wrong. I, here, am very conscious of that. 
 The best thing I can say of that past is that it 
 is the past. We are now associates in a great 
 work which is a forgetting and a putting by of 
 the past, in an effort to make the future. 
 
 Whatever this war is, it is a getting rid of 
 the past. The past has gone into the bonfire. 
 We are all in the war now, realizing with more 
 or less surprise and shock and bitterness, that 
 the old delights, the old ideals, the old way of 
 
 44 
 
The War and the Future 45 
 
 life, with Its comfortable loves and hatreds, are 
 gone. We have to remake our lives, forget 
 our old hatreds and learn new ones, and ask 
 ourselves the question: " What kind of a new 
 world am I going to help make? " 
 
 This war came gradually to you. You were, 
 as we were, not expecting war, seeing the threat 
 and the preparation of war, but believing, just 
 as we believed, that commonsense, or ordinary 
 human sense, and one-thousandth part of good- 
 will in human Intercourse would make war im- 
 possible. War to you, as to us, seemed to be 
 out of date in a century which cut the Panama 
 Canal and discovered Radium and the wireless 
 telegraph. But it came none the less, and all 
 our ten millions of adults had suddenly to put 
 by their old lives and take on new and dan- 
 gerous and terrible lives. Now the same thing 
 has happened to you. 
 
 When the threat of this war came suddenly 
 to Europe we had nothing to gain by war, ex- 
 cept our own soul. That is a big exception. 
 Short of that, we risked everything to keep 
 the peace, as our friends complained, and our en- 
 emies agreed. 
 
 When the war came to us, and the enemy 
 Ambassador was leaving England, a friend of 
 
46 The War and the Future 
 
 mine went to say good-bye to him. My friend 
 said to him: " I hope you think that we did 
 our best to prevent this war ? " The Ambassa- 
 dor said: ''You have done everything that 
 mortals could to prevent the war." 
 
 Now the years before the war were very 
 anxious years to every one. The threat of 
 war hung over every nation in Europe, and 
 every nation in Europe felt and said and wrote 
 that the threat of war was a German threat. 
 The Germans themselves were frank about It. 
 I often used to see German students and Ger- 
 man professors in England. They used to say, 
 quite openly, " Our next war will be with Eng- 
 land." After the Hague Conference nine 
 years ago, the English delegate said to me that 
 the attitude of Germany could only be ex- 
 plained on the supposition that she meant to 
 have a war. Germany was like an athlete 
 trained to the minute; she was spoiling for a 
 scrap. When boxers are trained to the minute, 
 It Is said that their friends always prefer to 
 walk behind them, for when a boxer who Is 
 very fit and spoiling for a scrap sees a nice chin 
 the temptation to hit that chin Is sometimes 
 more than he can bear. 
 
 In the summer of 19 14, the European chins 
 
The War and the Future 47 
 
 looked too tempting to Germany, and she hit 
 out at them. The results are before us. 
 
 This war employs all the strength and all the 
 talent of the nations waging it. One of the 
 weapons used by our enemies has been that of 
 lying. They have spread abroad lies about us, 
 which many repeat and some few, perhaps, be- 
 lieve. I wish here to state and answer some 
 of those lies. 
 
 Firstly: that we are a decadent people, in- 
 tent on sports and money-making, and without 
 ideals or any sense of serving the state. 
 
 The answer to that is that in England and 
 Scotland alone five million four hundred thou- 
 sand of our men enlisted as volunteers to fight 
 for our ideals, without compulsion of any kind, 
 while three million more who tried to enlist 
 were rejected as too old, or physically unfit, or 
 needed in other work. That was before we 
 had conscription. 
 
 Secondly: that we are a cowardly people, who 
 let other people fight for us. 
 
 The answer to that is that had we been a 
 cowardly people we should not have gone to 
 war; but we did; we came into this war and 
 have lost in this war something like two and 
 one-half millions of our best men killed. 
 
4^ The War and the Future 
 
 wounded and missing, and this without count- 
 ing the losses of the men of our Colonies. 
 
 Thirdly: That we are a mean people, who 
 do not take our fair share in the war. 
 
 The answer to that is, that we hold one-third 
 of the line in France, much of the line in Italy, 
 nearly all the line in Serbia, all the line in Pal- 
 estine and Mesopotamia, and all the line on 
 the vast colonial fronts in Africa. We supply 
 or have supplied France, Italy, Serbia, Belgium, 
 Roumania and Russia with millions of tons of 
 equipment of all sorts, guns, shells, uniforms, 
 boots and machines, in all amounting to 3,000 
 million dollars worth. We feed and clothe 
 and always have fed and clothed since the war 
 began the greater part of the population of Bel- 
 gium and practically the whole of the popula- 
 tion of Serbia. Besides our contributions of 
 men and guns, we have Immense hospital or- 
 ganizations working in Russia, In Italy, In Rou- 
 mania, and with the French. We have had the 
 greater part of the policing of the seas to do, 
 and practically all the submarine hunting. The 
 sea Is not an easy place to patrol, and the sub- 
 marine is not an easy thing to catch, but not 
 much German trade has been done by sea since 
 the war, and not many raiders have got through 
 
The War and the Future 49 
 
 our guards and we have sunk (I believe) not 
 less than ten times as many submarines as the 
 enemy had at the beginning of the war. We 
 have built ships to make our navy at least half 
 as strong again as it was before the war. We 
 have caused to be made and transported 25,- 
 000,000 tons of shells, and we have conveyed to 
 and from different parts of the globe, as soldiers 
 going and coming, well, sick or wounded, 
 some 13,000,000 men. Our policing of the 
 sea has been so done that we have lost by en- 
 emy action 2,700 of these 13,000,000 travelling 
 soldiers. 
 
 Then in money, we have spent on this war 
 five billion five hundred million dollars, of which 
 rather more than one-fifth has been loaned or 
 given to our Allies. 
 
 People sometimes say a fourth lie about us: 
 — that we are a grasping people who will profit 
 by this war. 
 
 Let me say this, that no one will profit from 
 this war. We in Europe will be beggared by 
 it for years to come; only we want the world 
 to profit by it, by a change of heart, by an un- 
 derstanding among the nations, and by the 
 knowledge which we In Europe needed this war 
 to teach us, that human life is the precious thing 
 
50 The War and the Future 
 
 on this earth, and that we are here truly linked 
 man to man, and not divided up nation by na- 
 tion. We are one body of humanity. 
 
 There is a fifth lie, that we are a greedy 
 people, who ask you Americans to starve, while 
 we feast on white bread and other delicacies. 
 The answer to that is, that no white bread has 
 been made in England for at least eighteen 
 months, and that there is no feasting there. 
 There is no home in all that land that is not the 
 sadder for this war. 
 
 There is no need to lie about a nation any 
 more than there is any need to lie about a man. 
 The truth emerges above any lie. 
 
 I know my nation's faults as well as I know 
 my own. They are the faults of a set and of 
 a system. They are faults of head, they are 
 not faults of heart. When I think of those 
 faults I think of a long graveyard in France, 
 a hundred miles long, where simple, good, kind, 
 ignorant Englishmen by the thousand and the 
 hundred thousand lie in every attitude of rest 
 and agony, for ever and for ever and for ever. 
 They did not know where Belgium is, nor what 
 Germany is, nor even what England is. They 
 were told that a great country had taken a little 
 country by the throat, and that it was up to 
 
The War and the Future 51 
 
 them to help, and they went out by the hundred 
 and the hundred thousand, and by the million, 
 on that word alone, and they stayed there, in 
 the mud, to help that little country, till they 
 were killed. 
 
 I've been along many miles of that old line, 
 and seen those graves, many of them not even 
 marked, except by a bayonet, or a bit of pack- 
 ing case, and I've thought, as I went along, 
 what epitaph could be put above that unend- 
 ing graveyard, and I could only think of one 
 epitaph, '' These men came here of their own 
 free will to help their fellow men in trouble.'* 
 
 There comes the question, what is the war 
 about? Each nation has its answer to that 
 question, an answer that could be put into 
 twenty words. But in each country, for many 
 years before the war, millions of prejudices, 
 and beliefs, and customs, and Ignorances, and 
 blindnesses, and memories, went to make the 
 war. The question, what it is about, does not 
 now so deeply matter, as the question, what the 
 struggle is, now that it is In full swing. 
 
 It is a struggle between two conceptions of 
 life, the soldier's and the civilian's. Both con- 
 ceptions have existed ever since the world began. 
 Much may be said for both. 
 
52 The War and the Future 
 
 The soldier says, in theory, " Men are not 
 of much account; it is the man who matters. 
 The man must have power over other men 
 and be able to direct them as he chooses and 
 punish them if they disobey; since men need a 
 strong hand. A State can only be strong if it 
 is so organized as to be obedient within and 
 feared without. Every man within the State 
 owes service to the State, he must be trained 
 to defend it and fight for it. All men of a cer- 
 tain wealth and standing must be officers; the 
 rest are and must be cannon fodder. The citi- 
 zens must have good roads fit for the move- 
 ment of troops, adequate food and housing, a 
 thorough military training and as much school- 
 ing as may be good for soldiers.'' Punctuality, 
 hard work, and cleanliness are made much of; 
 merit of certain kinds Is certain of Its reward, 
 the citizens are ticketed, looked after, used and 
 pensioned. They are not encouraged to think 
 for themselves nor permitted to break the regu- 
 lations. Napoleon In France and T'chaka In 
 Zululand both created soldier states In the last 
 century. 
 
 The civilian says, In effect, " It Is true, that 
 in case of need every man must be ready to 
 fight for his State, and should be trained so that 
 
The War and the Future 53 
 
 he may do so, but war is not a normal condi- 
 tion, it is an accident which may not occur, and 
 the direction of the State by soldiers is apt to 
 create a privileged class, who will enslave the 
 remainder of the citizens for their own ends, 
 which may be base and probably will be cruel, 
 and which may and very likely will bring about 
 that state of war which they are created to 
 prevent." So that, in the civilian state, the 
 army is made small, and interferences with per- 
 sonal liberty are bitterly resented and swiftly 
 opposed. The occupation of the civilian state 
 is generally commerce. Its relaxation or 
 amusement is generally the adornment of the 
 individual life, with the arts and sciences which 
 enrich life and make it pleasant. The general 
 feeling is, that men were not meant to be the 
 slaves of other men nor of human systems; but 
 to develop themselves in as loose, easy and 
 pleasant an organization as a nation can be 
 without collapsing. 
 
 Those are the two theories and ways of life, 
 both have been tried and both will work, and 
 both have left great marks in history. 
 
 But in working, both are open to grave de- 
 fects. No nation Is perfect, and no system of 
 living will suit all the people all the time; and 
 
54 The War and the Future 
 
 these ways of life, if persisted in by any nation 
 for three or four generations, intensify them- 
 selves, till, in the military state there is too 
 much control and in the civilian state too little. 
 In the civilian state, where much is left to the 
 individual, much is left undone. Many indi- 
 viduals grow up to be highly educated, pleas- 
 ant and agreeable men, but more grow up with 
 the feeling that there is nothing to stop them 
 from exploiting their fellow citizens, and this 
 they do quite as ruthlessly as any soldier, and 
 with far less recompense. The soldier may 
 drive his men, but he feeds, clothes and pen- 
 sions them. The civilian may drive his men 
 and scrap them as old tools when he has broken 
 them. Very soon. In the civilian state, Indi- 
 vidualism comes to a point In which the service 
 of the State Is left to those who care for that 
 kind of thing. Those who do care for that 
 kind of thing find that the fear of Interference 
 with liberty, which Is the main passion In a 
 civilian state, has prevented them from having 
 any power. They can do neither good nor evil, 
 and so they stagnate. They cease to attract 
 the finer and more active kinds of mind. So 
 that In a civilian state though you may find cul- 
 ture, politeness, niceness of feeling, enlighten- 
 
The War and the Future 55 
 
 ment, and a wise protection of the individual 
 against certain aggressions by King and State, 
 and a great commerce, strongly protected, you 
 may also find the man of action discounte- 
 nanced, and the talker in power in his stead. 
 
 In the military state, the soldier justifies him- 
 self to his subjects by some act which rids the 
 State of a danger or enriches it with a piece of 
 plunder, so that he is able to say, " You see, the 
 Army saved you or enriched you. You see 
 that you must have an Army." When the 
 army is enlarged, he attacks another State and 
 enriches his own State still further; definitely 
 enriches his officers with gifts of other people's 
 property and his surviving men with bits of 
 other people's lands, and at the same time in- 
 creases his army by conscripting the conquered 
 peoples. 
 
 Presently he forgets that the State is any- 
 thing except himself. He cries out that the 
 State is himself, since he is the head of the 
 Army and the Army is the State. He subordi- 
 nates everything to the army. He tolerates 
 schools only in so far as they teach military 
 maxims, and women only because they produce 
 cannon fodder. He encourages bad manners 
 in his officers, because he thinks that it teaches 
 
^6 The War and the Future 
 
 them to dominate; he preaches about duty and 
 his own magnificence in his churches and 
 schools, because he thinks that it teaches people 
 to obey. And at last, when his entire State 
 does obey, and all his officers have bad manners, 
 and a desire to dominate everybody, he has in 
 his hands a terrible instrument of destruction 
 which may be launched anywhere at his ca- 
 price. He is that irresponsible autocratic 
 power who has been the main cause of war for 
 twenty centuries. 
 
 But for the fact that all the power and blind 
 obedience of a nation may be flung anywhere 
 at the caprice of one man, there is much to be 
 said for the military state. But that fact damns 
 it, and the world has never allowed it to con- 
 tinue. The gunman who may be drunk or mad 
 or savage at any minute is too dangerous to be 
 allowed in the house. Rome, who had nobly 
 held the Idea of law, became that kind of State 
 and fell. France, who had nobly held the Idea 
 of liberty, became that kind of State, and fell; 
 and the savage Zulus, who made themselves a 
 people and then an exterminating scourge also 
 fell; and I feel that a grosser people, who have 
 upheld neither law nor liberty, but have become 
 exterminating scourges, will also fall. We 
 
The War and the Future 57 
 
 civilian peoples, flouted, insulted, and taken un- 
 awares, are banded together to make that con- 
 ception of life to fall. 
 
 Last April I was in a dirty little town in 
 France. On my right there was a ruined fac- 
 tory containing a pile of smashed sewing ma- 
 chines, on my left there was a casualty clearing 
 station, in what had once been a rather nice 
 house. Just outside the hospital there was a 
 little old French woman selling newspapers; 
 and dozens of soldiers were buying news- 
 papers and talking about the news. One of 
 the soldiers shouted out, " Hooray, America 
 has declared war,'' and another, who was older 
 and more thoughtful, said, " Thank God, now 
 we may have a decent world again." 
 
 War in one way is very like Mrs. Mac- 
 Gregor. 
 
 The poet Swinburne, when he was a young 
 man, was very fond of impassioned conversa- 
 tion and of whisky. One night he met a friend, 
 and suggested that the friend should come to 
 his lodgings for a talk. On their way Swin- 
 burne bought a bottle of whisky and with an air 
 of satanIc cunning hid it in his tail pocket, and 
 said, " I must be very careful; my landlady is 
 a very troublesome woman." When they 
 
58 The War and the Future 
 
 reached the door Swinburne said, " We must 
 go in very quietly; my landlady is a very trouble- 
 some woman." They opened the door and 
 crept in on tiptoe, and were just creeping up- 
 stairs, when a door opened and a stern voice 
 said, "Is that you, Mr. Swinburrrrrne ? " 
 " Yes, Mrs. MacGregor," said Swinburne. 
 Then the voice said, " Whattan is yon wee 
 bottle in yeir bit pocket, Mr. Swinburrrne ? " 
 " O," said Swinburne, " it's my cough-mixture, 
 Mrs. MacGregor; I'm afraid I've caught cold." 
 " Cough-mixture me nae cough-mixture," said 
 Mrs. MacGregor; " yon is a bottle of whuskey. 
 And ye'll give it heer, Mr. Swinburrrne. 
 Didn't I promise yeir father ye shuld na touch 
 the whuskey?" And she grabbed the bottle 
 and disappeared, and Swinburne was left wring- 
 ing his hands and saying, *' She's a very trouble- 
 some woman." 
 
 That is a light story, but it reminds me of the 
 war. Many and many a gathering of friends 
 has been interrupted by that savage goddess. 
 All over Europe, quiet, gentle, ordinary men, 
 who were going, as they thought, to the enjoy- 
 ment of delight, have been seized upon and 
 robbed by her, not only of material things, but 
 of love and leisure and of life itself. 
 
The War and the Future 59 
 
 There Is a story of a young king of India, 
 who became a leper whom no one could cure. 
 An old man told him that If he went to a cer- 
 tain city and ate bread In a house where there 
 was no sorrow, he would be cured. So he went 
 to the city, and went Into every house, but there 
 was no house that had no sorrow, so he was 
 not cured. " There was no house that had 
 not one dead." 
 
 There Is no house, poor or rich, In any of 
 the countries now fighting In Europe that has 
 not one dead, generally some quite young man. 
 
 Many great minds have brooded over war; 
 most of the great minds of the world have 
 taken part In war, and some have tried to un- 
 derstand It. No great mind has ever looked 
 upon It as a good thing, though they see that 
 sometimes In life outrageous, devilish evil can 
 be checked In no other way. To most of them. 
 Homer, Euripides, Shakespeare, Tolstoi, it Is 
 nearly the last, greatest and completest evil that 
 can come Into human life. 
 
 You all know how a fever comes upon the 
 body. Poison must be Introduced Into It from 
 outside, some living poison of germs; the body 
 
6o The War and the Future 
 
 must be predisposed to nurture the poison; it 
 must be a little overstrained, restless, tired, 
 bored, cross, or out of sorts. The natural 
 guards of the body must be unable to help. 
 Then the poison germs take hold and the nor- 
 mal life of the man ceases. He becomes a rag- 
 ing incoherent maniac terrible to himself and a 
 danger to all about him, till the poison is at its 
 height and has worked itself out in death or 
 recovery. 
 
 Well, you will agree with me perhaps that 
 war comes into the world, in much such a way. 
 The body of a nation does not want it, though 
 it may think about it often and much, the body 
 of a nation is normally busy with its own life. 
 Then, in times of overstrain, of restlessness, or 
 of excitement, or even of busy and pleasant 
 well-being, the poison is introduced, wilfully, 
 by kings and their ministers, and the nation 
 sickens. 
 
 The symptoms are always the same. The in- 
 fected nation becomes, first of all, arrogant. 
 It gets what we call swelled-head. It thinks 
 Itself, possibly with reason, the finest nation in 
 the world. As the poison takes hold and the 
 germs multiply, this arrogance leads to a 
 spiritual blindness to whatever may be good or 
 
The War and the Future 6i 
 
 right in any other nation in the world. This 
 blindness leads to an indifference to whatever 
 any other nation may do or care. This indif- 
 ference leads to the bloody theory, that it is a 
 duty to subjugate any other nation. And at 
 this point, the poison boils over in the system, 
 the nation involved runs up a temperature, and 
 it passes rapidly from acts of injustice to some 
 culminating act of impiety, such as cannot be 
 permitted, and against which a protest has to 
 be made by the outraged world. 
 
 Then comes war, which goes on, like a fever, 
 till the nation is dead or cured. 
 
 That may not be how all wars begin, but 
 that is how the greatest and longest and most 
 evil wars have begun, in modern times. A na- 
 tion has caught a fever, run up a temperature, 
 gone mad and bitten, been a danger and a 
 scourge to the world, and has gradually sick- 
 ened itself out Into exhaustion, peace and wis- 
 dom. Spain had such a fever three hundred 
 years ago, when her motto was the proud 
 boast, " The world does not suffice for us." 
 France had such a fever a century later. Eng- 
 land had such a fever when she forced this 
 country Into the Rebellion. 
 
 In all three countries, there was just that 
 
62 The War and the Future 
 
 same Irresponsible autocratic power to cultivate 
 the fever for his own ends. And who held that 
 power? The Immense power and wealth of 
 Spain were controlled by Phillip the Second, one 
 old, miserly, stubborn dotard, a sort of a re- 
 ligious mule. The immense and ordered power 
 of France was controlled by Louis Quatorze, 
 one little man who wore high-heeled shoes and 
 an Immense wig to give himself some air of 
 greatness. Afterwards it was held by Napo- 
 leon, of whom the French now say that he was 
 as great as any man can be without principles. 
 And who held the power of England? The 
 elderly, pear-headed, self-willed German, often 
 mad and always stupid, who wondered how the 
 apple got Inside the dumpling. And working 
 with him were the few, corrupt and evil fami- 
 lies engaged In the enslavement of the English 
 poor. 
 
 Such were the four Irresponsible autocrats 
 who caused the greatest, longest and most evil 
 wars of the past. But all the fever of their 
 wars, multiplied ten-fold, would be as nothing 
 to the fever of arrogance, blindness, wild and 
 bloody thinking, and Impious dealing, with 
 which another Irresponsible autocrat prepared 
 the present war. No former autocrat took 
 
The War and the Future 63 
 
 such pains to organize armed force, and to 
 make the evil blood in his nation to run so 
 hotly. No former autocrat had such skill or 
 such clever servants to prepare and direct the 
 outburst. And no former autocrat has reaped 
 such a crop of bloodshed, massacre and de- 
 struction. 
 
 I'm not here to abuse our present enemies. 
 We are against them today, but we have been 
 with them in the past and we shall have to be 
 with them in the future, if there is to be any 
 future. In this life, collections of men behave 
 worse than individuals, and it is the thought, 
 and the way of life and the irresponsible auto- 
 crat that make them behave worse, that are the 
 evil things. This war might have been averted, 
 but that that one irresponsible autocrat was 
 afraid of democracy. Consider what he has 
 let loose upon the world. Consider, too, what 
 he has raised against him. 
 
 A few minutes ago, I said that the greatest 
 minds among men looked upon war as nearly 
 (but not quite) the last, greatest and completest 
 evil that can come into human life. Nearly, 
 but not quite. There is one completer evil, 
 that of letting proud, bloody and devilish men 
 to rule this world. While proud, bloody and 
 
64 The War and the Future 
 
 devilish men strike for power here, free men, 
 who had rather die than serve them, will strike 
 against them. And evil as war is, that resolve 
 of the free soul is beautiful. It is in that re- 
 solve that we free peoples are banded, and it is 
 in that resolve that we shall fight, till the proud, 
 bloody and devilish idea is gone. 
 
 All of you here have read about this war 
 daily for more than three years. All of you 
 know some one who is taking part in it, and all 
 of you have in your minds some picture of what 
 it is like. The population of these States is 
 said to be nearly a hundred millions. Not less 
 than twenty-five millions of men, or the equiva- 
 lent of the entire adult male population of these 
 States are or have been engaged in the fighting 
 of this war, and not less than another forty 
 millions are engaged in the making the fighting 
 possible, by the making of arms, equipment and 
 munitions. Then besides those millions there 
 are ten million dead, and twenty million 
 maimed, disabled, blinded or lunatic soldiers 
 who will never fight again. 
 
 You begin to meet the war many miles from 
 any part of the fighting. You come upon a vil- 
 lage of little huts near a railway siding. A 
 month later you find that the village has become 
 
The War and the Future 65 
 
 a town. A month later you find that the town 
 has become a city. In that city the picked in- 
 tellect of your country uses the picked knowl- 
 edge of the universe to make the picked devilry 
 of this war, some gas that will be deadlier than 
 the other man's, some shell that will kill over a 
 bigger area, some bomb that will go off with a 
 louder bang and blast a bigger hole in a town. 
 
 You go elsewhere, and you see miles of chim- 
 neys spouting fire, where every known force is 
 pressing every known metal into every known 
 kind of engine of death. 
 
 You see the nimblest brains and hands and 
 all the finest courage perfecting our control of 
 the air. You see men gathering and packing 
 food, breaking stones for roads and shaping 
 sleepers for railways. You see men by the 
 million about whom nobody cared, in the old 
 days, in peace, suddenly taken up, and fed and 
 clad and taught, and made much of. You see 
 horses and cars by the hundred thousand, and 
 everything that is swift and strong and clever 
 and destructive, suddenly important and de- 
 sired and of great account. You see the toil 
 of a nation suddenly intensified sevenfold, and 
 made acute, and better paid than it ever was, 
 and intellect, the searching intellect, that light 
 
66 The War and the Future 
 
 of the mind which brings us out of the mud, 
 suddenly sought for in the street. And you 
 think, " Is man awaking suddenly to his heri- 
 tage, and to the knowledge of what life may be 
 here? " Then you say to yourself, *' No, this 
 is all due to the war." 
 
 You see young men giving up their hopes, 
 and mature men their attainments, and women 
 losing their sons, their husbands and their 
 chance of husbands, and children losing their 
 fathers and their chances of life, and you ask, 
 what earthly endeavour can cause all this sac- 
 rifice, into what kind of a hopper is it all being 
 fed? It is being fed into the war. 
 
 The war is spread over a tract as big as these 
 States. In many places the tide of war has 
 passed and repassed several times, till the 
 dwellers in those places have died of starvation, 
 or been carried away Into slavery. In the East, 
 you can walk for miles along roads peopled with 
 mad, starving and dying men and women; there 
 are heaps of little bones all along the roads. 
 They are all little bones. They are the little 
 bones of little children who have died of starva- 
 tion there. All the bigger bones have been 
 taken by the enemy to make artificial manure. 
 
The War and the Future 67 
 
 In the West, there Is a strip of land about 
 four hundred and fifty miles long, by from ten 
 to twenty broad. It is called the Army Zone. 
 With the exception of a few poor people who 
 sell little things, such as fruit and tobacco, to 
 the soldiers, all the Inhabitants of that zone are 
 gone. The place Is Inhabited by the armies. 
 The business there is destruction, and rest, after 
 destruction, so that the destroyers may destroy 
 again. 
 
 All that strip of France and Flanders was 
 once happily at peace. All of it was rich and 
 prosperous, with corn and wine and Industry. 
 Even the mountains were covered with timber. 
 Today, after the manhood of four nations has 
 fought over It for three and a half years it is 
 a sight which no man can describe. 
 
 If one could look down upon that strip from 
 above, it would look like a broad ribbon laid 
 across France. The normal colour of a coun- 
 tryside Is green, and green country would ap- 
 pear on both sides of the strip. At the edges 
 however the green would lose Its brightness. It 
 would look dull and rather mottled; further 
 from the edges It would look still duller, and In 
 the centre of the strip no trace of green would 
 
68 The War and the Future 
 
 show, it would all be dark except that the dark- 
 ness would glitter in many places with little 
 flashes of fire. 
 
 And if one comes to that strip by any of the 
 roads which lead to it, one sees, at first, simply 
 the normal French landscape, which is tidy, 
 well-cultivated land, on a big scale, with little 
 neat woods and little, compact villages. 
 One notices that many houses are closed, and 
 that very few men are about. Presently one 
 comes to a village, where one or two of the 
 houses are roofless, and perhaps the church 
 tower has a hole in it. And if you ask, you 
 hear, " No, the enemy never got so far as here, 
 but they shelled it." A little further on, you 
 come to a village where every other house is 
 a burnt-out shell, all down the street. And if 
 you ask how this came about, that every other 
 house should be destroyed, you hear, *' O, the 
 enemy occupied this place and burnt every other 
 house for punishment." And if you ask, pun- 
 ishment for what? You hear, " O, some of 
 the enemy got drunk here and fired at each 
 other, and they said we did it, so they shot the 
 Maire and burnt every other house." 
 
 Then, a little further on, you come to a vil- 
 lage where there are no roofs nor any big part 
 
The War and the Future 69 
 
 of a house, but heaps of brick and stone much 
 blackened with fire, and on both sides of the 
 road you see gashes and heapings of the earth 
 and a great many stakes supporting barbed 
 wire, and a general mess and litter as though 
 there had been a fair there in rather rainy 
 weather. And if you ask about this, they say, 
 " Ah, this is where our old support line ran, 
 just along here, and just under the church in 
 what used to be the charnel-house, we had the 
 snuggest little dug-out that ever was." 
 
 Then if you go on, you come to a landscape 
 where there is no visible living thing; nothing 
 but a blasted bedevilled sea of mud, gouged 
 into great holes and gashed into great trenches, 
 and blown into immense pits, and all littered and 
 heaped with broken iron, and broken leather, 
 and rags and boots and jars and tins, and old 
 barbed wire by the ton and unexploded shells 
 and bombs by the hundred ton, and where there 
 is no building and no road, and no tree and no 
 grass, nothing but desolation and mud and 
 death. 
 
 And if you ask, '' Is this Hell? " They say, 
 " No, this is the market place where we are 
 standing. The church is that lump to the 
 right." Then if you look down you see that 
 
70 The War and the Future 
 
 the ground, though full of holes, Is littered 
 with little bits of brick, and you realize that 
 you are standing in a town. 
 
 If you go on a little further, you notice that 
 the mud is a little fresher. You come to a 
 deafening noise, which bursts in a succession of 
 shattering crashes, followed by long wailing 
 shrieks, partly like gigantic cats making love, 
 and partly as though the sky were linen being 
 ripped across. The noise makes you sick and 
 dizzy. 
 
 If you go on a little further you come to a 
 place where the ground is being whirled aloft 
 in clods and shards, amid clouds of dust and 
 smoke and powdered brick. Screaming shells 
 pass over you or crash beside you, and you 
 realize then that you are at the front. Like 
 Voltaire, you say, " I am among men, because 
 they are fighting. I am among civilized men 
 because they are doing It so savagely." And 
 when the smoke and dust of the shells clear 
 away, you see no men, civilized or savage, noth- 
 ing but a vast expanse of mud, with a dead 
 mule or two, and great black and white devils 
 of smoke where shells are bursting. 
 
 In parts of that strip of France, especially 
 In the broadest part, you come upon places 
 
The War and the Future 71 
 
 where the ground is almost unmarked with 
 shell-fire. There are no traces of fighting, no 
 graves, no litter of broken men or broken equip- 
 ment, the fields are green and there is no noise 
 of war. Yet all the houses are ruined; they 
 have been gutted, their roofs have been blown 
 off or their fronts pulled out, and in their 
 streets you will sometimes see vast collections 
 of pots, pans, desks, tables, chairs, pictures, all 
 smashed, evidently wantonly smashed; men 
 have evidently defaced them, cut, burnt, and 
 banged them. And you notice that for miles 
 of that country all the best of the trees, espe- 
 cially the fruit trees, have been cut down, not 
 for firewood, for they are all there, with their 
 heads in the mud, but for wanton devilry. 
 
 And if you ask about this, you will hear — 
 " O, no; there was no fighting here, but this is 
 the ground the enemy couldn't hold. When 
 he lost the ground to the north, he had to re- 
 treat from here in a hurry, but he showed his 
 spite first. First he took away the few re- 
 maining boys and girls to work for him at mak- 
 ing shells or digging trenches. Then they went 
 from house to house and collected all the furni- 
 ture and property into the central place of the 
 town; then all that was good or valuable or 
 
72 The War and the Future 
 
 not too bulky was taken by enemy soldiers, offi- 
 cers as well as men, as prize of war, and sent 
 home to their homes. But all the rest, the 
 things too bulky to pack, were deliberately 
 smashed, defiled and broken, and the fruit trees 
 were systematically killed." 
 
 I was in one such town in France last March 
 the day after the enemy left it, and I went into 
 one poor man's garden no bigger than this plat- 
 form. Five or six little flowering plants had 
 been pulled up by the roots. One little plum- 
 tree and two currant bushes had been cut 
 through, and the wall parting this garden from 
 its neighbour had been thrown down. All the 
 wells in this district were poisoned by the en- 
 emy before he left. He referred to this in his 
 Orders as being " according to modern theories 
 of war." 
 
 Over all that area of the Army Zone, the 
 business of the inhabitants Is destruction; they 
 rest not day nor night, not even fog nor snow 
 will stop them. I have watched a raging battle 
 in a snowstorm, and one of our neatest suc- 
 cesses was made In a fog. And at night the 
 darkness Is lit with starshells, beautiful coloured 
 rockets, flares, searchlights and magnesiums, so 
 that the killing may go on. 
 
The War and the Future 73 
 
 You may wonder what kind of a life is lived 
 under such conditions. 
 
 I can only say that it is a very attractive kind 
 of life, and that most men who leave it 
 want to go back to it, and few men who 
 have lived that kind of life find it easy to set- 
 tle down to another. And you will see men 
 at their very best under those conditions. You 
 will find them far more thoughtful of each 
 other; far more generous and self-sacrificing 
 than you will ever see them in time of peace. 
 You will be among men who will die for you 
 without a moment's thought or an instant's 
 hesitation, and who will share their last food 
 or drink with you. You will see dying men 
 giving up their last breath to comfort some 
 other wounded man who may be suffering more 
 at the moment. And living among those men, 
 sharing their hardships and their dangers, you 
 will realize to the full the sense of brotherhood 
 and the unity of life which are among the 
 deepest feelings which can come to men. You 
 will realize the gaiety, the courage and the 
 heroism of the mind of man, and you will 
 realize how deeply you love your fellows. 
 
 A British oiBcer has defined the life at the 
 front as " damned dull, damned dirty and 
 
74 The War and the Future 
 
 damned dangerous." It is dull, because you 
 stand in a gash in the earth behind some barbed 
 wire and look through a thing called periscope 
 at some more barbed wire two hundred yards 
 away, beyond which, somewhere, is the enemy, 
 whom you hardly ever see. Then when you 
 have stood in the trench for a time, you are 
 put to do some digging, and when you have 
 done the digging you are put to dig something 
 else, and when you have done that digging you 
 are put to dig something else. And when you 
 have finished digging for the time, you are put 
 to carrying something heavy and awkward, and 
 when you have carried that, you are given 
 something else to carry, and when you have 
 carried that, you are given something else to 
 carry, and the next morning there will be plenty 
 of other things to carry. The work of sol- 
 diers today is not so much fighting, as digging 
 trenches and roads and railways and wells. 
 When they have finished digging, they have to 
 carry up the heavy and awkward things needed 
 at the front lines. Marshal Joffre said that 
 this war is a war of carriers. The Battle of 
 the Marne was won by us because the enemy 
 carriers failed, and Verdun was saved to us be- 
 cause the French carriers did not fail. All the 
 
The War and the Future 75 
 
 things needed in the front line are heavy and 
 awkward to carry, and all have to be carried 
 up, on the shoulders of men. The image left 
 on the minds of most men by this war is not an 
 image of fighting, nor of men standing in the 
 trenches, nor of attacks, nor even of the gun- 
 ners at the guns; it is the image of little parties 
 of men plodding along in single file through the 
 mud, carrying up the things needed in the front 
 trenches; barbed wire, trench gratings, trench 
 pumps, machine guns, machine gun ammunition, 
 bombs, Stokes shells, tins of bully beef and tins 
 of water. And by the sides of the gratings 
 which make the roads near the front you will 
 see the graves of hundreds of men who have 
 lost their lives in carrying up these things. 
 
 And when it rains, as it has rained for weeks 
 together on the Western front during the last 
 three years, that task of carrying becomes in- 
 finitely more terrible to the men than standing 
 in the trenches to be killed or wounded. All 
 that shot up field becomes a vast and waveless 
 sea of mud. That mud has to be seen to be 
 believed, it cannot be described. It is more 
 dangerous than any quicksand. I have seen 
 men and horses stuck in it, being pulled out 
 with ropes. I have seen soldiers standing in 
 
76 The War and the Future 
 
 it up to the waist, fast asleep, and I daresay you 
 have seen that picture of the two soldiers stand- 
 ing in it up to the chin, one of them saying to 
 the other: " If we stay here much longer we 
 shall be submarined." There Is nothing like 
 this mud for breaking men's hearts. Any sol- 
 dier on the Western front will tell you that the 
 mud Is the real enemy. The task of carrying 
 up supplies across that mud, becomes by much 
 the most difficult task which soldiers are called 
 upon to do. 
 
 In spite of the danger and the occasional 
 mud, the life at the front Is lived with cheer- 
 fulness. There Is much joking, though many 
 of the jokes are about death and the dead. 
 Very strange and romantic things happen con- 
 tinually, and there are strange escapes. I 
 have not seen any escape quite so wonderful as 
 that escape vouched for during your Civil War. 
 The story goes that a soldier was sitting on the 
 ground eating his supper. Between two mouth- 
 fuls he suddenly leaped Into the air. While he 
 was In the air, so the story goes, a cannon ball 
 struck the ground where he had been sitting. 
 He could not explain afterwards why It was 
 that he jumped. I daresay that story Is true. 
 I have not seen anything quite so wonderful as 
 
The War and the Future 77 
 
 that, but I know of one very wonderful escape, 
 in Gallipoli. A little party of friends sat to- 
 gether at their dugout door, watching the men 
 swimming on the beach under fire. The beach 
 was continually under fire, but it was no more 
 dangerous than the dry land, and as swimming 
 was the only possible relaxation for the troops, 
 they were allowed to swim. While they 
 watched the swimmers, these friends saw a soli- 
 tary soldier go into a dugout (some distance 
 down the hill) and draw the sacking which 
 served as a door. Evidently he was settling 
 in for his siesta. About ten minutes later a 
 big Turkish shell came over. There were three 
 big Turkish guns which used to shell the beach. 
 They were known as Beachy Bill, Asiatic An- 
 nie, and Lousie Liza. A shell from one of 
 these guns pitched (apparently) right onto the 
 dugout into which this man had gone, and 
 burst. The friends waited for a minute to see 
 If another shell were coming near the same 
 place, but the next shell pitched into the sea. 
 They then went down to see if they could be of 
 any service, though they expected to find the 
 man blown to pieces. As they drew near to 
 the wreck of the dugout, a perfectly naked man 
 emerged, swearing. What had happened was 
 
78 The War and the Future 
 
 this. He had gone into the dugout, had taken 
 off all his clothes because it was very hot, and 
 had lain down on his bed, which was a raised 
 bank of earth, perhaps three feet above the 
 level of the floor. The shell had come through 
 the roof, had gone into the floor of the dugout, 
 had dug a hole ten feet deep and had then 
 burst. The hole and the raised bank of earth 
 together had protected the man from the con- 
 cussion and from the chunks of shell. He him- 
 self was not touched. Everything which he 
 possessed was blown into little flinders, and he 
 was swearing because his afternoon sleep had 
 been disturbed. 
 
 In the same place, in Gallipoli, the day after 
 the landing, the 26th of April, 19 15, an Aus- 
 tralian Captain was with his platoon of men 
 in a trench up the hill. An Australian Major 
 suddenly appeared to this Captain and said: 
 " Don't let your men fire to their front during 
 the next half hour. An Indian working party 
 has just gone up to your front, you will be hit- 
 ting some of them." The Captain was a little 
 puzzled at this, because he had seen no Indian 
 working party, so he looked at the Major, and 
 noticed that the Major's shoulder strap bore 
 the number 31. That puzzled him, because 
 
The War and the Future 79 
 
 he knew that only eighteen Australian bat- 
 talions had landed on the Peninsula — Num- 
 bers one to eighteen — and he did not under- 
 stand what a member of the thirty-first battalion 
 could be doing there. So he looked hard at 
 this Major and said: "Say, are you Fair 
 Dinkum?" That is an Australian slang 
 phrase which means, " Are you the genuine 
 thing? Are you quite all that you pretend to 
 be?" The Major said: "Yes, I'm Major 
 Fair Dinkum." 
 
 At the inquest on Major Dinkum, they found 
 that he had taken the uniform from a dead Ma- 
 jor of the thirteenth battalion, and had been 
 afraid to wear It just as it was, for fear of be- 
 ing challenged, so he had reversed the numbers 
 on the shoulder straps, and made them thirty- 
 one. The inquest found that he died from lead 
 in the head. 
 
 A branch of the service which Is very little 
 recognized but exceedingly dangerous is that 
 branch of the messengers who carry messages 
 and carrier pigeons and telephone wires during 
 an attack. One of the most difficult things In 
 modern war is to let your own side know ex- 
 actly how far an attack has progressed. You 
 send back messengers and the messengers are 
 
8o The War and the Future 
 
 killed. You run out telephone wires and the 
 wires are cut, as fast as they are laid, by shells 
 or bullets. You send back carrier pigeons and 
 the carrier pigeons are killed. During the 
 Battle of the Somme a friend of mine was up 
 in a tree correcting the fire of his battery. He 
 had a telephone and a telescope. He watched 
 the bursting of the shells and then telephoned 
 back to the guns to correct their fire. While 
 he was doing this, he glanced back at the Eng- 
 lish lines, and saw a great enemy barrage 
 bursting between himself and his friends, in a 
 kind of wall of explosion. And hopping along 
 through this barrage came one solitary English 
 soldier, who paid no more attention to the shells 
 than if they had been hail. He looked to see 
 this man blown to pieces, but he wasn't blown 
 to pieces; and then he saw that it was his own 
 servant bringing a letter. He wondered what 
 kind of a letter could be brought under such 
 conditions, and what stirring thing made it 
 necessary, so he climbed down the tree and took 
 the letter and read it. The letter ran: " The 
 Veterinary Surgeon-Major begs to report, that 
 your old mare is suffering from a fit of the 
 strangles." The servant saluted and said: 
 "Any answer, sir?" And my friend said: 
 
The War and the Future 8i 
 
 " No, no answer. Acknowledge." The serv- 
 ant saluted and went back with the acknowledg- 
 ment, hopping through the barrage as though 
 perhaps it were a little wet, but not worth put- 
 ting on a mackintosh for. 
 
 There is another story told of a General 
 (during an attack in the Battle of the Somme) 
 who could not learn how far his division had 
 gone. It was a matter of the most intense 
 anxiety to him. He sent out messengers who 
 never returned, the telephone wires were cut as 
 fast as they were laid, and no pigeons came 
 back. He stood beside the pigeon-loft biting 
 his finger nails. Then at last, out of the battle, 
 came a solitary pigeon, and the General cried: 
 " There she is, there she is. Now we shall 
 know." The pigeon came circling out of the 
 smoke, and came down to the pigeon-loft and 
 went in. The General said, " Go in, man, go 
 in, and get the message ! " So the pigeon 
 fancier went into the loft and was gone rather 
 a long time, and the General cried: " Read 
 it out, man, read it out. What do they say? " 
 The man replied, " I'd rather not read it aloud, 
 sir." The General said: ''Bring it here, 
 man." The General took the message and 
 read it, and the message ran: "I'm not go- 
 
82 The War and the Future 
 
 ing to carry this bloody poultry any longer." 
 I have said something about the dulness and 
 the dirtiness of the life, but there is a kind of 
 dirtiness to which I have not yet alluded. On 
 your way up to the front you are struck by the 
 number of soldiers sitting on the doorsteps of 
 ruined houses studying the tails of their shirts 
 as though they were precious manuscripts. 
 When you are at the front you notice that the 
 men have an uneasy way with their shoulders 
 as though they wished to be scraping along 
 brick walls, and when you have slept one night 
 at the front you realize what the soldier meant 
 when he wrote home to say: " This war isn't 
 a very bloody war, so far as I've seen it, but it 
 does tickle at night." I would like to ask all 
 those who are sending packets of clothing to 
 their friends at the front always to include the 
 strongest insecticide they can find, because, 
 though no insecticide is really strong enough to 
 kill the creatures, a good strong insecticide will 
 take the edge off them. The condition of need- 
 ing insecticide is known as being *' chatty." 
 Not long ago an English actress was playing to 
 the soldiers in a base camp. She was playing 
 a play of Barrie's, in which a lady says of her 
 husband that he was so nice and " chatty." 
 
The War and the Future 83 
 
 She was interrupted by a burst of joy from the 
 troops. She could not understand what she 
 had said to disturb them. 
 
 Next as to the danger at the front. In pro- 
 portion to the numbers engaged, this war is by 
 much the least dangerous war of which we have 
 any record. The great scourges of ancient 
 armies, typhus fever, typhoid, smallpox and 
 measles, have been practically eliminated from 
 this war. The only outbreak of typhus, so 
 far as I know, was the outbreak in Serbia in 
 19 1 5, and that was due not to the soldiers, but 
 to the filthy conditions in which the Serbian 
 refugees were forced to live. A friend of 
 mine, a Doctor, was in charge of a hospital 
 during that epidemic. The hospital was a big 
 church which was completely filled with misery 
 of every sort; typhus cases, typhoid cases, 
 smallpox cases, maternity cases and children 
 with measles, all jammed up together, and no- 
 body to look after them but my friend and a 
 few Austrian prisoners. The place was very 
 filthy, crawling with vermin, and pretty nearly 
 every known language was spoken there. One 
 day a strange man appeared on the scene of 
 misery. The orderlies asked my friend what 
 they should do with him. My friend looked 
 
84 The War and the Future 
 
 d.t the man, and saw that he was pale and 
 shaggy, so he said, " Just wash him and put 
 him into one of the beds." So they washed 
 him. He protested very vigorously, but they 
 did it, and they put him into one of the beds. 
 He protested very vigorously against that, but 
 they put him in and kept him there. My 
 friend, being very busy, was not able to see him 
 for the rest of the day, and didn't get round to 
 him until the next morning. Then he found 
 that he wasn't sick at all, but had come with a 
 message from some neighbouring hospital. 
 
 As to the danger from missiles at the front, 
 it is true, that at any minute of the day or night, 
 in any part of the Army Zone, you may be- 
 come a casualty, and the thing which makes you 
 a casualty may bury you as well, or blow you 
 into such small fragments that nothing of you 
 may ever be seen again, nor anybody know 
 what has become of you. Even if you are 
 away from the front, on some battlefield where 
 there has been no fighting for months, you are 
 still in danger, because the ground is littered 
 with explosives in a more or less dangerous con- 
 dition. There are bombs which are going off 
 because their safety pins have rusted through, 
 and shells which go off for no apparent cause. 
 
The War and the Future 85 
 
 You may jump across an open trench and land 
 on a percussion bomb and kill yourself, or you 
 may be riding along, and your horse may kick 
 a percussion bomb and kill you. Or you may 
 meet a souvenir hunter who will be equally 
 deadly. And then some soldiers love to collect 
 shells which have not exploded and then light 
 fires under them for the pleasure of hearing 
 them go Bang! They love to collect bombs 
 and fling them at targets for their amusement. 
 Last summer a General was walking on the 
 old battlefield, when he heard a noise of cheer- 
 ing. There came a Bang, and bits of shrapnel 
 came flying past. Then there came another 
 cheer, and another Bang and some more shrap- 
 nel. So, guessing what was the matter, he 
 jumped up onto the trench parapet and looked 
 down. There he saw a burly soldier who had 
 rigged up a target to represent a German and 
 was bowling Mills bombs at it. At each bomb 
 he shouted out: " Every time you hit you get 
 a good cigar!" The General jumped onto 
 this man and said: " Here, what are you do- 
 ing? Don't you know that's against orders? " 
 The man turned up the face of an Innocent child 
 and said : '' No sir." '' Well," said the Gen- 
 eral, " at least you know it's very dangerous, 
 
86 The War and the Future 
 
 don't you? " The man looked at the General 
 and sized him up, and said, " Yes, General. 
 That's just why I was doing it, sir. You know, 
 sir, I'm a family man, sir. I daresay you are 
 yourself, sir. And I was thinking, in a little 
 while the little children will be coming back to 
 these old battlefields. They won't know what 
 these cruel bombs are, sir, they'll go playing 
 with them, poor little things, sir, and they'll 
 blow off their little arms, sir, and their little 
 legs, sir. Then think of their poor mothers' 
 feelings. So I just collected these few bombs, 
 sir, really In order to save those little children, 
 sir." So he was acquitted as a philanthropist. 
 While I am on the subject of bombs, I may 
 say what happened to a boy of the Gloucester 
 Battalion In Gallipoll. The boy was an agri- 
 cultural laborer before the war and rather 
 stronger In the arm than In the head. A friend 
 came to his mother and said: ^' Oh, Mrs. 
 Brown, what news have you of Bert? " Mrs. 
 Brown beamed all over her face and said: 
 " Oh, our Bert, he have had a narrow escape. 
 He was In Gallipoll and there come a Turk 
 and flung one of they bombs, and the bomb 
 fell just at our Bert's feet, but our Bert he 
 never hesitate, he pick it up, and he flung it 
 
The War and the Future 87 
 
 right to the other end of the trench, and it burst 
 just as it got there. It killed two of our Bert's 
 best friends, but if our Bert hadn't flung it just 
 when he done, it would have killed our Bert." 
 
 During the course of this war some six or 
 seven millions of men have been drawn into 
 the English Army from every rank of society, 
 and have submitted to a pretty rough test. Un- 
 der that test, thousands of men, who had had 
 no opportunity of showing what was in them 
 in time of peace, have risen to positions of 
 great dignity, trust and authority. And as a 
 result, the Army today is a thoroughly demo- 
 cratic thing. At the beginning of the war it 
 was not so. I know of a case, in which a rich 
 man enlisted with his shepherd. He told the 
 shepherd, when he enlisted, " Of course, I shall 
 pay your wages as my shepherd all the time 
 that we are serving." When they were In the 
 Battalion the shepherd soon proved himself to 
 be the better man. The shepherd became a 
 Sergeant and his master remained a private. 
 Presently, the master did something wrong and 
 the shepherd had him up and got him ten days* 
 fatigue. As he left the court, the master leaned 
 over to the shepherd and said: " Your wages 
 are stopped for these ten days." That was in 
 
88 The War and the Future 
 
 the early days of the war, when the democratic 
 leaven was not working very well. But it is 
 working very well today. I know of a case of 
 a young man who began life as a stable boy in a 
 racing stable. He didn't like the life, so he 
 became a carpenter; he was a carpenter when 
 the war began. He enlisted In a cavalry regi- 
 ment, because he was very fond of horses; and 
 as he knew a great deal about the management 
 of horses he was given a commission straight- 
 away. He was always a man of great good 
 temper and charm and tact in dealing with other 
 men. He soon rose to a Captain. He went 
 to France with the battalion, served in the 
 trenches, dismounted, and soon rose to be Colo- 
 nel of the battalion. He handled the battalion 
 with great distinction and was made a Briga- 
 dier-General, and he is a Brigadier-General 
 today. 
 
 Last summer I was talking with a General 
 about the war, and he said: " Guess what my 
 best staff officer was before the war?" I 
 couldn't guess. He said he was a barber's as- 
 sistant. " Now what do you think my second 
 best staff officer was before the war? " Again 
 I couldn't guess. He said, " He was a milk- 
 man's assistant and went round with the milk 
 
The War and the Future 89 
 
 cans In the morning. Now what do you think 
 my third best staff officer was before the war? 
 He's the bravest man I've got." Again I could 
 not guess. He said, " He was a milHner's as- 
 sistant, and sold ribbons over the counter." 
 
 When the war is over and these men are dis- 
 banded back into every rank of society, they 
 will carry with them this democratic leaven. I 
 am quite sure that England, after the war, will 
 be as democratic a country as this country or 
 France. 
 
 If you turn your back upon the Army Zone 
 and walk into the green and pleasant parts of 
 France, you will notice that every big building 
 in France Is flying a Red Cross flag, for every 
 big building now in France is a hospital. The 
 business of the care of the wounded Is a bigger 
 business than coal or cotton or steel In time of 
 peace. There are hundreds of thousands of 
 orderlies and nurses and all the picked surgeons 
 of the world looking after the wounded. 
 There are miles of Red Cross trains carrying 
 wounded, and there are more ships carrying 
 wounded than carried passengers between Eng- 
 land and America in the time of peace. I 
 should like to tell you of one or two things 
 
90 The War and the Future 
 
 which have been done to better the lot of the 
 wounded. Firstly, about facial surgery. In 
 this war of high explosives it often happens 
 that men will be brought in with all their faces 
 blown away, with practically no face left be- 
 neath their brows, their noses gone, their 
 cheeks gone, their jaws and their tongues gone. 
 In the old days, if those men had survived at 
 all, they could only have survived as objects 
 of pity and horror and disgust. But today the 
 facial surgeon steps in and re-makes their faces. 
 The facial surgeon begins by taking a bone from 
 the man's leg. Out of that bone they model 
 him a new jaw-bone, which they graft onto the 
 stumps of the old. Then cunning artists model 
 him a new palate and a new set of teeth. Then, 
 bit by bit, they begin to make him new cheeks. 
 They get little bits of skin from the man's arm, 
 and other little bits from volunteers, and they 
 graft these on to what was left of the man's 
 cheeks. Though it takes a long time to do, 
 they do at last make complete cheeks. Then 
 they take a part of a sheep's tongue and graft 
 it on to the roots of the man's tongue, so that it 
 grows. Then they add artificial lips, an arti- 
 ficial nose, and whiskers, beard and moustaches, 
 if the man chooses. They turn the man out, 
 
The War and the Future 91 
 
 oftener handsomer than he ever was before, 
 able to talk, and to earn his own living on equal 
 terms with his fellowmen. In all that work of 
 facial surgery the American surgeons have set a 
 standard for the rest of the world. What 
 they have done is amazing. You can see the 
 men brought in, looking like nothing human, 
 looking like bloody mops on the ends of sticks. 
 Gradually you see them becoming human and 
 at last becoming handsome and at last almost 
 indistinguishable from their fellows. Surgeons 
 not only restore the men fresh from the battle- 
 field, but they remake the faces of those who 
 have been badly patched up in distant parts of 
 this war, such as Mesopotamia, where special 
 treatment has been Impossible, and though this 
 re-making takes a very long time. It can still be 
 done. 
 
 Another very wonderful treatment Is the 
 treatment of the burned men. In this war of 
 high explosives and flame projectors many men 
 are shockingly burned. You may see men 
 brought In with practically no skin on them 
 above their waist, unable to rest, and suffer- 
 ing torments. They apply the new treatment 
 of Ambrene to these sufferers. Ambrene Is 
 said to be a by-product of paraffin mixed with 
 
92 The War and the Future 
 
 resin and with amber. It is applied in a liquid 
 form with a camel's hair brush. Directly it 
 touches the burned surface all pain ceases and 
 the man is able to rest. In a fortnight the man 
 has an entirely new skin, with no scar and prac- 
 tically no discoloration, and he is able to go 
 back to the trenches, often much disgusted at 
 being cured so soon. 
 
 When you have seen the wounded you have 
 seen the fruits of this business. And when you 
 have seen the wounded you resolve within your- 
 self that at whatever cost this must be the last 
 war of this kind. This war is being fought to- 
 day in order that it may be the last war of its 
 kind. If we succeed in this, as we shall, all the 
 bloodshed and horror and misery of this war 
 will have been very well worth while. But even 
 when we have gotten rid of the causes of this 
 T/ar, there will still remain, in all human socie- 
 ties, many potential causes of war. A great 
 deal of cant is talked about war. In all com- 
 mercial countries there must be some manufac- 
 turers who make things that will be of great 
 demand in war, and it is an unfortunate fact 
 that after long periods of peace men begin to 
 think a great deal about war, to read about it, 
 and to brood upon it, and even to long for it, so 
 
The War and the Future 93 
 
 that they may have that deep experience for 
 themselves. And to many young men war is 
 exceedingly delightful. It gives them adven- 
 ture, excitement and comradeship. Only the 
 other day a young English soldier said to me; 
 " Do you think this lovely war will ever come 
 to an end?" I said I hoped it would, some 
 day. And he said, " Well, I don't know what 
 I shall do when it comes to an end. It will 
 break my heart. I've had the time of my life." 
 That boy was not quite nineteen. He had been 
 a school-boy six months before. He had been 
 badly wounded three weeks before. He had 
 been at death's door a fortnight before. He 
 had made an amazing recovery and was pant- 
 ing to get back. There are hundreds of thou- 
 sand of young men like that, who thoroughly en- 
 joy every minute of it. The older men do not 
 view war with quite such enthusiasm. Their 
 attitude, perhaps, is much like that of the 
 Naval Officer who said the other day: *' I do 
 wish to God this war would end, so that I could 
 get the men back to battle practice." 
 
 Even if we were able to be rid of all these 
 potential causes of war we should not get rid 
 of evil in this world, and as long as men can be 
 evil, evil men will strike for power, and the 
 
94 The War and the Future 
 
 only way to resist evil men, when they do evil 
 things, is to use force to them. It often needs 
 a very great deal of force. 
 
 Yet when people ask me if I think that wars 
 will cease to be, I always say that I do, because 
 the evil things in this world do get knocked on 
 the head. The dragons and basilisks and 
 cockatrices have become extinct, and most mur- 
 derers get hanged, and most lunatics get locked 
 up; and men are coming more and more to see 
 that certain evils that afflict life are not inevit- 
 able, and are not the will of God, but are simply 
 the result of obsolete and stupid ways of think- 
 ing and of governing. It ought to be possible 
 for the mind of man, which made the steam 
 engine, the submarine and the aeroplane, and 
 conquered the Black Death and yellow fever 
 and typhus fever, to devise some means of 
 living, nation with nation, without this peri- 
 odical slaughter known as war. It won't be 
 easy to devise any such means, men being what 
 they are, with the instincts for war deeply 
 rooted in their hearts, or easily put there by 
 their rulers; yet the mind of man can do most 
 things, if he can only get the will to do them. 
 
 Even before this war, when most men were 
 either unoccupied or occupied only in the grim 
 
The War and the Future 95 
 
 and stupid devilry of plotting and preparing 
 war; men tried to limit and prevent war, the 
 Hague Conferences did sit. They didn't limit 
 or prevent war, because they were not meant to. 
 While they sat, one great power was doubling 
 its army, and a second was doubling its strate- 
 gic railways, and a third was increasing its 
 navy, and all were afraid, each of the other. 
 How could peace come from men under those 
 conditions? 
 
 Then, though they made recommendations, 
 the Hague delegates had no power to enforce 
 them. They knew this when they made them. 
 Their recommendations were therefore not 
 forceful. They seemed to say, that war is in- 
 evitable, let us temper its horror. They did 
 not say, war has no business in modern life, 
 henceforth those who make war shall be treated 
 as criminals by an international police. 
 
 They could not say that, but the Peace Dele- 
 gates of the future will have to say it. If there 
 Is to be any future. And after this war men 
 will listen to them if they do say it, for after 
 this war men will passionately want to limit 
 and prevent war. They know now, that the 
 devil of war, which they fed with their arro- 
 gance, their envy, their strength and their stu- 
 
96 The War and the Future 
 
 pidlty, is an overwhelming monster which eats 
 them wholesale. 
 
 Not long ago, I was talking to an American 
 about this ending of war by internationalism. 
 He said: " If two great peoples would agree 
 to it, it could be done ; and if your country and 
 mine would agree to it, it would be done." 
 Don't think me a dreamer, an idealist, a pacifist. 
 I am for the common man and woman, whose 
 tears and blood pay for war. And in that mat- 
 ter of payment, the poor German pays, equally 
 with the poor Belgian. He pays with all he 
 has. On the battlefields of this war I have seen 
 the men who paid. I have seen enemy dead, 
 and Turk dead, and French dead, and English 
 dead, and every dead man meant some woman 
 with a broken heart. 
 
 Those men had no quarrel with each other. 
 They lie there in the mud, because man, who 
 has conquered the black death and typhus and 
 smallpox, and the yellow fever, has not con- 
 quered the war fever. And the war fever takes 
 him in the blood and in the soul and kills him 
 by the hundred thousand. 
 
 When the blessed bells ring for peace, this 
 year or next year, in man's time if not in ours. 
 
The War and the Future 97 
 
 it may be possible to remake the ways of na- 
 tional life more in accordance with man's place 
 in the universe. When that time comes, 
 France, this country, and England, the three 
 countries which have done the most for liberty, 
 will have deciding voices in that remaking. 
 They will be able to declare in what ways of 
 freedom the men and women of the future will 
 walk. I trust that our three great nations may 
 be able to substitute some co-operating system 
 of internationalism for the competing national- 
 ism which led to the present bonfire. 
 
 And when that time comes, I hope that one 
 other thing may be possible. I hope that my 
 people, the English, may, as your comrades m 
 this war, do something or be something or be- 
 come something which will atone in some meas- 
 ure for the wrongs we did to you in the past, 
 and for the misunderstandings which have 
 arisen between us since then. I'm afraid that 
 the memory of those old wrongs may never 
 pass, for nations, like people, do not forget 
 their childhood. Yet I hope for the sake of the 
 world, that it may be set aside, so that your 
 country and mine, which have one great key to 
 understanding, which other nations have not, 
 
98 The War and the Future 
 
 the same language, may, after this time of war 
 work like friends together, to make wars to 
 cease upon this earth. 
 
 PRINTED IN THE XTNITBD STATES OF AMERICA 
 
HE following pages contain advertisements of Mac- 
 millan books by the same author. 
 
THE WORKS OF JOHN MASBPiELD 
 
 Gallipoli 
 
 "This is a miniature epic, or saga, its eloquent but un- 
 forced prose making it a book that will stand high among 
 Alasefield's productions. . . . Masefield writes of the mili- 
 tary aspect of the campaign with a rare facility for pic- 
 torial expression ... a splendid story of bravery splen- 
 didly told." — New York Evening Post. 
 
 The Old Front Line 
 
 Illustrated. Cloth, ismo. $i.oo 
 
 What Mr. Masefield did for the Gallipoli Campaign, he 
 now does for the Campaign in France. His subject is the 
 old front line as it was when the battle of the Somme be- 
 gan. His account is vivid and gripping — a huge conflict 
 seen through the eyes of a great poet, this is the book. 
 
 Good Friday and Other Poems 
 
 By JOHN MASEFIELD 
 
 Cloth, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 
 
 "Reveals an interesting development in poetic thought 
 and expression ... a new Masefield . . . who has never 
 written with more dignity, nor with more artistry. Those 
 who go in quest of Beauty will find her here. . . . Here is 
 beauty of impression, beauty of expression, beauty of 
 thought, and beauty of phrase."— The New York Times. 
 
 The Story of a Round-House, 
 and Other Poems 
 
 New and revised edition, $1.30. Leather, $1.75 
 
 "The story of that rounding of the Horn! Never in prose has 
 the sea been so tremendously described." — Chicago Evening Post. 
 
 " Masefield has prisoned in verse the spirit of life at sea." — N. Y. 
 Sun. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64r-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
THE WORKS OP JOHN MASEFIBLD 
 
 The Everlasting Mercy and 
 The Widow in the Bye Street 
 
 (Awarded the Royal Society of Literature's prize of $500) 
 
 New and revised edition, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 
 
 " Mr. Masefield comes like a flash of light across contemporary 
 English poetry. The improbable has been accomplished; he has 
 made poetry out of the very material that has refused to yield it for 
 almost a score of years." — Boston Evening Transcript. 
 
 " A vigour and sincerity rare in modem English literature."— 
 The Independent. 
 
 Philip the King, and Other Poems 
 
 Cloth, j2mo, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 
 
 " Mr. Masefield has never done anything better than these 
 poems." — Argonaut. 
 
 Lollingdon Downs and Other Poems 
 
 $1.25 
 
 A new book of poems by Mr. Masefield, containing his 
 most recent work in verse. The same beauty of expres- 
 sion and impression which pervaded his earlier poetry will 
 be found in the pages of " Lollingdon Downs and Other 
 Poems." These latest of Mr. Masefield's poems are issued 
 in a limited edition. 
 
 The Daffodil Fields 
 
 Cloth, i2mo, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 
 
 " Neither in the design nor in the telling did or could ' Enoch 
 Arden * come near the artistic truth of ' The Daffodil Fields.' " — 
 Sir Quiller-Couch. Cambridge University. 
 
 Salt Water Poems and Ballads 
 
 Illustrated. $2.00 
 
 "The salt of the sea is in these jingles not the mystic sea of the 
 older poets who had an art, but the hard sea that men fight, even 
 in these days of leviathan liners, in stout-timbered hulls with blocks 
 to rattle and hemp for the gale to whistle through and give the salt- 
 lipped chantey man his rugged meters." — New York Sun. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
THE WORKS OF JOHN MASBFIBLD 
 
 A Mainsail Haul 
 
 Cloth, i2mo, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 
 As a sailor before the mast Masefield has traveled the 
 world over. Many of the tales in this volume are his own 
 experiences written with the same dramatic fidelity dis- 
 played in " Dauber." 
 
 Multitude and Solitude 
 
 " This is material of the best kind for a story of adventure, and 
 Mr. Masefield uses it to the best advantage. He has the gift of 
 direct and simple narrative, and it need hardly be said that he 
 knows the human heart." — Argonaut. 
 
 Captain Margaret 
 
 Cloth, $1.50 
 
 " Worthy to rank high among books of its class. The story has 
 quality, charm, and spirited narrative." — Outlook. 
 
 Lost Endeavour 
 
 $1.50 
 
 A stirring story of adventure, dealing with pirates and 
 buccaneers, and life on the seas in a day when an ocean 
 trip was beset with all kinds of dangers and excitements. 
 Those who have enjoyed "Captain Margaret" and "Mul- 
 titude and Solitude " will find this tale equally exhilarating. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
THB WORKS OF JOHN MASEFIELD 
 
 The Tragedy of Pompey 
 
 Cloth, i2mo, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 
 
 A play such as only the author of " Nan " could have 
 written. Tense in situation and impressive in its poetry it 
 conveys Masefield's genius in the handling of the dramatic 
 form. 
 
 The Faithful: A Tragedy in Three Acts 
 
 Cloth, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 
 
 "A striking drama ... a notable work that will meet with the 
 hearty appreciation of discerning readers." — The Nation. 
 
 The Tragedy of Nan 
 
 New edition. Cloth, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 
 
 *' One of the most distinctive tragedies written by a dramatist of 
 the modern school." — A'^. Y. Evening Post, 
 
 The Locked Chest, and the Sweeps of 
 Ninety-Eight 
 
 $1-^5 
 
 The place of Mr. Masefield as a dramatist has been 
 amply proved by the plays which he has published hitherto. 
 In the realm of the one-act play he is seen to quite as good 
 effect as in the longer work, and this volume ranks with 
 his best. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
 Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
 Treatment Date: 
 
 HAY 2G01 
 
 iTei 
 
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