H. Wells - The World Set Free

smouldering for revolt, talking of justice and injustice and

revenge. I sawno hope in that talk, nor in anything but

patience…'

But he did not mean a passive patience. He meant that the method

of social reconstruction was still a riddle, that no effectual

rearrangement was possible until this riddle in all its tangled

aspects was solved. 'I tried to talk to those discontented men,'

he wrote, 'but it was hard for them to seethings as I sawthem.

When I talked of patienceand the larger scheme, they answered,

"But then we shall all be dead"-and I could not make them see,

what is so simple to my own mind, that that did not affect the

question. Men who thinkin lifetimes are of no use to

statesmanship.'

He does not seem to have seena newspaper during those

wanderings, and a chance sightof the transparency of a kiosk in

the market-place at Bishop's Stortford announcing a 'Grave

International Situation' did not excite him very much. There had

been so many grave international situations in recent years.

This time it was talk of the Central European powers suddenly

attacking the Slav Confederacy, with France and England going to

the helpof the Slavs.

But the next night he found a tolerable meal awaiting the

vagrants in the casual ward, and learnt from the workhouse master

that all serviceable trained men were to be sent back on the

morrow to their mobilisation centres. The country was on the eve

of war. He was to go back through London to Surrey. His first

feeling, he records, was one of extreme relief that his days of

'hopeless battering at the underside of civilisation' were at an

end. Here was something definite to do, something definitely

provided for. But his relief was greatly modified when he found

that the mobilisation arrangements had been made so hastily and

carelessly that for nearly thirty-six hours at the improvised

depot at Epsom he got nothing either to eat or to drink but a cup

of cold water. The depot was absolutely unprovisioned, and no one

was free to leave it.

Section I

Viewed from the standpoint of a sane and ambitious social order,

it is difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow,

the motives that plunged mankind into the war that fills the

histories of the middle decades of the twentieth century.

It must always be rememberedthat the political structure of the

world at that time was everywhere extraordinarily behind the

collective intelligence. That is the central fact of that

history. For two hundred years there had been no great changes in

political or legal methods and pretensions, the utmost change had

been a certain shifting of boundaries and slight readjustment of

procedure, while in nearly every other aspect of life there had

been fundamental revolutions, gigantic releases, and an enormous

enlargement of scope and outlook. The absurdities of courts and

the indignities of representative parliamentary government,

coupled with the opening of vast fields of opportunity in other

directions, had withdrawn the best intelligences more and more

from public affairs. The ostensible governments of the world in

the twentieth century were following in the wakeof the

ostensible religions. They were ceasingto command the services

of any but second-rate men. After the middle of the eighteenth

century there are no more great ecclesiastics upon the world's

memory, after the opening of the twentieth no more statesmen.

Everywhere one finds an energetic, ambitious, short-sighted,

common-place type in the seats of authority, blind to the new

possibilities and litigiously reliant upon the traditions of the

past.

Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were the

boundaries of the various 'sovereign states,' and the conception

of a general predominance in human affairs on the part of some

one particular state. The memoryof the empires of Rome and

Alexander squatted, an unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human

imagination-it bored into the human brain like some grisly

parasite and filled it with disordered thoughtsand violent

impulses. For more than a century the French system exhausted

its vitality in belligerent convulsions, and then the infection

passed to the German-speaking peoples who were the heart and

centre of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs. Later ages

were to store and neglect the vast insane literature of this

obsession, the intricate treaties, the secret agreements, the

infinite knowingnessof the political writer, the cunning

refusals to acceptplain facts, the strategic devices, the

tactical manoeuvres, the records of mobilisations and

counter-mobilisations. It ceasedto be credible almost as soon as

it ceasedto happen, but in the very dawn of the new age their

statecraftsmen sat with their historical candles burning, and,

in spite of strange, new reflections and unfamiliar lights and

shadows, still wrangling and planning to rearrange the maps of

Europe and the world.

It was to become a matter for subtle inquiry how far the millions

of men and women outside the world of these specialists

sympathised and agreed with their portentous activities. One

school of psychologists inclined to minimise this participation,

but the balance of evidence goes to show that there were massive

responsesto these suggestions of the belligerent schemer.

Primitive man had been a fiercely combative animal; innumerable

generations had passed their lives in tribal warfare, and the

weight of tradition, the example of history, the ideals of

loyalty and devotion fell in easily enough with the incitements

of the international mischief-maker. The political ideas of the

common man were picked up haphazard, there was practically

nothing in such education as he was given that was ever intended

to fit him for citizenship as such (that conception only

appeared, indeed, with the development of Modern State ideas),

and it was therefore a comparatively easy matter to fill his

vacant mindwith the sounds and fury of exasperated suspicion and

national aggression.

For example, Barnet describes the London crowd as noisily

patriotic when presently his battalion came up from the depot to

London, to entrain for the French frontier. He tells of children

and women and lads and old men cheering and shouting, of the

streets and rows hung with the flags of the Allied Powers, of a

realenthusiasm even among the destitute and unemployed. The

Labour Bureaux were now partially transformedinto enrolment

offices, and were centres of hotly patriotic excitement. At

every convenient place upon the line on either side of the

Channel Tunnel there were enthusiastic spectators, and the

feelingin the regiment, if a little stiffened and darkened by

grim anticipations, was none the less warlike.

But all this emotionwas the fickle emotionof mindswithout

established ideas; it was with most of them, Barnet says, as it

was with himself, a natural responseto collective movement, and

to martial sounds and colours, and the exhilarating challenge of

vague dangers. And people had been so long oppressed by the

threat of and preparation for war that its arrival came with an

effectof positive relief.

Section 2

The plan of campaign of the Allies assigned the defence of the

lower Meuse to the English, and the troop-trains were run direct