CHAPTER VII
THE MILITARY NATION
Let us disentangle our minds for a moment from the events that are now crowding thick upon us and take a wider survey.
After the French Revolution war entered upon a new phase of its development which is only still in process of evolution. By the end of the eighteenth century war had become an affair of armies, not of peoples, and, as has been said, a battle or a siege was just a form of a diplomatic note delivered by one ruler to another. When the French Republic was challenged by the rulers of Europe, they marched against it with their old armies. But the challenge was to the French people, and the French people armed themselves to resist it. Thus the modern national war began. The French armed nation was successful in defending itself, and then proceeded, with Napoleon at its head, to threaten the peoples of Europe. The peoples that were threatened responded as the French themselves had done, and Prussia, " without either money or credit, and with a population re by one-half, took the field with an Army twice as strong as in 1806." This revolutionized modern war. It brought in the people as well as the rulers. It established the practice of conscription. It made available for military operations the unlimited resources of the State in men and credit and labour. It can end only with the most absolute control of men, women, and children, of workshops as well as of armies, of workpeople as well as of soldiers. "Thus, therefore," says Clausewitz,"the element of war, freed from all conventional restrictions, broke loose with all its natural force." It made a public opinion in war necessary. It raised fury in the public mind. It gave a new function to the Press. It made necessary the suppression of liberty to think and speak and criticize. To the mind of nations thus placed it made the imminence of war a constant assumption. As in the Dreyfus time, an insult to the Army became an insult to the nation; as in modern Prussia, a military officer was a sacred thing apart; as in Great Britain during this war, a whisper of reason became treason to the national will.
And it must be remembered that the sources from which all this sprang was "the necessity" which the Allies a hundred years ago imposed on France, and France imposed on Prussia, to defend themselves. The origin of the European militarism of to-day is national defence, not national aggression. The uninterrupted growth of military power in Europe throughout the century is the inevitable evolution of a false policy.
The failure of Napoleon to land in England, and the isolated position of the country ever since, protected us until two years ago from this flood of change. Part of it washed over us during the South African War; it came in its fullness during this war. No sane man can believe that it will depart when this war is over. The country mixed up in twentieth-century military diplomacy and obligations cannot possibly return to an eighteenth-century Army or an eighteenth-century attitude to war.
We can now make peace permanent or prepare for war. There is no alternative obligation. If we prepare for war, it must be for a national war involving two things—a National Army and the cultivation and moulding of opinion by the military State. For no military State can allow the growth of opinion which cuts at its own foundations. Military patriotism will be taught in schools. Patronage on the one hand and coercion on the other will be applied to our Press to keep up such education amongst the masses. The military strain and burden upon Europe will now be enormously greater than it was between 1871 and 1914. For Germany did not reach the limits of military preparation, far as she went. On its purely military side the war has shown the need of being prepared on the vastest and the minutest scale; on its political side it has proved the "military necessity" of creating an obedient and a muzzled people.
All the scientific modern military writers lay the greatest stress upon public opinion, and their thoughts are always stretching out to the final conclusion that democracy is treason to the State, that freedom to criticize and weaken the military machine and its necessities is treason to the nation. This war, described so grandiloquently as "a fight for the right and freedom," has conquered enormous territories of the mind and of States to militarism. We are witnessing a further stage in the evolution of nineteenth-century militarism, not an emancipation of twentieth-century liberty.
How the military mind is running is revealed in an interesting interview which the Russian General Skugarevski gave to the Russkoe Slovo, and which was reproduced in the Russian Supplement of The Times for the 29th July, 1916, under the heading "The Future War." "At the present time," he says, "it is possible fairly accurately to imagine the picture of the next war after this." It is to be more frightful than this, both as to scale and destructiveness. This war has brought into the field numbers of men and masses of munitions for which no State had made preparations. We shall begin our armament preparations on the scale upon which this war ends them. "Humanity must at last learn how to prepare for war." This war has shown that a State will use 25 per cent, of its men for military operations. Allowing for sickness and other inefficiencies, that means that armies equal to 20 per cent, of the population will at once take the field. In ten years, therefore, the Russian Army will number 40,000,000, the German one about 20,000,000. The Russians will require 300,000 officers, who will have to be provided by a special form of conscription. It may be necessary to introduce industrial conscription for girls and childless widows, so that the places of workmen may be taken at once by women previously trained, and a supply of clothing, food, and munitions to the Army secured. The Army will be equipped with 100,000 guns, 1,000,000 Maxims, tens of thousands of motor-cars; 50,000,000 gun projectiles will have to be kept ready and 5,000,000 rifle cartridges. Each regiment will, in addition, have to be equipped with great numbers of portable machine-guns. The explosives used will be deadly in the extreme, and a tremendous advance will be made in the mechanism of rifles. There will be thousands of dirigibles and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of aeroplanes. The daily cost of the new war on the Russian scale will be at least £20,000,000. The peace footing of the Russian Army will be 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 men, and the annual cost will be about £100,000,000. Everything will have to be planned during the intervening peace, and, in preparation for the war, the labour and the industry of the nation will have to be controlled and organized.
We need not pin ourselves to details. The general accuracy of this forecast is good enough. In its evolution militarism is grasping the whole life of the nation; everything has to be subordinate to it; within the net it is casting, every activity and service must be caught because all are necessary. Those who are trusting that the pains and losses inflicted by this war will end war are building their houses upon sand. The memory of pain and loss passes, and a new generation arises which has not the memory at all. But the menace and the spirit of militarism and of armed force endures. The permanent memory of these years will be the need of the most thorough preparation. This war drove us pell-mell out of voluntaryism into compulsion, both military and industrial, and we shall begin in peace, not where we were in August 1914 but at the point to which the war brought us.1 1After I had finished this book I read Neumann's Central Europe, a book which in every page, argument, and proposal shows the soundness of my position. Here there is no thought of a settled peace. The war has made the nations more aggressive and more self-willed. "It is not to be supposed that at the conclusion of the war the long jubilee years of an everlasting peace will begin! . . . The war will leave behind it an immense number of unsolved problems, both new and old, and will lead to disillusionments which will express themselves in extensive armaments. All the War Ministers, General Staffs and Admiralties will ponder over the lessons of the past war, technical skill will contrive yet newer weapons, frontier fortifications will be made still wider and, above all, longer. Is it really credible that in such an atmosphere the isolated State can remain any longer in isolation?" (p. 7). Of the economic war after the war he says: "It is no theoretical academic demand but is a practical precept, and its chief supporters must be the Ministers of War on both sides"(p. 174). Further: "It will not only be Central Europe that will emerge from the war with schemes for equipment and defence, but all the other States as well. Even a growing inclination among the people towards peace can do little to alter this steady preparation for coming wars" (p. 179).
Whether this is to happen or not, says General Skugarevski, depends upon the peace. With that we shall all agree, but we shall disagree as to what kind of peace will avoid this horror and what kind of one will make it our inevitable doom. The important thing for the moment to remember is that every responsible Government is assuming that a state of incipient war will follow the ending of present hostilities, and this will undoubtedly happen unless the people determine otherwise.