receptive to novelties as any. The German generals have
done no better; indeed, they have not done so well as the generals of
the Allies in this respect. But after the war, if the world does not
organize rapidly for peace, then as resources accumulate a little, the
mechanical genius will get to work on the possibilities of these ideas
that have merely been sketched out in this war. We shall get big land
ironclads which will smash towns. We shall get air offensives--let the
experienced London reader think of an air raid going on hour after hour,
day after day--that will really burn out and wreck towns, that will
drive people mad by the thousand. We shall get a very complete cessation
of sea transit. Even land transit may be enormously hampered by aerial
attack. I doubt if any sort of social order will really be able to stand
the strain of a fully worked out modern war. We have still, of course,
to feel the full shock effects even of this war. Most of the combatants
are going on, as sometimes men who have incurred grave wounds will still
go on for a time--without feeling them. The educational, biological,
social, economic punishment that has already been taken by each of the
European countries is, I feel, very much greater than we yet realize.
Russia, the heaviest and worst-trained combatant, has indeed shown the
effects and is down and sick, but in three years' time all Europe will
know far better than it does now the full price of this war. And the
shock effects of the next war will have much the same relation to the
shock effects of this, as the shock of breaking a finger-nail has to the
shock of crushing in a body. In Russia to-day we have seen, not indeed
social revolution, not the replacement of one social order by another,
but disintegration. Let not national conceit blind us. Germany, France,
Italy, Britain are all slipping about on that same slope down which
Russia has slid. Which goes first, it is hard to guess, or whether we
shall all hold out to some kind of Peace. At present the social
discipline of France and Britain seems to be at least as good as that of
Germany, and the _morale_ of the Rhineland and Bavaria has probably to
undergo very severe testing by systematized and steadily increasing air
punishment as this year goes on. The next war--if a next war comes--will
see all Germany, from end to end, vulnerable to aircraft....

Such are the two sets of considerations that will, I think, ultimately
prevail o