t possibilities, intensely doing their best; in the place of
charging battalions, shattering impacts of squadrons and wide
harvest-fields of death, there will be hundreds of little rifle battles
fought up to the hilt, gallant dashes here, night surprises there, the
sudden sinister faint gleam of nocturnal bayonets, brilliant guesses
that will drop catastrophic shell and death over hills and forests
suddenly into carelessly exposed masses of men. For eight miles on
either side of the firing lines--whose fire will probably never
altogether die away while the war lasts--men will live and eat and sleep
under the imminence of unanticipated death.... Such will be the opening
phase of the war that is speedily to come.

And behind the thin firing line on either side a vast multitude of
people will be at work; indeed, the whole mass of the efficients in the
State will have to be at work, and most of them will be simply at the
same work or similar work to that done in peace time--only now as
combatants upon the lines of communication. The organized staffs of the
big road managements, now become a part of the military scheme, will be
deporting women and children and feeble people and bringing up supplies
and supports; the doctors will be dropping from their civil duties into
pre-appointed official places, directing the feeding and treatment of
the shifting masses of people and guarding the valuable manhood of the
fighting apparatus most sedulously from disease;[38] the engineers will
be entrenching and bringing up a vast variety of complicated and
ingenious apparatus designed to surprise and inconvenience the enemy in
novel ways; the dealers in food and clothing, the manufacturers of all
sorts of necessary stuff, will be converted by the mere declaration of
war into public servants; a practical realization of socialistic
conceptions will quite inevitably be forced upon the fighting State. The
State that has not incorporated with its fighting organization all its
able-bodied manhood and all its material substance, its roads, vehicles,
engines, foundries, and all its resources of food and clothing; the
State which at the outbreak of war has to bargain with railway and
shipping companies, replace experienced station-masters by inexperienced
officers, and haggle against alien interests for every sort of supply,
will be at an overwhelming disadvantage against a State which has
emerged from the social confusion of the present time, got r