is nowhere they can
come in, there is nothing they can do. The scattered invisible marksmen
with their supporting guns will shatter their masses, pick them off
individually, cover their line of retreat and force them into wholesale
surrenders. It will be more like herding sheep than actual fighting. Yet
the bitterest and cruellest things will have to happen, thousands and
thousands of poor boys will be smashed in all sorts of dreadful ways and
given over to every conceivable form of avoidable hardship and painful
disease, before the obvious fact that war is no longer a business for
half-trained lads in uniform, led by parson-bred sixth-form boys and men
of pleasure and old men, but an exhaustive demand upon very
carefully-educated adults for the most strenuous best that is in them,
will get its practical recognition.[43]...

Well, in the ampler prospect even this haunting tragedy of innumerable
avoidable deaths is but an incidental thing. They die, and their
troubles are over. The larger fact after all is the inexorable tendency
in things to make a soldier a skilled and educated man, and to link him,
in sympathy and organization, with the engineer and the doctor, and all
the continually developing mass of scientifically educated men that the
advance of science and mechanism is producing. We are dealing with the
inter-play of two world-wide forces, that work through distinctive and
contrasted tendencies to a common end. We have the force of invention
insistent upon a progress of the peace organization, which tends on the
one hand to throw out great useless masses of people, the People of the
Abyss, and on the other hand to develop a sort of adiposity of
functionless wealthy, a speculative elephantiasis, and to promote the
development of a new social order of efficients, only very painfully and
slowly, amidst these growing and yet disintegrating masses. And on the
other hand we have the warlike drift of such a social body, the
inevitable intensification of international animosities in such a body,
the absolute determination evident in the scheme of things to smash such
a body, to smash it just as far as it is such a body, under the hammer
of war, that must finally bring about rapidly and under pressure the
same result as that to which the peaceful evolution slowly tends. While
we are as yet only thinking of a physiological struggle, of complex
reactions and slow absorptions, comes War with the surgeon's knife. War
comes