ake war impossible in the ordinary
meaning of the word, the bigger the gun and the viler the lethal
implement the more possible does war become, but it will make war
"impossible" in the slang use of five or six years ago, in the sense,
that is, of its being utterly useless and mischievous, the sense in
which Norman Angell employed it and so brought upon himself an
avalanche of quite unfair derision. No nation ever embarked upon so
fair a prospect of conquest and dominion as the victorious Germans
when, after 1871, they decided to continue to give themselves to the
development of overwhelming military power. And after exertions
unparalleled in the whole history of mankind their net conquests are
nothing; they have destroyed enormously and achieved no other single
thing, and today they repeat on a colossal scale the adventures of
Fort Chabrol and Sidney Street, and are no better than a nation of
murderous outcasts besieged by an outraged world.

Now, among many delusions that this war has usefully dispelled is the
delusion that there can be a sort of legality about war, that you can
make war a little, but not make war altogether, that the civilized
world can look forward to a sort of tame war in the future, a war
crossed with peace, a lap-dog war that will bark but not bite. War is
war; it is the cessation of law and argument, it is outrage, and
Germany has demonstrated on the large scale what our British
suffragettes learned on a small one, that with every failure to
accomplish your end by violent means you are forced to further
outrages. Violence has no reserves but further violence. Each failure
of the violent is met by the desperate cry, the heroical scream: "We
will not be beaten. If you will not give in to us for this much,
then see! We will go further." Wars always do go further. Wars always
end more savagely than they begin. Even our war in South Africa,
certainly the most decently conducted war in all history, got to farm
burning and concentration camps. A side that hopes for victory fights
with conciliation in its mind. Victory and conciliation recede
together. When the German--who is really, one must remember, a human
being like the rest of us, at the worst just merely a little worse in
his upbringing--when he finds he cannot march gloriously into Paris or
Warsaw, then, and only then, does he begin to try to damage Paris and
Warsaw with bombs, when he finds he cannot beat the French Army and
the British fleet,