t say out of what historical conjunctions the final tempests
will issue, nor by what fancy names the interchangeable ideals imposed
on men will be known in that moment. But the cause--that will perhaps
everywhere be fear of the nations' real freedom. What we do know is
that the tempests will come.

Armaments will increase every year amid dizzy enthusiasm. The
relentless torture of precision seizes me. We do three years of
military training; our children will do five, they will do ten. We pay
two thousand million francs a year in preparation for war; we shall pay
twenty, we shall pay fifty thousand millions. All that we have will be
taken; it will be robbery, insolvency, bankruptcy. War kills wealth as
it does men; it goes away in ruins and smoke, and one cannot fabricate
gold any more than soldiers. We no longer know how to count; we no
longer know anything. A billion--a million millions--the word appears
to me printed on the emptiness of things. It sprang yesterday out of
war, and I shrink in dismay from the new, incomprehensible word.

There will be nothing else on the earth but preparation for war. All
living forces will be absorbed by it; it will monopolize all discovery,
all science, all imagination. Supremacy in the air alone, the regular
levies for the control of space, will suffice to squander a nation's
fortune. For aerial navigation, at its birth in the middle of envious
circles, has become a rich prize which everybody desires, a prey they
have immeasurably torn in pieces.

Other expenditure will dry up before that on destruction does, and
other longings as well, and all the reasons for living. Such will be
the sense of humanity's last age.

* * * * * *

The battlefields were prepared long ago. They cover entire provinces
with one black city, with a great metallic reservoir of factories,
where iron floors and furnaces tremble, bordered by a land of forests
whose trees are steel, and of wells where sleeps the sharp blackness of
snares; a country navigated by frantic groups of railway trains in
parallel formation, and heavy as attacking columns. At whatever point
you may be on the plain, even if you turn away, even if you take
flight, the bright tentacles of the rails diverge and shine, and cloudy
sheaves of wires rise into the air. Upon that territory of execution
there rises and falls and writhes machinery so complex that it has not
even names, so vast t