WAR AND THE FUTURE
Italy, France and Britain at War
by H. G. Wells

Contents
The Passing of the Effigy
The War in Italy (August, 1916)
  I. The Isonzo Front
 II. The Mountain War
III. Behind the Front
The Western War (September, 1916)
  I. Ruins
 II. The Grades of War
III. The War Landscape
 IV. New Arms for Old Ones
  V. Tanks
How People Think About the War
  I. Do they Really Think at all?
 II. The Yielding Pacifist and the Conscientious Objector
III. The Religious Revival
 IV. The Riddle of the British
  V. The Social Changes in Progress
 VI. The Ending of the War

THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY

1

One of the minor peculiarities of this unprecedented war is the
Tour of the Front.  After some months of suppressed information--
in which even the war correspondent was discouraged to the point
of elimination--it was discovered on both sides that this was a
struggle in which Opinion was playing a larger and more important
part than it had ever done before.  This wild spreading weed was
perhaps of decisive importance; the Germans at any rate were
attempting to make it a cultivated flower.  There was Opinion
flowering away at home, feeding rankly on rumour; Opinion in
neutral countries; Opinion getting into great tangles of
misunderstanding and incorrect valuation between the Allies.  The
confidence and courage of the enemy; the amiability and
assistance of the neutral; the zeal, sacrifice, and serenity of
the home population; all were affected.  The German cultivation
of opinion began long before the war; it is still the most
systematic and, because of the psychological ineptitude of the
Germans, it is probably the clumsiest.  The French /Maison de
la Presse/ is certainly the best organisation in existence for
making things clear, counteracting hostile suggestion, the
British official organisations are comparatively ineffective; but
what is lacking officially is very largely made up for by the
good will and generous efforts of the English and American press.
An interesting monograph might be written upon these various
attempts of the belligerents to get themselves and their
proceedings explained.

Because there is perceptible in these developments, quite over
and above the desire to influence opinion, a very real effort to
get things explained.  It is the most interesting and curious--
one might almost write touching--feature of these organisations
that they do not constitute a positive and defined propaganda
such as the Germans maintain.  The German propaganda is simple,
because its ends are simple; assertions of the moral elevation
and loveliness of Germany; of the insuperable excellences of
German Kultur, the Kaiser, and Crown Prince, and so forth; abuse
of the "treacherous" English who allied themselves with the
"degenerate" French and the "barbaric" Russians; nonsense about
"the freedom of the seas"--the emptiest phrase in history--
childish attempts to sow suspicion between the Allies, and still
more childish attempts to induce neutrals and simple-minded
pacifists of allied nationality to save the face of Germany by
initiating peace negotiations.  But apart from their steady
record and reminder of German brutalities and German aggression,
the press organisations of the Allies have none of this
definiteness in their task.  The aim of the national intelligence
in each of the allied countries is not to exalt one's own nation
and confuse and divide the enemy, but to get a real understanding
with the peoples and spirits of a number of different nations, an
understanding that will increase and become a fruitful and
permanent understanding between the allied peoples.  Neither the
English, the Russians, the Italians, nor the French, to name only
the bigger European allies, are concerned in setting up a legend,
as the Germans are concerned in setting up a legend of themselves
to impose upon mankind.  They are reality dealers in this war,
and the Germans are effigy mongers.  Practically the Allies are
saying each to one another, "Pray come to me and see for yourself
that I am very much the human stuff that you are.  Come and see
that I am doing my best--and I think that is not so very bad a
best...."  And with that is something else still more subtle,
something rather in the form of, "And please tell me what you
think of me--and all this."

So we have this curious byplay of the war, and one day I find Mr.
Nabokoff, the editor of the /Retch/, and Count Alexy
Tolstoy, that writer of delicate short stories, and Mr.
Chukovsky, the subtle critic, calling in upon me after braving
the wintry seas to see the British fleet; M. Joseph Reinach
follows them presently upon the same errand; and then appear
photographs of Mr. Arnold Bennett wading in the trenches of
Flanders, Mr. Noyes becomes discreetly indiscreet about what he
has seen among the submarines, and Mr. Hugh Walpole catches
things from Mr. Stephen Graham in the Dark Forest of Russia.  All
this is quite over and above such writing of facts at first hand
as Mr. Patrick McGill and a dozen other real experiencing
soldiers--not to mention the soldiers' letters Mr. James Milne
has collected, or the unforgettable and immortal /Prisoner of
War/ of Mr. Arthur Green--or such admirable war
correspondents' work as Mr. Philip Gibbs or Mr. Washburne has
done.  Some of us writers--I can answer for one--have made our
Tour of the Fronts with a very understandable diffidence.  For my
own part I did not want to go.  I evaded a suggestion that I
should go in 1915.  I travel badly, I speak French and Italian
with incredible atrocity, and am an extreme Pacifist.  I hate
soldiering.  And also I did not want to write anything "under
instruction".  It is largely owing to a certain stiffness in the
composition of General Delme-Radcliffe is resolved that
Italy shall not feel neglected by the refusal of the invitation
from the Commando Supremo by anyone who from the perspective of
Italy may seem to be a representative of British opinion.  If
Herbert Spencer had been alive General Radcliffe would have
certainly made him come, travelling-hammock, ear clips and all--
and I am not above confessing that I wish that Herbert Spencer
was alive--for this purpose.  I found Udine warm and gay with
memories of Mr. Belloc, Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Sidney Low, Colonel
Repington and Dr. Conan Doyle, and anticipating the arrival of
Mr. Harold Cox.  So we pass, mostly in automobiles that bump
tremendously over war roads, a cloud of witnesses each testifying
after his manner.  Whatever else has happened, we have all been
photographed with invincible patience and resolution under the
direction of Colonel Barberich in a sunny little court in Udine.

My own manner of testifying must be to tell what I have seen and
what I have thought during this extraordinary experience.  It has
been my natural disposition to see this war as something
purposeful and epic, as it is great, as an epoch, as "the War
that will end War"--but of that last, more anon.  I do not think
I am alone in this inclination to a dramatic and logical
interpretation.  The caricatures in the French shops show
civilisation (and particularly Marianne) in conflict with a huge
and hugely wicked Hindenburg Ogre.  Well, I come back from this
tour with something not so simple as that.  If I were to be tied
down to one word for my impression of this war, I should say that
this war is /Queer./  It is not like anything in a really
waking world, but like something in a dream.  It hasn't exactly
that clearness of light against darkness or of good against ill.
But it has the quality of wholesome instinct struggling under a
nightmare.  The world is not really awake.  This vague appeal for
explanations to all sorts of people, this desire to exhibit the
business, to get something in the way of elucidation at present
missing, is extraordinarily suggestive of the efforts of the mind
to wake up that will sometimes occur at a deep crisis.  My memory
of this tour I have just made is full of puzzled-looking men.  I
have seen thousands of /poilus/ sitting about in
cafes, by the roadside, in tents, in trenches, thoughtful.
I have seen Alpini sitting restfully and staring with speculative
eyes across the mountain gulfs towards unseen and unaccountable
enemies.  I have seen trainloads of wounded staring out of the
ambulance train windows as we passed.  I have seen these dim
intimations of questioning reflection in the strangest
juxtapositions; in Malagasy soldiers resting for a spell among
the big shells they were hoisting into trucks for the front, in a
couple of khaki-clad Maoris sitting upon the step of a horse-van
in Amiens station.  It is always the same expression one catches,
rather weary, rather sullen, inturned.  The shoulders droop.  The
very outline is a note of interrogation.  They look up as the
privileged tourist of the front, in the big automobile or the
reserved compartment, with his officer or so in charge, passes--
importantly.  One meets a pair of eyes that seems to say:
"Perhaps /you/ understand....

"In which case---...?"

It is a part, I think, of this disposition to investigate what
makes everyone collect "specimens" of the war.  Everywhere the
souvenir forces itself upon the attention.  The homecoming
permissionaire brings with him invariably a considerable weight
of broken objects, bits of shell, cartridge clips, helmets; it is
a peripatetic museum.  It is as if he hoped for a clue.  It is
almost impossible, I have found, to escape these pieces in
evidence.  I am the least collecting of men, but I have brought
home Italian cartridges, Austrian cartridges, the fuse of an
Austrian shell, a broken Italian bayonet, and a note that is
worth half a franc within the confines of Amiens.  But a large
heavy piece of exploded shell that had been thrust very urgently
upon my attention upon the Carso I contrived to lose during the
temporary confusion of our party by the arrival and explosion of
another prospective souvenir in our close proximity.  And two
really very large and almost complete specimens of some species
of /Ammonites/ unknown to me, from the hills to the east of
the Adige, partially wrapped in a back number of the /Corriere
della Sera/, that were pressed upon me by a friendly officer,
were unfortunately lost on the line between Verona and Milan
through the gross negligence of a railway porter.  But I doubt if
they would have thrown any very conclusive light upon the war.

2

I avow myself an extreme Pacifist.  I am against the man who
first takes up the weapon.  I carry my pacifism far beyond the
ambiguous little group of British and foreign sentimentalists who
pretend so amusingly to be socialists in the /Labour
Leader/, whose conception of foreign policy is to give Germany