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The great war that never was — 1871–1914
641
Almanac
of anticbations
The great war that never was -
1871-1914
I. F. Clarke
I. F. Clarke concludes his two-part study of the forecasts of future warfare in the half-century before the outbreak of World War I. He argues that the experts failed to foresee trench warfare and the long stalemate on the Western Front, precisely because they were experts, and that the devastating effects of the new military technologies ended the old-style belief in the uninterrupted forward march of mankind. To begin with a modest proposal: a course of reading in the forecasts of future warfare that appeared before 1914 should be required study for all aspirant futurologists. They would discover for themselves that the geography of expectation may conceal immense and dangerous chasms between the predicted contours of tomorrow and the dark hinterland of coming events. The map of the future is a projection of assumptions. The cardinal points are: the dominant convictions of a society, a firm belief in the uniformity of development, the decided opinion of expert knowledge, and the calculated pursuit of novelty in the press. Consider, for example, the emphatic judgment of a popular military writer, one of many, who wrote in La “the Prochaine Guerre of 1906 that outcome of the next war will be decided in less than a month after the opening of hostilities”. 1 Eight years later the realities of the new warfare proved that forecast to be disastrously wrong. In November 1914, after all the predictions of a rapid war of movement on I. F. Clarke is the Emeritus Professor of English Studies in the University of Strathclyde. G1asc-o~. Scotland. His study ok imaginar; wars of the future, Voices Prophesying War (Oxford University Press, 1966), is the definitive book on that vast subject.
FUTURES December 1984
Napoleonic lines and after three months of unexpectedly heavy fighting, Marshal Foch recorded with some surprise that the new circumstances had forced the allied armies to establish a front from Switzerland to the North Sea: “This was a distance of 425 miles-a line of battle hitherto unheard of in history”. After more than 30 years spent in preparing for the next war the one-time professor of military history and strategy at the Ecole SupCrieure de Guerre felt it necessary to note that the war of entrenchments had never figured in his preconceptions:* The fighting around Ypres once more proved the strength which the defence had acquired through the development of tire-power, and especially that of machine-guns. The offensive had not gained in any similar proportion. Out of this situation there arose the long period of stagnation of the two opposing armies during which a new kind of warfare came into existence, the war of position, as opposed to the so-called war of movement. And yet the outbreak of war in 1914 saw the beginnings of a conflict long expected and constantly described throughout the major European countries. For close on half a century, ever since the notorious success of Chesney’s Battle of Dorking in 1871 ,3 the description of ‘the next great war’ had attracted the attention of a
642
Almanac ojanttcipations
lar@z, ever-growing body of writersmilitary and naval correspondents, admirals and generals, politicians and journalists of many persuasions. Everything they wrote served only to confirm the general belief in a future European war of short and glorious campaigns. One explanation for that almost universal failure in anticipatiun came from the historian Duff Cooper. He had enlisted in 1914, thinking like his contemporaries that wars “never interfered very much or for very long with the civilian population”. Part of this difficulty in accurate anticipation had begun, he thought, from the fact that he “facked the imagination to conceive that this war was likely to be very different to any great extent from the others”.4 As he went through his basic military training, Duff Cooper was able to follow the day-by-day operations of the Schlieffen PIan: 750 000 German troops in a great encircling movement wheeling through Luxembourg and Belgium. Nevertheless, the predictions of the German General Staff did not run true to their grandiose scheme for a swift sixweek war against France, thanks in part to the unexpected appearance of the British Expeditionary Force in the Mons area on 21 August. From that day onwards the great design for the advance on Paris ran into increasing and unexpected difficulties. The Uattle of the Marne followed in the September, one of the rare decisive strategic battles of World War I. Then winter settled in and with it came an entirely new kind of warfare, as Marshal Foch discovered. A judgment on that fearful change in the direction of expectations comes from one of the ablest and must successful of modern generals, Montgomery of Alamein:5 As winter descended on the tired soldiers, the western front congealed into trench warfare. Barbed wire and machine-guns dominated the battlefield. From now on generals on both sides would try to smash through the opposing front-but in vain: they knew not the answer and merefy wasted lives.
fffinkered
by imagination
Here, then is a conundrum for the aspirant futurologist : how is it possible to explain the almost universal failure to anticipate the development of trench warfare? The answer has to start from the transformation of urban life in the last century; and enough has been said in this series to show that the unprecedented technological, scientific, and medical advances of that time had found expression in a gospel of the uniform, advantageous progress of industrial society. Indeed, ane of the many books written about the progress of the age during the 1890s had the appropriate title of ifhis Wonderful Century. The author was Alfred Russel Wallace, the eminent zoologist who made the famous joint declaration with Darwin to the Linnaean Society on the theory of natural selection. Xn 1859 their papers had opened up a new world to mankind, and 40 years fates Wallace summed up the characteristics of his time as “a marve~~ous and altogether unprecedented progress in knowledge of the universe and of its compiex forces”. The advance would continue, he expected, in a constant and even manner:” The bounds of human knowledge have been so far extended that new vistas have opened to us in directions where it had been thought we could never penetrate, and the more we learn the more we seem capable of learning in the ever-widening expanse of the universe. It may be truly said of men of science that they have now become as gads knowing good and evil, since rhey have been able not only to utilize rhe most recondite powers ofnarnre in their service, hut have in many cases been able to discover the sources ofmuch ofthe evil that afflicts humanity, to abolish pain, to lengthen life, and to add immensely to the intellectual as well as to the physical enjoyment of our race. The seemingly beneficent development of the technologies had combined with the theory of organic evolution to establish a novel befief-a conviction that the new industrial society was destined to go on advancing without any
FUTURESDecember
1%384
Almanac
serious checks to better and better levels of existence. The evidence for the uniformity of material progress was so strong that a fatal division came about between reason and imagination, as though the intellect could not see further than the undoubted facts of scientific achievement and the imagination could only consider the sinister within the strict limits of fantasy. This careful separating into categories appears most clearly in the many works of H. G. Wells-the founding father of modern science fiction, the first futurologist to attract world-wide attention, and the man who produced more stories about future wars than any other writer of his time. The record of his extraordinary achievements begins in 1884, at the Normal School of Science in Kensington, London, when the young Wells started a course in elementary biology with T. H. Huxley, a great instructor and the most successful propagator of Darwinian ideas. From his teaching Wells went on to develop his own as theories of “the cosmic process”, Huxley liked to call it, and these found their fullest synthesis in his Outline of History and in his innumerable arguments for “the idea of a planned world”. The success story opens with the appearance of The Time Machine as a serial in the New Review during the first half of 1895. At the core of that most original evolutionary myth is the theme of everlasting warfare. Wells carried his understanding of the struggle-for-existence to a logical conclusion in his vision of a future time when mankind’s triumph over the powers of nature ends in a decadent, debilitated humanity, and the great war between the species continues unchecked in the pursuit of the effete Eloi by the dreadful Morlocks. H. G. Wells anticipations Fame and fortune followed rapidly for Wells. By the year 1900 he had built Spade House and had opened up another area of the future with his
FUTURES December
1994
of anticipations 643
writings of Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientzfic Progress upon Human Life and Thought. It was the first comprehensive and successful forecast of future developments in the brief history of futurology. It began as a serial in the Fortnightly Review, taking the reader on a tour de 1‘avenir from expected advances in transportation to Wells’s highly idiosyncratic notions about the beliefs and practices of “the prevailing men of the future”. In the sixth chapter he turned to the topic of “War in the Twentieth and he predicted that: the Century” submarine would never be successful in naval warfare; ramming tactics would dominate the battle at sea; and the commerce-destroyer could not hope to last for long. With the flying machine he came a little nearer the mark, writing that “very probably before 1950 a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound”. From that development the command of the air would follow, and war would become “a conflict between a seeing host and one that is blind”. From the details of the chapter it is evident that Wells was working through the many contemporary accounts of future warfare. The improved riflemore accurate, longer range, faster rate of fire-was to dominate the infantry clouds of fast-moving engagement; cyclists were to provide an effective mobile force; and the balloons would be the eyes of the artillery. He saw-faintly and partially-that there might be a change in the scale of fighting: “It will be as this evident that such warfare, inevitable precision of gun and rifle forces upon humanity, will become less and less dramatic as a whole, more and more as a whole a monstrous thrust of people against people’ ’ He failed, however, to follow up that because he had accurate estimate, separated the waging of war from the living world of nations and urban centres. In consequence, he failed to examine the changes that might come in the scale of operations. The probability
644
Almanac
ofanticipations
of immense casualties and of prolonged defensive engagements eluded him, even though he wrote of people against people. Although he foresaw the possible application of trench-making machines, he was certain that the defensive could be no more than a brief stage in the war of movement. Although he mentioned in a foot-note the possible use of fighting vehicles, “even of a sort of land ironclad”, he considered these would be limited to defensive operations. Although he foresaw how modern war must lead inevitably to centralized state control, he welcomed that development as an advance on the desirable road to socialism:’ The State that has not incorporated with its fighting organzation all its abled-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 rid of every vestige of our present distinction between official and governed, and organized every element in its being.
his ruminations on the nature of a future war Wells had drawn two major conclusions. First, the conduct of war on land or at sea would be “much more one-sided than it has ever been in the past, much more of a foregone conelusion”. Second, the law “that dominates the future is glaringly plain. A people must develop and consolidate its educated efficient classes or be beaten in war and give way upon all points where its interests conflict with the interests of more capable people”.8 How did Wells come so close to divining the later realities of warfare but never achieved the final break-through to a fuller realization of what might be? His brief forecast “War in the Twentieth Century” was a victory for reason over From
the imagination. Everything he had written about the mechanics and management of the conflict-to-come was a recapitulation or an enlargement of contemporary expectations. Chaos and catastrophe could have no place in his calculations, because he held firm to the conventional wisdom of his day-to the certainty that the beneficent process of technological development would go forward, steadily and evenly, from decade to decade. For the new urban societies the future would be a non-stop trip in a time machine. Terrifying
fantasies
The imagination, however, carried all before it in Wells’s fiction. In the absolutely free world of fantasy he was able to follow his intuitions to their appropriate, often terrifying conclusions. Thus, in the War of the Worlds in 1898 Wells composed a vast scenario of interplanetary conflict-the setting for the inevitable triumph of any advanced weapon systems. The Martian lighting machines, the Heat Ray, the Black Smoke-these showed in brilliant, brutal scenes what war could become, given the right technologies. The frantic exodus from the cities and the striking images of London-empty, desolate, the red weed choking the Thames-these were signals from the self-contained universe of Wellsian fiction to the real world of future possibilities. After the Martian invaders came the German airmen in their wonderful flying machines, as Wells imagined they would be in his War in the Air of 1908. In the near future the Germans show that they have absorbed the doctrines laid down in Anticipations; for they are “better organized for swift and secret with the action, better equipped their of modern science, resources official and administrative classes at a higher level of education and training”. Of set purpose Wells demonstrates the advantages of careful planning and preparation, as he relates how Germany
FUTURES December 1984
Almanac
declares war on the USA and a great fleet of airships crosses the Atlantic to bomb New York. As he enters on the first comprehensive, reasonably prescient account of aerial bombardment in the course of modern fiction, Wells points to the lesson: “The catastrophe was the logical outcome of the situation created by the application of science to warfare”. So, the destruction of New York is the beginning of the end for civilization on planet Earth. Cities burn, governments collapse, communications fail, famine and the Purple Death wipe out entire populations. Wells reinforces his painful object lesson on the prudent use of the sciences with more stern words for the reader:9 The accidental balance on the side of Progress was far slighter and infinitely more complex and delicate in its adjustment than the people of that time suspected; but that did not aiter the fact that it was an effective balance. They did not realize that this age of relative good was an age of immense but temporary opportunity for their kind. They complacently assumed a necessary progress towards which they had no moral responsibility. They did not realize that this security of progresswas a thing still to be won or lost, and that the time to win it was a time that passed.
After that cruel introduction to modern times Wells started on yet another tale of misapplied technology in The World Set Free (191+), a title that promised to show how it might be possible to pluck universal peace out of total disaster. With deliberate intent Wells returned to “the thesis that because of the development of scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate sovereign empires are no longer possible in the world”. In many ways it was one of Wells’s poorest books, but there is still an interest in observing how the prophet worked on his sources. Most of the scientific information came from the rnt~~ret~tion ofRadium by Frederick Soddy, the chemist and later Nobel Laureate, who had worked with Rutherford in Canada on the now classic
FUTURES December 1994
ofanticipations645
investigation of radioactivity. Together they had formdated the crucial Disintegration Theory that demonstrated the genetic relationship between the chemical elements. As Wells acknowledged in the dedication, long passages from the Soddy book had supplied the material for the opening chapter on “The Sun Snarers”. There a professor of physics explains how atomic energy will affect the condition of mankind: “I see the desert continents transformed, the poles no longer a wilderness of ice, the whole world once more Eden”. Introducing
the atomic
bomb
Before science can bring in the millennium, however, Wells has to show how human folly can imperil the potentially happy marriage between humanity and the new technologies. So, he describes the outbreak of the first nuclear war in 1956 and gives the English
language
the first use of the term
atomic bomb: lo By the spring of 1959 from nearly two hundred centres, and every week added to their number, roared the unquenchable crimson conflagration of the atomic bombs; the flimsy fabric of the world’s credit had vanished, industry was completely disorganized and every city, every thickly populated area, was starving or trembled on the edge of starvation. Most of the capital cities of the world were burning; millions of people had already perished, and over great areas government was at an end. prophecy has not been fulfilled so far, but by the end of 1914 an earlier forecast of trench warfare had most unhappily been proved all too accurate. This was a lengthy, meticulous sixvolume study, The t;irtureof War, the first major study of the war-to-come in the history of futurology. The author was the Polish banker and economist, Ivan S. Bloch, who gave up financial affairs and devoted eight years of his life to an exhaustive investigation of the factors most likely to decide the conduct of a major war in Europe. Bloch Iooked into That
every aspect of his subject-from rates of fire (infantry and artillery), casualty rates in the War of 1870, explosives, smokeless powders, new and improved weapons, communications, transportation, the size and training of conscript armies, industrial resources and so on. His conclusions were extraordinary for that time: “Everybody will be entrenched in the next war. It will be a great war of entrenchments. The spade will be as indispensable to a soldier as his rifle.” That prediction earned Bloch a commendation, 70 years later, from Field Marshal Montgomery. In his History of Warfare he recorded that before 1914 there “was at least one man, Bloch, who was not afraid to point the finger to what was likely to happen to the world”. In his usual caustic way Montgomery noted that “Bloch’s warnings were largely put aside by military commanders in Europe because he was not a professional soldier; they said much the same about the lessons of the civil war in America, on the ground that it was fought between amateurs-a startling statement to make!” Here is the forecast of the Polish amateur: i1 At first there will be increased slaughterincreased slaughter on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue. They will try, thinking that they are fighting under the old conditions, and they will learn such a lesson that they will abandon the attempt for ever. Then, instead of a war fought out to the bitter end in a series of decisive battles, we shall have as a substitute a long period of continually increasing strain upon the resources of the combatants. The war, instead of being a hand-to-hand contest in which the combatants measure their physical and moral superiority, will become a kind of stalemate, in which neither army being able to get at the other, both armies will be maintained in opposition to each other, threatening each other, but never able to deliver a final, decisive attack.
The book first appeared in Russian in 1897 and at once attracted the attention of the Czar Nicholas II, the last of the
Romanovs, who passed it on to a committee of experts for examination and report. The conclusions were favourable. The book was useful and should be placed in the hands of all staff officers. No one will ever know what the Russian generals made of the book, although Bloch did reveal that General Dragomiroff had strongly condemned the section where the bayonet was written off as a weapon in any future war. The general was then 67 years of age, a former Chief of the General Staff, and the author of the book War is an Inevitable Evil.
The six volumes on The Future of War had no detectable effect on the planning of military operations, but they were an element in the factors that caused Nicholas II to think about the future of warfare. On 24 August 1898 he approved the issue of an Imperial Rescript that proposed an international conference on the dangers of modern war. This was the beginning of the Hague Conventions. The Peace Conference, as the press called it, convened at the Hague in 1899 and at the suggestion of Queen Wilhelmina the proceedings began on the Tsar’s birthday. The Parliament of Peace was an all-male and that oddity moved one affair; observer to hope that “perhaps it may be the last Conference whose members are drawn solely from one half of the human race”. Without any help from the better half of humanity the best the men could do was to agree on a series of conventions. These defined the conditions for a state of belligerency on land or at sea, and they declared an absolute prohibition on the use of dum-dum bullets, asphyxiating gases, and the discharge of projectiles from balloons. The most important result was the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague. Amateurs v. experts Is there any sensible explanation for the almost universal silence that followed on
FUTURES December
1984
of anticipations647
Almanac
Bloch’s forecast of trench warfare and the collapse of governments? Does the answer begin with Field Marshal Montgomery’s view that experts do not listen to amateurs? Is it possible that the specialist cannot see the wood for the trees? Can the long training and constant practice of the professional encourage the dangerous belief that any system of organization, if successful, must always produce the correct answers to given problems? In the decade before 1914, for example, the British and French general staffs believed so completely in the doctrine of the speed of manoeuvre that they reduced the quota of heavy artillery and machine-guns for their divisions. In like manner the British admirals had every reason to expect that the then most powerful fleet in the world would retain the command of the seas. They were right and they were desperately wrong. The possibility of a successful enemy submarine campaign had never entered into their forward planning; and yet it inspired a famous short story, Danger, by the greatest writer of detective fiction in English literature. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story came out in the July number of the Strand Mugazine in 1914, only nine months before the Chief of the German Admiralty Staff proclaimed a submarine blockade of the British Isles. That had already taken place in Doyle’s story which he had written, he said, “to direct public attention to the great danger which threatened this country”. Doyle related, simply and forcefully, how a small imaginary European country took on the Royal Navy and defeated the mighty British Empire by the use of subenemy submarine marines. The commander
declared
a total
blockade
approaching
FUTURES December 1984
the UK.
on
Food supplies began to run out and the government had to sue for peace. That was an amateur theorizing about naval warfare in the interests of a all shipping
Channel Tunnel. The expert opinions on the Doyle hypothesis came from Admiral Penrose Fitzgerald-“1 do not think that any civilized nation will unarmed and defenceless torpedo merchant ships”and from Admiral Sir Algernon de Horsey-“a very interesting but, as most would say, fantastic account of an imaginary war”. Admiral William Hannam Henderson voiced the opinions of an older world and spokeand here no irony is intended-in the finest traditions of the Royal Navy when he rejected the Doyle forecast “that territorial waters will be violated or neutral vessels sunk. Such will be absolutely prohibited, and will only recoil on the heads of the perpetrators. No nation would permit it, and the officer who did it would be shot. ” ‘* References 1. General Bonnal, La Prochaine Guene, (1906), page 54. 2. Marshal Foch, The Memoirs (trans. Col. T. Bentley), (1931), page 201. 3. Described in “Almanac of anticipations”, Futures, 16 (5), October 1984, pages 533-542. 4. Alfred Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget, (1953), page 48. 5. Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, A History of Warfare, (1968), page 464. 6. A. R. Wallace, This Wonderful Century, (1898), page 376. 7. H. G. Wells, Anticipations, (1902), page 185. 8. Ibid, page 212. 9. H. G. Wells, The War in the Air, (1908), page 207. 10. H. G. Wells, The World set Free, (1914), page 116. Wells got the chain effect wrong; his bombs keep on exploding for weeks. 11. I. S. Bloch, Is WarnowZmpossible?(1899), page xvi. 12. The opinions of many experts were printed at the end of Doyle’s story under the heading of “What the Naval Experts Think”, Strand Magazine, July 1914, pages 20-22.
Almanac
of anticbations
The great war that never was -
1871-1914
I. F. Clarke
I. F. Clarke concludes his two-part study of the forecasts of future warfare in the half-century before the outbreak of World War I. He argues that the experts failed to foresee trench warfare and the long stalemate on the Western Front, precisely because they were experts, and that the devastating effects of the new military technologies ended the old-style belief in the uninterrupted forward march of mankind. To begin with a modest proposal: a course of reading in the forecasts of future warfare that appeared before 1914 should be required study for all aspirant futurologists. They would discover for themselves that the geography of expectation may conceal immense and dangerous chasms between the predicted contours of tomorrow and the dark hinterland of coming events. The map of the future is a projection of assumptions. The cardinal points are: the dominant convictions of a society, a firm belief in the uniformity of development, the decided opinion of expert knowledge, and the calculated pursuit of novelty in the press. Consider, for example, the emphatic judgment of a popular military writer, one of many, who wrote in La “the Prochaine Guerre of 1906 that outcome of the next war will be decided in less than a month after the opening of hostilities”. 1 Eight years later the realities of the new warfare proved that forecast to be disastrously wrong. In November 1914, after all the predictions of a rapid war of movement on I. F. Clarke is the Emeritus Professor of English Studies in the University of Strathclyde. G1asc-o~. Scotland. His study ok imaginar; wars of the future, Voices Prophesying War (Oxford University Press, 1966), is the definitive book on that vast subject.
FUTURES December 1984
Napoleonic lines and after three months of unexpectedly heavy fighting, Marshal Foch recorded with some surprise that the new circumstances had forced the allied armies to establish a front from Switzerland to the North Sea: “This was a distance of 425 miles-a line of battle hitherto unheard of in history”. After more than 30 years spent in preparing for the next war the one-time professor of military history and strategy at the Ecole SupCrieure de Guerre felt it necessary to note that the war of entrenchments had never figured in his preconceptions:* The fighting around Ypres once more proved the strength which the defence had acquired through the development of tire-power, and especially that of machine-guns. The offensive had not gained in any similar proportion. Out of this situation there arose the long period of stagnation of the two opposing armies during which a new kind of warfare came into existence, the war of position, as opposed to the so-called war of movement. And yet the outbreak of war in 1914 saw the beginnings of a conflict long expected and constantly described throughout the major European countries. For close on half a century, ever since the notorious success of Chesney’s Battle of Dorking in 1871 ,3 the description of ‘the next great war’ had attracted the attention of a
642
Almanac ojanttcipations
lar@z, ever-growing body of writersmilitary and naval correspondents, admirals and generals, politicians and journalists of many persuasions. Everything they wrote served only to confirm the general belief in a future European war of short and glorious campaigns. One explanation for that almost universal failure in anticipatiun came from the historian Duff Cooper. He had enlisted in 1914, thinking like his contemporaries that wars “never interfered very much or for very long with the civilian population”. Part of this difficulty in accurate anticipation had begun, he thought, from the fact that he “facked the imagination to conceive that this war was likely to be very different to any great extent from the others”.4 As he went through his basic military training, Duff Cooper was able to follow the day-by-day operations of the Schlieffen PIan: 750 000 German troops in a great encircling movement wheeling through Luxembourg and Belgium. Nevertheless, the predictions of the German General Staff did not run true to their grandiose scheme for a swift sixweek war against France, thanks in part to the unexpected appearance of the British Expeditionary Force in the Mons area on 21 August. From that day onwards the great design for the advance on Paris ran into increasing and unexpected difficulties. The Uattle of the Marne followed in the September, one of the rare decisive strategic battles of World War I. Then winter settled in and with it came an entirely new kind of warfare, as Marshal Foch discovered. A judgment on that fearful change in the direction of expectations comes from one of the ablest and must successful of modern generals, Montgomery of Alamein:5 As winter descended on the tired soldiers, the western front congealed into trench warfare. Barbed wire and machine-guns dominated the battlefield. From now on generals on both sides would try to smash through the opposing front-but in vain: they knew not the answer and merefy wasted lives.
fffinkered
by imagination
Here, then is a conundrum for the aspirant futurologist : how is it possible to explain the almost universal failure to anticipate the development of trench warfare? The answer has to start from the transformation of urban life in the last century; and enough has been said in this series to show that the unprecedented technological, scientific, and medical advances of that time had found expression in a gospel of the uniform, advantageous progress of industrial society. Indeed, ane of the many books written about the progress of the age during the 1890s had the appropriate title of ifhis Wonderful Century. The author was Alfred Russel Wallace, the eminent zoologist who made the famous joint declaration with Darwin to the Linnaean Society on the theory of natural selection. Xn 1859 their papers had opened up a new world to mankind, and 40 years fates Wallace summed up the characteristics of his time as “a marve~~ous and altogether unprecedented progress in knowledge of the universe and of its compiex forces”. The advance would continue, he expected, in a constant and even manner:” The bounds of human knowledge have been so far extended that new vistas have opened to us in directions where it had been thought we could never penetrate, and the more we learn the more we seem capable of learning in the ever-widening expanse of the universe. It may be truly said of men of science that they have now become as gads knowing good and evil, since rhey have been able not only to utilize rhe most recondite powers ofnarnre in their service, hut have in many cases been able to discover the sources ofmuch ofthe evil that afflicts humanity, to abolish pain, to lengthen life, and to add immensely to the intellectual as well as to the physical enjoyment of our race. The seemingly beneficent development of the technologies had combined with the theory of organic evolution to establish a novel befief-a conviction that the new industrial society was destined to go on advancing without any
FUTURESDecember
1%384
Almanac
serious checks to better and better levels of existence. The evidence for the uniformity of material progress was so strong that a fatal division came about between reason and imagination, as though the intellect could not see further than the undoubted facts of scientific achievement and the imagination could only consider the sinister within the strict limits of fantasy. This careful separating into categories appears most clearly in the many works of H. G. Wells-the founding father of modern science fiction, the first futurologist to attract world-wide attention, and the man who produced more stories about future wars than any other writer of his time. The record of his extraordinary achievements begins in 1884, at the Normal School of Science in Kensington, London, when the young Wells started a course in elementary biology with T. H. Huxley, a great instructor and the most successful propagator of Darwinian ideas. From his teaching Wells went on to develop his own as theories of “the cosmic process”, Huxley liked to call it, and these found their fullest synthesis in his Outline of History and in his innumerable arguments for “the idea of a planned world”. The success story opens with the appearance of The Time Machine as a serial in the New Review during the first half of 1895. At the core of that most original evolutionary myth is the theme of everlasting warfare. Wells carried his understanding of the struggle-for-existence to a logical conclusion in his vision of a future time when mankind’s triumph over the powers of nature ends in a decadent, debilitated humanity, and the great war between the species continues unchecked in the pursuit of the effete Eloi by the dreadful Morlocks. H. G. Wells anticipations Fame and fortune followed rapidly for Wells. By the year 1900 he had built Spade House and had opened up another area of the future with his
FUTURES December
1994
of anticipations 643
writings of Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientzfic Progress upon Human Life and Thought. It was the first comprehensive and successful forecast of future developments in the brief history of futurology. It began as a serial in the Fortnightly Review, taking the reader on a tour de 1‘avenir from expected advances in transportation to Wells’s highly idiosyncratic notions about the beliefs and practices of “the prevailing men of the future”. In the sixth chapter he turned to the topic of “War in the Twentieth and he predicted that: the Century” submarine would never be successful in naval warfare; ramming tactics would dominate the battle at sea; and the commerce-destroyer could not hope to last for long. With the flying machine he came a little nearer the mark, writing that “very probably before 1950 a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound”. From that development the command of the air would follow, and war would become “a conflict between a seeing host and one that is blind”. From the details of the chapter it is evident that Wells was working through the many contemporary accounts of future warfare. The improved riflemore accurate, longer range, faster rate of fire-was to dominate the infantry clouds of fast-moving engagement; cyclists were to provide an effective mobile force; and the balloons would be the eyes of the artillery. He saw-faintly and partially-that there might be a change in the scale of fighting: “It will be as this evident that such warfare, inevitable precision of gun and rifle forces upon humanity, will become less and less dramatic as a whole, more and more as a whole a monstrous thrust of people against people’ ’ He failed, however, to follow up that because he had accurate estimate, separated the waging of war from the living world of nations and urban centres. In consequence, he failed to examine the changes that might come in the scale of operations. The probability
644
Almanac
ofanticipations
of immense casualties and of prolonged defensive engagements eluded him, even though he wrote of people against people. Although he foresaw the possible application of trench-making machines, he was certain that the defensive could be no more than a brief stage in the war of movement. Although he mentioned in a foot-note the possible use of fighting vehicles, “even of a sort of land ironclad”, he considered these would be limited to defensive operations. Although he foresaw how modern war must lead inevitably to centralized state control, he welcomed that development as an advance on the desirable road to socialism:’ The State that has not incorporated with its fighting organzation all its abled-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 rid of every vestige of our present distinction between official and governed, and organized every element in its being.
his ruminations on the nature of a future war Wells had drawn two major conclusions. First, the conduct of war on land or at sea would be “much more one-sided than it has ever been in the past, much more of a foregone conelusion”. Second, the law “that dominates the future is glaringly plain. A people must develop and consolidate its educated efficient classes or be beaten in war and give way upon all points where its interests conflict with the interests of more capable people”.8 How did Wells come so close to divining the later realities of warfare but never achieved the final break-through to a fuller realization of what might be? His brief forecast “War in the Twentieth Century” was a victory for reason over From
the imagination. Everything he had written about the mechanics and management of the conflict-to-come was a recapitulation or an enlargement of contemporary expectations. Chaos and catastrophe could have no place in his calculations, because he held firm to the conventional wisdom of his day-to the certainty that the beneficent process of technological development would go forward, steadily and evenly, from decade to decade. For the new urban societies the future would be a non-stop trip in a time machine. Terrifying
fantasies
The imagination, however, carried all before it in Wells’s fiction. In the absolutely free world of fantasy he was able to follow his intuitions to their appropriate, often terrifying conclusions. Thus, in the War of the Worlds in 1898 Wells composed a vast scenario of interplanetary conflict-the setting for the inevitable triumph of any advanced weapon systems. The Martian lighting machines, the Heat Ray, the Black Smoke-these showed in brilliant, brutal scenes what war could become, given the right technologies. The frantic exodus from the cities and the striking images of London-empty, desolate, the red weed choking the Thames-these were signals from the self-contained universe of Wellsian fiction to the real world of future possibilities. After the Martian invaders came the German airmen in their wonderful flying machines, as Wells imagined they would be in his War in the Air of 1908. In the near future the Germans show that they have absorbed the doctrines laid down in Anticipations; for they are “better organized for swift and secret with the action, better equipped their of modern science, resources official and administrative classes at a higher level of education and training”. Of set purpose Wells demonstrates the advantages of careful planning and preparation, as he relates how Germany
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declares war on the USA and a great fleet of airships crosses the Atlantic to bomb New York. As he enters on the first comprehensive, reasonably prescient account of aerial bombardment in the course of modern fiction, Wells points to the lesson: “The catastrophe was the logical outcome of the situation created by the application of science to warfare”. So, the destruction of New York is the beginning of the end for civilization on planet Earth. Cities burn, governments collapse, communications fail, famine and the Purple Death wipe out entire populations. Wells reinforces his painful object lesson on the prudent use of the sciences with more stern words for the reader:9 The accidental balance on the side of Progress was far slighter and infinitely more complex and delicate in its adjustment than the people of that time suspected; but that did not aiter the fact that it was an effective balance. They did not realize that this age of relative good was an age of immense but temporary opportunity for their kind. They complacently assumed a necessary progress towards which they had no moral responsibility. They did not realize that this security of progresswas a thing still to be won or lost, and that the time to win it was a time that passed.
After that cruel introduction to modern times Wells started on yet another tale of misapplied technology in The World Set Free (191+), a title that promised to show how it might be possible to pluck universal peace out of total disaster. With deliberate intent Wells returned to “the thesis that because of the development of scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate sovereign empires are no longer possible in the world”. In many ways it was one of Wells’s poorest books, but there is still an interest in observing how the prophet worked on his sources. Most of the scientific information came from the rnt~~ret~tion ofRadium by Frederick Soddy, the chemist and later Nobel Laureate, who had worked with Rutherford in Canada on the now classic
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investigation of radioactivity. Together they had formdated the crucial Disintegration Theory that demonstrated the genetic relationship between the chemical elements. As Wells acknowledged in the dedication, long passages from the Soddy book had supplied the material for the opening chapter on “The Sun Snarers”. There a professor of physics explains how atomic energy will affect the condition of mankind: “I see the desert continents transformed, the poles no longer a wilderness of ice, the whole world once more Eden”. Introducing
the atomic
bomb
Before science can bring in the millennium, however, Wells has to show how human folly can imperil the potentially happy marriage between humanity and the new technologies. So, he describes the outbreak of the first nuclear war in 1956 and gives the English
language
the first use of the term
atomic bomb: lo By the spring of 1959 from nearly two hundred centres, and every week added to their number, roared the unquenchable crimson conflagration of the atomic bombs; the flimsy fabric of the world’s credit had vanished, industry was completely disorganized and every city, every thickly populated area, was starving or trembled on the edge of starvation. Most of the capital cities of the world were burning; millions of people had already perished, and over great areas government was at an end. prophecy has not been fulfilled so far, but by the end of 1914 an earlier forecast of trench warfare had most unhappily been proved all too accurate. This was a lengthy, meticulous sixvolume study, The t;irtureof War, the first major study of the war-to-come in the history of futurology. The author was the Polish banker and economist, Ivan S. Bloch, who gave up financial affairs and devoted eight years of his life to an exhaustive investigation of the factors most likely to decide the conduct of a major war in Europe. Bloch Iooked into That
every aspect of his subject-from rates of fire (infantry and artillery), casualty rates in the War of 1870, explosives, smokeless powders, new and improved weapons, communications, transportation, the size and training of conscript armies, industrial resources and so on. His conclusions were extraordinary for that time: “Everybody will be entrenched in the next war. It will be a great war of entrenchments. The spade will be as indispensable to a soldier as his rifle.” That prediction earned Bloch a commendation, 70 years later, from Field Marshal Montgomery. In his History of Warfare he recorded that before 1914 there “was at least one man, Bloch, who was not afraid to point the finger to what was likely to happen to the world”. In his usual caustic way Montgomery noted that “Bloch’s warnings were largely put aside by military commanders in Europe because he was not a professional soldier; they said much the same about the lessons of the civil war in America, on the ground that it was fought between amateurs-a startling statement to make!” Here is the forecast of the Polish amateur: i1 At first there will be increased slaughterincreased slaughter on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue. They will try, thinking that they are fighting under the old conditions, and they will learn such a lesson that they will abandon the attempt for ever. Then, instead of a war fought out to the bitter end in a series of decisive battles, we shall have as a substitute a long period of continually increasing strain upon the resources of the combatants. The war, instead of being a hand-to-hand contest in which the combatants measure their physical and moral superiority, will become a kind of stalemate, in which neither army being able to get at the other, both armies will be maintained in opposition to each other, threatening each other, but never able to deliver a final, decisive attack.
The book first appeared in Russian in 1897 and at once attracted the attention of the Czar Nicholas II, the last of the
Romanovs, who passed it on to a committee of experts for examination and report. The conclusions were favourable. The book was useful and should be placed in the hands of all staff officers. No one will ever know what the Russian generals made of the book, although Bloch did reveal that General Dragomiroff had strongly condemned the section where the bayonet was written off as a weapon in any future war. The general was then 67 years of age, a former Chief of the General Staff, and the author of the book War is an Inevitable Evil.
The six volumes on The Future of War had no detectable effect on the planning of military operations, but they were an element in the factors that caused Nicholas II to think about the future of warfare. On 24 August 1898 he approved the issue of an Imperial Rescript that proposed an international conference on the dangers of modern war. This was the beginning of the Hague Conventions. The Peace Conference, as the press called it, convened at the Hague in 1899 and at the suggestion of Queen Wilhelmina the proceedings began on the Tsar’s birthday. The Parliament of Peace was an all-male and that oddity moved one affair; observer to hope that “perhaps it may be the last Conference whose members are drawn solely from one half of the human race”. Without any help from the better half of humanity the best the men could do was to agree on a series of conventions. These defined the conditions for a state of belligerency on land or at sea, and they declared an absolute prohibition on the use of dum-dum bullets, asphyxiating gases, and the discharge of projectiles from balloons. The most important result was the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague. Amateurs v. experts Is there any sensible explanation for the almost universal silence that followed on
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Bloch’s forecast of trench warfare and the collapse of governments? Does the answer begin with Field Marshal Montgomery’s view that experts do not listen to amateurs? Is it possible that the specialist cannot see the wood for the trees? Can the long training and constant practice of the professional encourage the dangerous belief that any system of organization, if successful, must always produce the correct answers to given problems? In the decade before 1914, for example, the British and French general staffs believed so completely in the doctrine of the speed of manoeuvre that they reduced the quota of heavy artillery and machine-guns for their divisions. In like manner the British admirals had every reason to expect that the then most powerful fleet in the world would retain the command of the seas. They were right and they were desperately wrong. The possibility of a successful enemy submarine campaign had never entered into their forward planning; and yet it inspired a famous short story, Danger, by the greatest writer of detective fiction in English literature. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story came out in the July number of the Strand Mugazine in 1914, only nine months before the Chief of the German Admiralty Staff proclaimed a submarine blockade of the British Isles. That had already taken place in Doyle’s story which he had written, he said, “to direct public attention to the great danger which threatened this country”. Doyle related, simply and forcefully, how a small imaginary European country took on the Royal Navy and defeated the mighty British Empire by the use of subenemy submarine marines. The commander
declared
a total
blockade
approaching
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the UK.
on
Food supplies began to run out and the government had to sue for peace. That was an amateur theorizing about naval warfare in the interests of a all shipping
Channel Tunnel. The expert opinions on the Doyle hypothesis came from Admiral Penrose Fitzgerald-“1 do not think that any civilized nation will unarmed and defenceless torpedo merchant ships”and from Admiral Sir Algernon de Horsey-“a very interesting but, as most would say, fantastic account of an imaginary war”. Admiral William Hannam Henderson voiced the opinions of an older world and spokeand here no irony is intended-in the finest traditions of the Royal Navy when he rejected the Doyle forecast “that territorial waters will be violated or neutral vessels sunk. Such will be absolutely prohibited, and will only recoil on the heads of the perpetrators. No nation would permit it, and the officer who did it would be shot. ” ‘* References 1. General Bonnal, La Prochaine Guene, (1906), page 54. 2. Marshal Foch, The Memoirs (trans. Col. T. Bentley), (1931), page 201. 3. Described in “Almanac of anticipations”, Futures, 16 (5), October 1984, pages 533-542. 4. Alfred Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget, (1953), page 48. 5. Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, A History of Warfare, (1968), page 464. 6. A. R. Wallace, This Wonderful Century, (1898), page 376. 7. H. G. Wells, Anticipations, (1902), page 185. 8. Ibid, page 212. 9. H. G. Wells, The War in the Air, (1908), page 207. 10. H. G. Wells, The World set Free, (1914), page 116. Wells got the chain effect wrong; his bombs keep on exploding for weeks. 11. I. S. Bloch, Is WarnowZmpossible?(1899), page xvi. 12. The opinions of many experts were printed at the end of Doyle’s story under the heading of “What the Naval Experts Think”, Strand Magazine, July 1914, pages 20-22.