第35章 NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES(6)

Behind it your infantry can follow to receive surrenders; in most circumstances they can come up on cycles if it is a case of getting up quickly across a wide space.Similarly for pursuit the use of wire and use of the machine gun have abolished the possibility of a pouring cavalry charge.The swooping aeroplane does everything that cavalry can do in the way of disorganising the enemy, and far more than it can do in the way of silencing machine guns.It can capture guns in retreat much more easily by bombing traction engines and coming down low and shooting horses and men.An ideal modern pursuit would be an advance of guns, automobiles full of infantry, motor cyclists and cyclists, behind a high screen of observation aeroplanes and a low screen of bombing and fighting aeroplanes.Cavalry /might/ advance across fields and so forth, but only as a very accessory part of the general advance....

And what else is there for the cavalry to do?

It may be argued that horses can go over country that is impossible for automobiles.That is to ignore altogether what has been done in this war by such devices as caterpillar wheels.

So far from cavalry being able to negotiate country where machines would stick and fail, mechanism can now ride over places where any horse would flounder.

I submit these considerations to the horse-lover.They are not my original observations; they have been put to me and they have convinced me.Except perhaps as a parent of transport mules Isee no further part henceforth for the horse to play in war.

6

The form and texture of the coming warfare--if there is still warfare to come--are not yet to be seen in their completeness upon the modern battlefield.One swallow does not make a summer, nor a handful of aeroplanes, a "Tank" or so, a few acres of shell craters, and a village here and there, pounded out of recognition, do more than foreshadow the spectacle of modernised war on land.War by these developments has become the monopoly of the five great industrial powers; it is their alternative to end or evolve it, and if they continue to disagree, then it must needs become a spectacle of majestic horror such as no man can yet conceive.It has been wise of Mr.Pennell therefore, who has recently been drawing his impressions of the war upon stone, to make his pictures not upon the battlefield, but among the huge industrial apparatus that is thrusting behind and thrusting up through the war of the gentlemen in spurs.He gives us the splendours and immensities of forge and gun pit, furnace and mine shaft.He shows you how great they are and how terrible.Among them go the little figures of men, robbed of all dominance, robbed of all individual quality.He leaves it for you to draw the obvious conclusion that presently, if we cannot contrive to put an end to war, blacknessess like these, enormities and flares and towering threats, will follow in the track of the Tanks and come trampling over the bickering confusion of mankind.

There is something very striking in these insignificant and incidental men that Mr.Pennell shows us.Nowhere does a man dominate in all these wonderful pictures.You may argue perhaps that that is untrue to the essential realities; all this array of machine and workshop, all this marshalled power and purpose, has been the creation of inventor and business organiser.But are we not a little too free with that word "/creation/"? Falstaff was a "creation" perhaps, or the Sistine sibyls; there we have indubitably an end conceived and sought and achieved; but did these inventors and business organisers do more than heed certain unavoidable imperatives? Seeking coal they were obliged to mine in a certain way; seeking steel they had to do this and this and not that and that; seeking profit they had to obey the imperative of the economy.So little did they plan their ends that most of these manufacturers speak with a kind of astonishment of the deadly use to which their works are put.They find themselves making the new war as a man might wake out of some drugged condition to find himself strangling his mother.

So that Mr.Pennell's sketchy and transient human figures seem altogether right to me.He sees these forges, workshops, cranes and the like, as inhuman and as wonderful as cliffs or great caves or icebergs or the stars.They are a new aspect of the logic of physical necessity that made all these older things, and he seizes upon the majesty and beauty of their dimensions with an entire impartiality.And they are as impartial.Through all these lithographs runs one present motif, the motif of the supreme effort of western civilisation to save itself and the world from the dominance of the reactionary German Imperialism of modern science.The pictures are arranged to shape out the life of a shell, from the mine to the great gun; nothing remains of their history to show except the ammunition dump, the gun in action and the shell-burst.Upon this theme all these great appearances are strung to-day.But to-morrow they may be strung upon some other and nobler purpose.These gigantic beings of which the engineer is the master and slave, are neither benevolent nor malignant.To-day they produce destruction, they are the slaves of the spur; to-morrow we hope they will bridge and carry and house and help again.

For that peace we struggle against the dull inflexibility of the German Will-to-Power.