War and the Future | Page 3

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 now a peace that would be no more than a
breathing time for a fresh outrage upon civilisation, and who would
even make heroes of the crazy young assassins of the Dublin crime. I
do not understand those people. I do not merely want to stop this war. I
want to nail down war in its coffin. Modern war is an intolerable thing.
It is not a thing to trifle with in this Urban District Council way, it is a
thing to end forever. I have always hated it, so far that is as my
imagination enabled me to realise it; and now that I have been seeing it,
sometimes quite closely for a full month, I hate it more than ever. I
never imagined a quarter of its waste, its boredom, its futility, its
desolation. It is merely a destructive and dispersive instead of a
constructive and accumulative industrialism. It is a gigantic, dusty,
muddy, weedy, bloodstained silliness. It is the plain duty of every man
to give his life and all that he has if by so doing he may help to end it. I
hate Germany, which has thrust this experience upon mankind, as I hate
some horrible infectious disease. The new war, the war on the modern
level, is her invention and her crime. I perceive that on our side and in

its broad outlines, this war is nothing more than a gigantic and heroic
effort in sanitary engineering; an effort to remove German militarism
from the life and regions it has invaded, and to bank it in and discredit
and enfeeble it so that never more will it repeat its present preposterous
and horrible efforts. All human affairs and all great affairs have their
reservations and their complications, but that is the broad outline of the
business as it has impressed itself on my mind and as I find it
conceived in the mind of the average man of the reading class among
the allied peoples, and as I find it understood in the judgement of
honest and intelligent neutral observers.
It is my unshakeable belief that essentially the Allies fight for a
permanent world peace, that primarily they do not make war but resist
war, that has reconciled me to this not very congenial experience of
touring as a spectator all agog to see, through the war zones. At any
rate there was never any risk of my playing Balaam and blessing the
enemy. This war is tragedy and sacrifice for most of the world, for the
Germans it is simply the catastrophic outcome of fifty years of
elaborate intellectual foolery. Militarism, Welt Politik, and here we are!
What else /could/ have happened, with Michael and his infernal War
Machine in the very centre of Europe, but this tremendous disaster?
It is a disaster. It may be a necessary disaster; it may teach a lesson that
could be learnt in no other way; but for all that, I insist, it remains
waste, disorder, disaster.
There is a disposition, I know, in myself as well as in others, to wriggle
away from this verity, to find so much good in the collapse that has
come to the mad direction of Europe for the past half-century as to
make it on the whole almost a beneficial thing. But at most I can find it
in no greater good than the good of a nightmare that awakens the
sleeper in a dangerous place to a realisation of the extreme danger of
his sleep. Better had he been awake--or never there. In Venetia Captain
Pirelli, whose task it was to