memory, after the opening of the twentieth no more statesmen.
Everywhere one finds an energetic, ambitious, short-sighted,
common-place type in the seats of authority, blind to the new
possibilities and litigiously reliant upon the traditions of the
past.
Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were the
boundaries of the various 'sovereign states,' and the conception
of a general predominance in human affairs on the part of some
one particular state. The memory of the empires of Rome and
Alexander squatted, an unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human
imagination-it bored into the human brain like some grisly
parasite and filled it with disordered thoughts and violent
impulses. For more than a century the French system exhausted
its vitality in belligerent convulsions, and then the infection
passed to the German-speaking peoples who were the heart and
centre of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs. Later ages
were to store and neglect the vast insane literature of this
obsession, the intricate treaties, the secret agreements, the
infinite knowingness of the political writer, the cunning
refusals to accept plain facts, the strategic devices, the
tactical manoeuvres, the records of mobilisations and
counter-mobilisations. It ceased to be credible almost as soon as
it ceased to happen, but in the very dawn of the new age their
state craftsmen sat with their historical candles burning, and,
in spite of strange, new reflections and unfamiliar lights and
shadows, still wrangling and planning to rearrange the maps of
Europe and the world.
It was to become a matter for subtle inquiry how far the millions
of men and women outside the world of these specialists
sympathised and agreed with their portentous activities. One
school of psychologists inclined to minimise this participation,
but the balance of evidence goes to show that there were massive
responses to these suggestions of the belligerent schemer.
Primitive man had been a fiercely combative animal; innumerable
generations had passed their lives in tribal warfare, and the
weight of tradition, the example of history, the ideals of
loyalty and devotion fell in easily enough with the incitements
of the international mischief-maker. The political ideas of the
common man were picked up haphazard, there was practically
nothing in such education as he was given that was ever intended
to fit him for citizenship as such (that conception only
appeared, indeed, with the development of Modern State ideas),
and it was therefore a comparatively easy matter to fill his
vacant mind with the sounds and fury of exasperated suspicion and
national aggression.
For example, Barnet describes the London crowd as noisily
patriotic when presently his battalion came up from the depot to
London, to entrain for the French frontier. He tells of children
and women and lads and old men cheering and shouting, of the
streets and rows hung with the flags of the Allied Powers, of a
real enthusiasm even among the destitute and unemployed. The
Labour Bureaux were now partially transformed into enrolment
offices, and were centres of hotly patriotic excitement. At
every convenient place upon the line on either side of the
Channel Tunnel there were enthusiastic spectators, and the
feeling in the regiment, if a little stiffened and darkened by
grim anticipations, was none the less warlike.
But all this emotion was the fickle emotion of minds without
established ideas; it was with most of them, Barnet says, as it
was with himself, a natural response to collective movement, and
to martial sounds and colours, and the exhilarating challenge of
vague dangers. And people had been so long oppressed by the
threat of and preparation for war that its arrival came with an
effect of positive relief.
Section 2
The plan of campaign of the Allies assigned the defence of the
lower Meuse to the English, and the troop-trains were run direct
from the various British depots to the points in the Ardennes
where they were intended to entrench themselves.
Most of the documents bearing upon the campaign were destroyed
during the war, from the first the scheme of the Allies seems to
have been confused, but it is highly probable that the formation
of an aerial park in this region, from which attacks could be
made upon the vast industrial plant of the lower Rhine, and a
flanking raid through Holland upon the German naval
establishments at the mouth of the Elbe, were integral parts of
the original project. Nothing of this was known to such pawns in
the game as Barnet and his company, whose business it was to do
what they were told by the mysterious intelligences at the
direction of things in Paris, to which city the Whitehall staff
had also been transferred. From first to last these directing
intelligences remained mysterious to the body of the army, veiled
under the name of 'Orders.' There was no Napoleon, no Caesar to
embody enthusiasm. Barnet says, 'We talked of Them. THEY are
sending us up into Luxembourg. THEY are going to turn the
Central European right.'
Behind the veil of this vagueness the little group of more or
less worthy men which constituted Headquarters was beginning to
realise the enormity of the thing it was supposed to control…
In the great hall of the War Control, whose windows looked out
across the Seine to the Trocadero and the palaces of the western
quarter, a series of big-scale relief maps were laid out upon
tables to display the whole seat of war, and the staff-officers
of the control were continually busy shifting the little blocks
which represented the contending troops, as the reports and
intelligence came drifting in to the various telegraphic bureaux
in the adjacent rooms. In other smaller apartments there were
maps of a less detailed sort, upon which, for example, the
reports of the British Admiralty and of the Slav commanders were
recorded as they kept coming to hand. Upon these maps, as upon
chessboards, Marshal Dubois, in consultation with General Viard
and the Earl of Delhi, was to play the great game for world
supremacy against the Central European powers. Very probably he
had a definite idea of his game; very probably he had a coherent
and admirable plan.
But he had reckoned without a proper estimate either of the new
strategy of aviation or of the possibilities of atomic energy
that Holsten had opened for mankind. While he planned
entrenchments and invasions and a frontier war, the Central
European generalship was striking at the eyes and the brain. And
while, with a certain diffident hesitation, he developed his