What is Coming? by H. G. Wells

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Peace organisation seems, indeed, to be following the lines of public
sanitation. Everybody in England, for example, was bored by the
discussion of sanitation--until the great cholera epidemic. Everybody
thought public health a very desirable thing, but nobody thought it
intensely and overridingly desirable. Then the interest in sanitation
grew lively, and people exerted themselves to create responsible
organisations. Crimes of violence, again, were neglected in the great
cities of Europe until the danger grew to dimensions that evolved the
police. There come occasions when the normal concentration of an
individual upon his own immediate concerns becomes impossible; as, for
instance, when a man who is stocktaking in his business premises
discovers that the house next door is on fire. A great many people who
have never troubled their heads about anything but their own purely
personal and selfish interests are now realising that quite a multitude
of houses about them are ablaze, and that the fire is spreading.

That is one change the war will bring about that will make for world
peace: a quickened general interest in its possibility. Another is the
certainty that the war will increase the number of devoted and fanatic
characters available for disinterested effort. Whatever other outcome
this war may have, it means that there lies ahead a period of extreme
economic and political dislocation. The credit system has been strained,
and will be strained, and will need unprecedented readjustments. In the
past such phases of uncertainty, sudden impoverishment and disorder as
certainly lie ahead of us, have meant for a considerable number of minds
a release--or, if you prefer it, a flight--from the habitual and
selfish. Types of intense religiosity, of devotion and of endeavour are
let loose, and there will be much more likelihood that we may presently
find, what it is impossible to find now, a number of devoted men and
women ready to give their whole lives, with a quasi-religious
enthusiasm, to this great task of peace establishment, finding in such
impersonal work a refuge from the disappointments, limitations, losses
and sorrows of their personal life--a refuge we need but little in more
settled and more prosperous periods. They will be but the outstanding
individuals in a very universal quickening. And simultaneously with this
quickening of the general imagination by experience there are certain
other developments in progress that point very clearly to a change under
the pressure of this war of just those institutions of nationality,
kingship, diplomacy and inter-State competition that have hitherto stood
most effectually in the way of a world pacification. The considerations
that seem to point to this third change are very convincing, to my mind.

The real operating cause that is, I believe, going to break down the
deadlock that has hitherto made a supreme court and a federal government
for the world at large a dream, lies in just that possibility of an
"inconclusive peace" which so many people seem to dread. Germany, I
believe, is going to be beaten, but not completely crushed, by this war;
she is going to be left militarist and united with Austria and Hungary,
and unchanged in her essential nature; and out of that state of affairs
comes, I believe, the hope for an ultimate confederation of the nations
of the earth.

Because, in the face of a league of the Central European Powers
attempting recuperation, cherishing revenge, dreaming of a renewal of
the struggle, it becomes impossible for the British, the French, the
Belgians, Russians, Italians or Japanese to think any longer of settling
their differences by war among themselves. To do so will mean the
creation of opportunity for the complete reinstatement of German
militarism. It will open the door for a conclusive German hegemony.
Now, however clumsy and confused the diplomacy of these present Allies
may be (challenged constantly, as it is, by democracy and hampered by a
free, venal and irresponsible Press in at least three of their
countries), the necessity they will be under will be so urgent and so
evident, that it is impossible to imagine that they will not set up some
permanent organ for the direction and co-ordination of their joint
international relationships. It may be a queerly constituted body at
first; it may be of a merely diplomatic pretension; it may be called a
Congress, or any old name of that sort, but essentially its business
will be to conduct a joint fiscal, military and naval policy, to keep
the peace in the Balkans and Asia, to establish a relationship with
China, and organise joint and several arbitration arrangements with
America. And it must develop something more sure and swift than our
present diplomacy. One of its chief concerns will be the right of way
through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and the watching of the
forces that stir up conflict in the Balkans and the Levant. It must have
unity enough for that; it must be much more than a mere leisurely,
unauthoritative conference of representatives.

For precisely similar reasons it seems to me incredible that the two
great Central European Powers should ever fall into sustained conflict
again with one another. They, too, will be forced to create some
overriding body to prevent so suicidal a possibility. America too, it
may be, will develop some Pan-American equivalent. Probably the hundred
millions of Latin America may achieve a method of unity, and then deal
on equal terms with the present United States. The thing has been ably
advocated already in South America. Whatever appearances of separate
sovereignties are kept up after the war, the practical outcome of the
struggle is quite likely to be this: that there will be only three great
World Powers left--the anti-German allies, the allied Central Europeans,
the Pan-Americans. And it is to be noted that, whatever the constituents
of these three Powers may be, none of them is likely to be a monarchy.
They may include monarchies, as England includes dukedoms. But they will
be overriding alliances, not overriding rulers. I leave it to the
mathematician to work out exactly how much the chances of conflict are
diminished when there are practically only three Powers in the world
instead of some scores. And these new Powers will be in certain respects
unlike any existing European "States." None of the three Powers will be
small or homogeneous enough to serve dynastic ambitions, embody a
national or racial Kultur, or fall into the grip of any group of
financial enterprises. They will be more comprehensive, less romantic,
and more businesslike altogether. They will be, to use a phrase
suggested a year or so ago, Great States.... And the war threat between
the three will be so plain and definite, the issues will be so lifted
out of the spheres of merely personal ambition and national feeling,
that I do not see why the negotiating means, the standing conference of
the three, should not ultimately become the needed nucleus of the World
State for which at present we search the world in vain.

There are more ways than one to the World State, and this second
possibility of a post-war conference and a conference of the Allies,
growing almost unawares into a pacific organisation of the world, since
it goes on directly from existing institutions, since it has none of the
quality of a clean break with the past which the idea of an immediate
World State and Pax Mundi involves, and more particularly since it
neither abolishes nor has in it anything to shock fundamentally the
princes, the diplomatists, the lawyers, the statesmen and politicians,
the nationalists and suspicious people, since it gives them years in
which to change and die out and reappear in new forms, and since at the
same time it will command the support of every intelligent human being
who gets his mind clear enough from his circumstances to understand its
import, is a far more credible hope than the hope of anything coming _de
novo_ out of Hague Foundations or the manifest logic of the war.

But, of course, there weighs against these hopes the possibility that
the Allied Powers are too various in their nature, too biased, too
feeble intellectually and imaginatively, to hold together and maintain
any institution for co-operation. The British Press may be too silly not
to foster irritation and suspicion; we may get Carsonism on a larger
scale trading on the resuscitation of dying hatreds; the British and
Russian diplomatists may play annoying tricks upon one another by sheer
force of habit. There may be many troubles of that sort. Even then I do
not see that the hope of an ultimate world peace vanishes. But it will
be a Roman world peace, made in Germany, and there will have to be
several more great wars before it is established. Germany is too
homogeneous yet to have begun the lesson of compromise and the
renunciation of the dream of national conquest. The Germans are a
national, not an imperial people. France has learnt that through
suffering, and Britain and Russia because for two centuries they have
been imperial and not national systems. The German conception of world
peace is as yet a conception of German ascendancy. The Allied conception
becomes perforce one of mutual toleration.

But I will not press this inquiry farther now. It is, as I said at the
beginning, a preliminary exploration of one of the great questions with
which I propose to play in these articles. The possibility I have
sketched is the one that most commends itself to me as probable. After a
more detailed examination of the big operating forces at present working
in the world, we may be in a position to revise these suggestions with a
greater confidence and draw our net of probabilities a little tighter.

II. THE END OF THE WAR[1]

The prophet who emerges with the most honour from this war is Bloch. It
must be fifteen or sixteen years ago since this gifted Pole made his
forecast of the future. Perhaps it is more, for the French translation
of his book was certainly in existence before the Boer War. His case was
that war between antagonists of fairly equal equipment must end in a
deadlock because of the continually increasing defensive efficiency of
entrenched infantry. This would give the defensive an advantage over the
most brilliant strategy and over considerably superior numbers that
would completely discourage all aggression. He concluded that war was
played out.

[Footnote 1: This chapter was originally a newspaper article. It was
written in December, 1915, and published about the middle of January.
Some of it has passed from the quality of anticipation to achievement,
but I do not see that it needs any material revision on that account.]

His book was very carefully studied in Germany. As a humble disciple of
Bloch I should have realised this, but I did not, and that failure led
me into some unfortunate prophesying at the outbreak of the war. I
judged Germany by the Kaiser, and by the Kaiser-worship which I saw in
Berlin. I thought that he was a theatrical person who would dream of
vast massed attacks and tremendous cavalry charges, and that he would
lead Germany to be smashed against the Allied defensive in the West, and
to be smashed so thoroughly that the war would be over. I did not
properly appreciate the more studious and more thorough Germany that was
to fight behind the Kaiser and thrust him aside, the Germany we British
fight now, the Ostwald-Krupp Germany of 1915. That Germany, one may now
perceive, had read and thought over and thought out the Bloch problem.

There was also a translation of Bloch into French. In English a portion
of his book was translated for the general reader and published with a
preface by the late Mr. W.T. Stead. It does not seem to have reached the
British military authorities, nor was it published in England with an
instructive intention. As an imaginative work it would have been
considered worthless and impracticable.

But it is manifest now that if the Belgian and French frontiers had been
properly prepared--as they should have been prepared when the Germans
built their strategic railways--with trenches and gun emplacements and
secondary and tertiary lines, the Germans would never have got fifty
miles into either France or Belgium. They would have been held at Liege
and in the Ardennes. Five hundred thousand men would have held them
indefinitely. But the Allies had never worked trench warfare; they were
unready for it, Germans knew of their unreadiness, and their unreadiness
it is quite clear they calculated. They did not reckon, it is now clear
that they were right in not reckoning, the Allies as contemporary
soldiers. They were going to fight a 1900 army with a 1914 army, and
their whole opening scheme was based on the conviction that the Allies
would not entrench.

Somebody in those marvellous maxims from the dark ages that seem to form
the chief reading of our military experts, said that the army that
entrenches is a defeated army. The silly dictum was repeated and
repeated in the English papers after the battle of the Marne. It shows
just where our military science had reached in 1914, namely, to a level
a year before Bloch wrote. So the Allies retreated.

For long weeks the Allies retreated out of the west of Belgium, out of
the north of France, and for rather over a month there was a loose
mobile war--as if Bloch had never existed. The Germans were not fighting
the 1914 pattern of war, they were fighting the 1899 pattern of war, in
which direct attack, outflanking and so on were still supposed to be
possible; they were fighting confident in their overwhelming numbers, in
their prepared surprise, in the unthought-out methods of their
opponents. In the "Victorian" war that ended in the middle of September,
1914, they delivered their blow, they over-reached, they were
successfully counter-attacked on the Marne, and then abruptly--almost
unfairly it seemed to the British sportsmanlike conceptions--they
shifted to the game played according to the very latest rules of 1914.
The war did not come up to date until the battle of the Aisne. With that
the second act of the great drama began.

I do not believe that the Germans ever thought it would come up to date
so soon. I believe they thought that they would hustle the French out of
Paris, come right up to the Channel at Calais before the end of 1914,
and then entrench, produce the submarine attack and the Zeppelins
against England, working from Calais as a base, and that they would end
the war before the spring of 1915--with the Allies still a good fifteen
years behindhand.

I believe the battle of the Marne was the decisive battle of the war, in
that it shattered this plan, and that the rest of the 1914 fighting was
Germany's attempt to reconstruct their broken scheme in the face of an
enemy who was continually getting more and more nearly up to date with
the fighting. By December, Bloch, who had seemed utterly discredited in
August, was justified up to the hilt. The world was entrenched at his
feet. By May the lagging military science of the British had so far
overtaken events as to realise that shrapnel was no longer so important
as high explosive, and within a year the significance of machine guns, a
significance thoroughly ventilated by imaginative writers fifteen years
before, was being grasped by the conservative but by no means
inadaptable leaders of Britain.

The war since that first attempt--admirably planned and altogether
justifiable (from a military point of view, I mean)--of Germany to
"rush" a victory, has consisted almost entirely of failures on both
sides either to get round or through or over the situation foretold by
Bloch. There has been only one marked success, the German success in
Poland due to the failure of the Russian munitions. Then for a time the
war in the East was mobile and precarious while the Russians retreated
to their present positions, and the Germans pursued and tried to
surround them. That was a lapse into the pre-Bloch style. Now the
Russians are again entrenched, their supplies are restored, the Germans
have a lengthened line of supplies, and Bloch is back upon his pedestal
so far as the Eastern theatre goes.

Bloch has been equally justified in the Anglo-French attempt to get
round through Gallipoli. The forces of the India Office have pushed
their way through unprepared country towards Bagdad, and are now
entrenching in Mesopotamia, but from the point of view of the main war
that is too remote to be considered either getting through or getting
round; and so too the losses of the German colonies and the East African
War are scarcely to be reckoned with in the main war. They have no
determining value. There remains the Balkan struggle. But the Balkan
struggle is something else; it is something new. It must be treated
separately. It is a war of treacheries and brags and appearances. It is
not a part of, it is a sequence to, the deadlock war of 1915.

But before dealing with this new development of the latter half of 1915
it is necessary to consider certain general aspects of the deadlock
war. It is manifest that the Germans hoped to secure an effective
victory in this war before they ran up against Bloch. But reckoning with
Bloch, as they certainly did, they hoped that even in the event of the
war getting to earth, it would still be possible to produce novelties
that would sufficiently neutralise Bloch to secure a victorious peace.
With unexpectedly powerful artillery suddenly concentrated, with high
explosives, with asphyxiating gas, with a well-organised system of
grenade throwing and mining, with attacks of flaming gas, and above all
with a vast munition-making plant to keep them going, they had a very
reasonable chance of hacking their way through.

Against these prepared novelties the Allies have had to improvise, and
on the whole the improvisation has kept pace with the demands made upon
it. They have brought their military science up to date, and to-day the
disparity in science and equipment between the antagonists has greatly
diminished. There has been no escaping Bloch after all, and the
deadlock, if no sudden peace occurs, can end now in only one thing, the
exhaustion in various degrees of all the combatants and the succumbing
of the most exhausted. The idea of a conclusive end of the traditional
pattern to this war, of a triumphal entry into London, Paris, Berlin or
Moscow, is to be dismissed altogether from our calculations. The end of
this war will be a matter of negotiation between practically immobilised
and extremely shattered antagonists.

There is, of course, one aspect of the Bloch deadlock that the Germans
at least have contemplated. If it is not possible to get through or
round, it may still be possible to get over. There is the air path.

This idea has certainly taken hold of the French mind, but France has
been too busy and is temperamentally too economical to risk large
expenditures upon what is necessarily an experiment. The British are too
conservative and sceptical to be the pioneers in any such enterprise.
The Russians have been too poor in the necessary resources of mechanics
and material.

The Germans alone have made any sustained attempt to strike through the
air at their enemies beyond the war zone. Their Zeppelin raids upon
England have shown a steadily increasing efficiency, and it is highly
probable that they will be repeated on a much larger scale before the
war is over. Quite possibly, too, the Germans are developing an
accessory force of large aeroplanes to co-operate in such an attack.
The long coasts of Britain, the impossibility of their being fully
equipped throughout their extent, except at a prohibitive cost of men
and material, to resist air invaders, exposes the whole length of the
island to considerable risk and annoyance from such an expedition.

It is doubtful, though, if the utmost damage an air raid is likely to
inflict upon England would count materially in the exhaustion process,
and the moral effect of these raids has been, and will be, to stiffen
the British resolution to fight this war through to the conclusive
ending of any such possibilities.

The net result of these air raids is an inflexible determination of the
British people rather to die in death grips with German militarism than
to live and let it survive. The best chance for the aircraft was at the
beginning of the war, when a surprise development might have had
astounding results. That chance has gone by. The Germans are racially
inferior to both French and English in the air, and the probability of
effective blows over the deadlock is on the whole a probability in
favour of the Allies. Nor is there anything on or under the sea that
seems likely now to produce decisive results. We return from these
considerations to a strengthened acceptance of Bloch.

The essential question for the prophet remains therefore the question of
which group of Powers will exhaust itself most rapidly. And following on
from that comes the question of how the successive stages of exhaustion
will manifest themselves in the combatant nations. The problems of this
war, as of all war, end as they begin in national psychology.

But it will be urged that this is reckoning without the Balkans. I
submit that the German thrust through the wooded wilderness of Serbia is
really no part of the war that has ended in the deadlock of 1915. It is
dramatic, tragic, spectacular, but it is quite inconclusive. Here there
is no way round or through to any vital centre of Germany's antagonists.
It turns nothing; it opens no path to Paris, London, or Petrograd. It is
a long, long way from the Danube to either Egypt or Mesopotamia, and
there--and there--Bloch is waiting. I do not think the Germans have any
intention of so generous an extension of their responsibilities. The
Balkan complication is no solution of the deadlock problem. It is the
opening of the sequel.

A whole series of new problems are opened up directly we turn to this
most troubled region of the Balkans--problems of the value of kingship,
of nationality, of the destiny of such cities as Constantinople, which
from their very beginning have never had any sort of nationality at all,
of the destiny of countries such as Albania, where a tangle of intense
tribal nationalities is distributed in spots and patches, or Dalmatia,
where one extremely self-conscious nation and language is present in the
towns and another in the surrounding country, or Asia Minor, where no
definite national boundaries, no religious, linguistic, or social
homogeneities have ever established themselves since the Roman legions
beat them down.

But all these questions can really be deferred or set aside in our
present discussion, which is a discussion of the main war. Whatever
surprises or changes this last phase of the Eastern Empire, that
blood-clotted melodrama, may involve, they will but assist and hasten on
the essential conclusion of the great war, that the Central Powers and
their pledged antagonists are in a deadlock, unable to reach a decision,
and steadily, day by day, hour by hour, losing men, destroying material,
spending credit, approaching something unprecedented, unknown, that we
try to express to ourselves by the word exhaustion.

Just how the people who use the word "exhaustion" so freely are
prepared to define it, is a matter for speculation. The idea seems to be
a phase in which the production of equipped forces ceases through the
using up of men or material or both. If the exhaustion is fairly mutual,
it need not be decisive for a long time. It may mean simply an ebb of
vigour on both sides, unusual hardship, a general social and economic
disorganisation and grading down. The fact that a great killing off of
men is implicit in the process, and that the survivors will be largely
under discipline, militates against the idea that the end may come
suddenly through a vigorous revolutionary outbreak. Exhaustion is likely
to be a very long and very thorough process, extending over years. A
"war of attrition" may last into 1918 or 1919, and may bring us to
conditions of strain and deprivation still only very vaguely imagined.
What happens in the Turkish Empire or India or America or elsewhere may
extend the areas of waste and accelerate or retard the process, but is
quite unlikely to end it.

Let us ask now which of the combatants is likely to undergo exhaustion
most rapidly, and what is of equal or greater importance, which is
likely to feel it first and most? No doubt there is a bias in my mind,
but it seems to me that the odds are on the whole heavily against the
Central Powers. Their peculiar German virtue, their tremendously
complete organisation, which enabled them to put so large a proportion
of their total resources into their first onslaught and to make so great
and rapid a recovery in the spring of 1915, leaves them with less to
draw upon now. Out of a smaller fortune they have spent a larger sum.
They are blockaded to a very considerable extent, and against them fight
not merely the resources of the Allies, but, thanks to the complete
British victory in the sea struggle, the purchasable resources of all
the world.

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