destroyers and airships and submarines.

And when I come to military matters my persuasion that things are not
all right, that our current hostility to imaginative activity and our
dull acceptance of established methods and traditions is leading us
towards grave dangers, intensifies. In South Africa the Boers taught us
in blood and bitterness the obvious fact that barbed wire had its
military uses, and over the high passes on the way to Lhassa (though,
luckily, it led to no disaster) there was not a rifle in condition to
use because we had not thought to take glycerine. The perpetual novelty
of modern conditions demands an imaginative alertness we eliminate. I do
not believe that the Army Council or anyone in authority has worked out
a tithe of the essential problems of contemporary war. If they have,
then it does not show. Our military imagination is half-way back to bows
and arrows. The other day I saw a detachment of the Legion of
Frontiersmen disporting itself at Totteridge. I presume these young
heroes consider they are preparing for a possible conflict in England or
Western Europe, and I presume the authorities are satisfied with them.
It is at any rate the only serious war of which there is any manifest
probability. Western Europe is now a network of railways, tramways, high
roads, wires of all sorts; its chief beasts of burthen are the railway
train and the motor car and the bicycle; towns and hypertrophied
villages are often practically continuous over large areas; there is
abundant water and food, and the commonest form of cover is the house.
But the Legion of Frontiersmen is equipped for war, oh!--in Arizona in
1890, and so far as I am able to judge the most modern sections of the
army extant are organised for a colonial war in (say) 1899 or 1900.
There is, of course, a considerable amount of vague energy demanding
conscription and urging our youth towards a familiarity with arms and
the backwoodsman's life, but of any thought-out purpose in our arming