and finally you are hit by the sound of the explosion. This is the
climax and end of the life history of any shell that is not a dud
shell. Afterwards the battered fuse may serve as some journalist's
paper-weight. The rest is scrap iron.

Such is, so to speak, the primary process of modern warfare. I will
not draw the obvious pacifist moral of the intense folly of human
concentration upon such a process. The Germans willed it. We Allies
have but obeyed the German will for warfare because we could not do
otherwise, we have taken up this simple game of shell delivery, and we
are teaching them that we can play it better, in the hope that so we
and the world may be freed from the German will-to-power and all its
humiliating and disgusting consequences henceforth for ever. Europe
now is no more than a household engaged in holding up and if possible
overpowering a monomaniac member.


4

Now the whole of this process of the making and delivery of a shell,
which is the main process of modern warfare, is one that can be far
better conducted by a man accustomed to industrial organisation or
transit work than by the old type of soldier. This is a thing that
cannot be too plainly stated or too often repeated. Germany nearly won
this way because of her tremendously modern industrial resources; but
she blundered into it and she is losing it because she has too many men
in military uniform and because their tradition and interests were to
powerful with her. All the state and glories of soldiering, the bright
uniforms, the feathers and spurs, the flags, the march-past, the
disciplined massed advance, the charge; all these are as needless and