第33章 NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES(4)

The dump I best remember I visited on a wet and windy day.Over a great space of ground the sidings of the rail-head spread, the normal gauge rail-head spread out like a fan and interdigitated with the narrow gauge lines that go up practically to the guns.

And also at the sides camions were loading, and an officer from the Midi in charge of one of these was being dramatically indignant at five minutes' delay.Between these two sets of lines, shells were piled of all sizes, I should think some hundreds of thousands of shells altogether, wet and shining in the rain.French reservists, soldiers from Madagascar, and some Senegalese were busy at different points loading and unloading the precious freights.A little way from me were despondent-looking German prisoners handling timber.All this dump was no more than an eddy as it were in the path of the shell from its birth from the steel bars near Paris to the accomplishment of its destiny in the destruction or capture of more Germans.

And next the visitor meets the shell coming up upon a little trolley to the gun.He sees the gunners, as drilled and precise as the men he saw at the forges, swing out the breech block and run the shell, which has met and combined with its detonators and various other industrial products since it left the main dump, into the gun.The breech closes like a safe door, and hides the shell from the visitor.It is "good-bye." He receives exaggerated warning of the danger to his ears, stuffs his fingers into them, and opens his mouth as instructed, hears a loud but by no means deafening report, and sees a spit of flame near the breech.Regulations of a severe character prevent his watching from an aeroplane the delivery of the goods upon the customers opposite.

I have already described the method of locating enemy guns and so forth by photography.Many of the men at this work are like dentists rather than soldiers; they are busy in carefully lit rooms, they wear white overalls, they have clean hands and laboratory manners.The only really romantic figure in the whole of this process, the only figure that has anything of the old soldierly swagger about him still, is the aviator.And, as one friend remarked to me when I visited the work of the British flying corps, "The real essential strength of this arm is the organisation of its repairs.Here is one of the repair vans through which our machine guns go.It is a motor workshop on wheels.But at any time all this park, everything, can pack up and move forward like Barnum and Bailey's Circus.The machine guns come through this shop in rotation; they go out again, cleaned, repaired, made new again.Since we got all that working we have heard nothing of a machine gun jamming in any air fight at all."...

The rest of the career of the shell after it has left the gun one must imagine chiefly from the incoming shell from the enemy.You see suddenly a flying up of earth and stones and anything else that is movable in the neighbourhood of the shell-burst, the instantaneous unfolding of a dark cloud of dust and reddish smoke, which comes very quickly to a certain size and then begins slowly to fray out and blow away.Then, after seeing the cloud of the burst you hear the hiss of the shell's approach, 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.Iwill 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 obsolete now in war as the masks and shields of an old-time Chinese brave.Liberal-minded people talk of the coming dangers of militarism in the face of events that prove conclusively that professional militarism is already as dead as Julius Caesar.What is coming is not so much the conversion of men into soldiers as the socialisation of the economic organisation of the country with a view to both national and international necessities.We do not want to turn a chemist or a photographer into a little figure like a lead soldier, moving mechanically at the word of command, but we do want to make his chemistry or photography swiftly available if the national organisation is called upon to fight.