WHAT IS COMING—THE END OF THE WAR.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 163, 7 April 1916, Page 4 (Supplement)

WHAT IS COMING—THE END OF THE WAR.

An article contributed by Mr. H. •'•€}. Wellsi the famous writer and novelist, to the "Daiy Chronicle," London, and the "Stturday Evening Post," in America, deals in a prophetic vein with the probable conditions that will govern the war from now •to the end. Mr. Wells is undoubtedly well qualified to deal with such o subject, and his main arguments and conclusions are given below.

The prophet who emerges! with the most honour from this war is Bloch. It must be fifteen or sixteen years ago since this gifted Russian made his forecast of the future. Perhaps it is more, for the French translation was certainly in existence before the Boer War. His case was that war between fairly equal antagonists 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.

His book was very carefully studied in Germany. As a humble follower of Bloch I did not realise this, 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 1 saw in Berlin. I thought thai he was a iheatrical person wTio would dream of vast attacks and tremendous cavalry charges, and that he would lead Germany to be smashed against the allied •defensive in the West, r,ndi to be smashed ?o 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 thust him aside, the Germany we English fight now, the Ostwald-Krupp Germany cf 1915. That "Germany, one may now perceive, had read an dthought over and thought out "the Bloch problem.

TWO KINDS OF WARFARE. 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 tfle Allies had never worked out trench warfare; they were unready for it, the Germans knew of their unreadiness, and upon this 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 191] army, and their whole wenine schemewas based on the conviction that th-5 Allies would not entrench. ... In the .Victorian war that ended in the midd'e .of September they delivered their blow they overreached, they were successfully counter-attacked on the Marne, and then abruptly—almost unfairly it seemed to our sportsmanlike conceptions — -they shifted to the game played accord leg to the very latest rules of 1914. The war did not come up to date until the ißattle of the Aisne. With that th--second act of the great drama began. 1 do not believe that the German'; -&ver thought it would 1 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 tiie submarine attack and the Zeppelins, 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 with the fighting. By December, Bloch, who had seemed l utterly disci edited in August, was justified up to the hilt. Th? 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 thorough•ly ventilated by imaginative writers .fifteen years before, was being grasped ]>y our conservative but by no means inadaptable leaders 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 apeace. 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 go ins, 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 ir. They havo brought their military science up to date, and to-day tho disarity in wience 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 disnvssed altogether from our calculations. The end of this war will be a matter of negotiation between practically immobilised and extremely shattered antagonists. .

STRIKING THROUGH THE AIR. There is, of course, one aspect of the Bloch deadlock that the Germans at least have contemplated. . . There is the air path. . . . The Germans alone have made any sustained effort to strike through the air at their enemies !>eyond the war zone. . . . But it is doubtful 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 is likely to lie, to stiffen the British resolution to fight this war through to the conclusive ending of any such possibilities.

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 ; n the combatant nations. The problems of this war. as of all war, end as they h,>gn in national psychoid v.

But it will be urged that this is reckoning without the Balkans. I submit that the German thrust through Servia is really no part of the war that has ended in the deadlock of 1915. Here there is no way round or through to any vital centre of Germany's antagonists. It turns nothing; it opens nn path to Paris, London, or Petrograd. It is a long, long way from the Danube to either Egypt or Bagdac', and there and there —Bloch is waiting. I do not think tlii) Germans have any intention of so generous an extension of their responsibilities. The Balkan complication is no solution of the deadlock problem. . . . Whatever surprises or

•hanges this last phase of that bloodclotted melodrama, the Eastern Empire, may involve, they will not alter the essential conclusion of the great war, that the Central Powers and their alleged 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.

THE RIGORS OF A WAR OF ATTRITION.

Just how the people who use the word 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, militated 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. W happens in the Turkish Empire, or India, or America, or elsewhere may accelerate, or retard l , or extend the area of 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 against the Central Powers. Their peculiar virtue, their tremendously complete organisation which enabled them to put so large a proportion or 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 r. 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 the woiM. Conceivably they will draw upon tiie resources of their Balkan allies, but the extent to which they can do that may very easily be over-estimated 1 . There is a limit to the power for treason of these spuposititious German monarchs that British folly has permitted to possess these Balkan thrones, and none of the Balkan peoples is likely to witness the complete looting of its country in the German interest by a German court with enthusiasm.

Germany will have to pay on the nail for most of her Balkan he'p. She will have to put more into the Balkans than she takes out. And, compared wjti the world behind the Allies, the Turkish country is a country of mountains, desert, and undeveloped lands. To develop these regions into a source of supplies under the strains and shortages of wartime will be an immense and dangerous undertaking for Germany. She may open mines she may never work, build railways that others will enjoy, -sow harvests for alien reaping. And for all these tasks she must Lend men. Men?

At present, so far as any judgment is possible, Germany is feeling the pinch of the war much more even than France, which is habitual l y parsimonious, and Russia, which is hardy and insensitive. Great Britain has really only begun to feel the stress. She has probably suffered economically no more than Holland or Switzerland 1 , and Italy and Japan have certainly suffered less. All these countries are full of men, oi' gear, of salable futures. In every pars of tiie globe Great Britain has co'ossal investments. She has stjll to apply the great principle of conscription, not only to her sons but to the property of her overseas investors and of her landed proprietors. She has not even looked yet at the German financial expedients of a year ago. She moves reluctantly but surely toward such a thoroughness of mobilisation. There need be no doubt that she will completely socialise herself, completely reorganise her whole social and economic structure, soonethan lose this war. She will do it clumsily and ungracefully, with much internal bickering, but not so slowly as a logical mind might anticipate. Germany then, I reckon, will becomes exhausted first among all the combatnts. I think, too, that she will, as a nation, feel and l lie aware of what \s happening to her sooner than any of the other nations that are sharing in this process of depletion. In 1914 the Germans were reaping the liar /est ot forty years of economic development, and business enterprise. Property and plenty were new experiences, and a generation had grown up in whose world a sense of expansion an dprogress was normal. There existed no trdition ( t the great hardship of war, such as t! c French possessed, to steel their minds. They ciine into this war more ouo.n:[y and confidently than any other people. Neither great victories iu. r defeats have been theirs, but only a slow, vast transition from joyful effort to hardship, loss and 1 loss of sub,t.m.:e, the dwindling of great hopes, (he realisation of ebb in the triunpliant tide of national welfare. They are under stresses now rs harsh a» the stresses of France.

THE FIRST HERALDS OF PEACE. We know little of the psychology of this new Gerfhany that has come into being since IS7I, hut it is doubtful if it will accept defeat, and still more doubtful how it will evade some ending to the war that will admit the failure of all its great hopes of Paris subjugated, London humbled, Russia suppliant, Belgium conquered l . Such an ending will be a day of reckoning that German imperialism will postpone until the last hope of some breach among the Allies, some saving miracle in the old Eastern Empire, some dramatically snatched victory at the eleventh hour, is gone. Nor can the Pledged Allies consent to a peace that does not involve the evaluation of Belgium and Servia, and at least tlu> autonomy of the lost provinces of France. Those are the ends of the main war. Europe will go down t: 1 rough stage after stage of impoverishment and exhaustion until these end® are attained or r.n !•> forever irn-

But these things form only the main outlines of a story with a vast amount of collateral interest. It is to these collateral issues that the amateur in prophecy must give his attention. It is here that the German will be induced by his Government to see his compensations. He will be consoled for the restoration of Servia by prospects of future conflicts between Italian and Jugoslav that will let him m again to the Adriatic. His attention will be directed to his newer, closer association with Bulgaria and Turkey. _ In those countries he may yet repeat the miracle of Hungary. He will hope a'so to retain his fleet, and 110 peace, he will be reminded l , can rob him of his hard-earned technical superiority in the air. The German Air Fleet of 1930 may yet he something as predominant as the British Navy of 1915. Had he not bettor wait for that ? YV hen such ideas as these become popular in the German Press we may begin to talk of peace, for these will be its necessary heralds. . .

The broad conditions of a possible peace wiil l>egin to get stated toward the end of 1916j and a certain lassitude will creep over the operations in the field. The process of exhaustion will probably have reached such a point by that time that it will b e a primary fact in the consciousness of common citizens of every belligerent counrtv. The common life of all Europe will have become—miserable. Conclusive blows will have receded 1 out of the imagination of the contending Powers. The war will have reached its fourth and last stage as a war. The war of the great attack will have given place to the war of the military deadlock; the war of the deadlock will have gone on with a gradual shifting of the interest to the war of treasons and diplomacies in the Eastern Mediterranean; and now the last phase will be developing into predominance, in which each nation will bo most concerned, no longer about victories or conquest, but about securing for itself the best chances of rapid economic recuperation and 1 social reconstruction. Tho commercial treaties, the arrangements for future associated action, made by the great Allies among themselves will appear more and more important to them and the mere question of boundaries less and less. It will dawn upon Europe that she has already dissipated the resources that enabled her to levy the tribute paid toilier investments in every quarter of the earth, and that neither tho Germans nor their antagonists will be able for many years to go oil with those piojects for world exploitation which la\ at the root of the great war. \ ery jaded and anaemic nations will bit about the table on which the new map of Europe will be drawn. Each of tne diplomatists will come to that business with a certain pre-oeeupation. Each will be thinking of his country as one thinks of a patient of doubtful patience and temper who is coming to out of the drugged stupor of a crucial, ill-conceived, and unnecessary operation Each will be thinking of Labour, wounded and perplexed, returning to the disorganised factories from wtucli Capital has fled.