There will be nothing else on the earth but preparation for war.  All living forces will be absorbed by it; it will monopolize all discovery, all science, all imagination.  Supremacy in the air alone, the regular levies for the control of space, will suffice to squander a nation’s fortune.  For aerial navigation, at its birth in the middle of envious circles, has become a rich prize which everybody desires, a prey they have immeasurably torn in pieces.

Other expenditure will dry up before that on destruction does, and other longings as well, and all the reasons for living.  Such will be the sense of humanity’s last age.

* * * * * *

The battlefields were prepared long ago.  They cover entire provinces with one black city, with a great metallic reservoir of factories, where iron floors and furnaces tremble, bordered by a land of forests whose trees are steel, and of wells where sleeps the sharp blackness of snares; a country navigated by frantic groups of railway trains in parallel formation, and heavy as attacking columns.  At whatever point you may be on the plain, even if you turn away, even if you take flight, the bright tentacles of the rails diverge and shine, and cloudy sheaves of wires rise into the air.  Upon that territory of execution there rises and falls and writhes machinery so complex that it has not even names, so vast that it has not even shape; for aloft—­above the booming whirlwinds which are linked from east to west in the glow of molten metal whose flashes are great as those of lighthouses, or in the pallor of scattered electric constellations—­hardly can one make out the artificial outline of a mountain range, clapped upon space.

This immense city of immense low buildings, rectangular and dark, is not a city.  They are assaulting tanks, which a feeble internal gesture sets in motion, ready for the rolling rush of their gigantic knee-caps.  These endless cannon, thrust into pits which search into the fiery entrails of the earth, and stand there upright, hardly leaning so much as Pisa’s tower; and these slanting tubes, long as factory chimneys, so long that perspective distorts their lines and sometimes splays them like the trumpets of Apocalypse—­these are not cannon; they are machine-guns, fed by continuous ribbons of trains which scoop out in entire regions—­and upon a country, if need be—­mountains of profundity.

In war, which was once like the open country and is now wholly like towns—­and even like one immense building—­one hardly sees the men.  On the round-ways and the casemates, the footbridges and the movable platforms, among the labyrinth of concrete caves, above the regiment echelonned downwards in the gulf and enormously upright,—­one sees a haggard herd of wan and stooping men, men black and trickling, men issuing from the peaty turf of night, men who came there to save their country.  They earthed themselves up in some zone of the vertical