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.  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 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.