32 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



force. It would, they foresaw, interfere with the 

 efficiency of the instrument of irresistible force 

 which they were forging in civilization. But their 

 policy, in this last resort, had been thought out. 

 It was already outlined in the textbooks of war. 

 It was " to smash the whole fabric of that spiritual 

 life " in the soldier himself, equally with that of the 

 enemy, for they had counted upon the necessity in 

 both cases, which ran counter to the policy which 

 demanded success as the supreme object of war. 1 



Thus had the essentially pagan mind of the West 

 reached to the elementals of the atavistic creed of 

 omnipotent force biological necessity it had become 

 in the military textbooks of Germany into which it 

 had rendered the thesis which Darwin had given to 

 it fifty years previously. Slowly but with increasing 

 momentum the curtain was beginning to rise upon 

 the greatest world-drama of force in the history of 

 humanity. 



It is necessary to turn now to watch other as- 

 pects of this movement in civilization into which all 

 local phases, national and social, have rapidly been 



1 For the teaching as to smashing the spiritual life of the 

 enemy compare The German War Book (Kriegsbrauch im Land- 

 kriege), translated by J. H. Morgan, M.A. For the teaching as 

 to smashing the spiritual life of the soldier when it ran counter to 

 the necessities of war compare passage quoted from Austrian 

 military textbook, for which and reference see p. 71 of this 

 volume. 



