September 18, 1915. 
LAND AND WATER 
THE GROTESQUE IN MODERN WAR. 
By J. D. Symon. 
WHEN the present conflict claims ils Vernet, 
its Meissonier, its de Xeiiville, its Detaille, 
what shall the battle-painter of the future 
(we do not mean the Futurist painter) do 
with the new and hideous accessories which 
modern warfare has thrust upon his sight? Genius, it 
is true, can mould any material to its will, but it seems 
as if some problems had been presented which can be 
solved only by omission. Old wars, so late even as the 
Russo-Turkish of 1878, were still full of glitter and 
colour; the very rags of long campaigning held some 
picturesque traces of ceremonial parade; the plume, the 
hussar's floating sleeves, the flying sabretache kept the 
rhythm of war alive; the soldier made a gallant figure to 
the eye amid tlie grime and smoke of the hot engage- 
ment, and the brush of Delaroche could dwell with loving 
fidelity on the dust-stained uniform of Napoleon. The 
man was still paramount; he had not been lost behind a 
utilitarian disguise. It is this disguise that now con- 
fronts the battle-painter with a task that will try his skill 
to the uttermost. In some instances it may make him 
almost despair. 
Very curious is the pictorial history of this intrusion, 
a by-product of the scientific spirit. It began as a fore- 
cast, which has been verified almost to the letter. The 
fount and origin of the innovation, however, was 
literary ; the pen gave the pencil the first hint of the 
strange thing to be. ^X'^hen the fantastic imagination of 
Mr. H. G. Wells peered into the future and saw man- 
kind arming itself with the weapons of advanced science, 
the first blight fell upon the colour of war. 
Visions Fulfilled. 
Entered 1900 and its hurrying changes. Speed be- 
came an actuality, then a commonplace of life; the 
motorist stood before us in his odd costume, raised a 
laugh, and then ceased to be remarkable. Followed the 
conquest of the air, with further realisations of the 
AVellsian dream. We had begun to live in the pages of 
an Utopian picture-book. A little earlier, while flying 
was still something of a question, the same author had 
pushed Tennyson's wild surmise of aerial navies a step 
nearer fulfilment. 
What the poet adumbrated the novelist wrought out 
in minute detail. Perhaps his fable gave the Teuton 
encouragement to persevere, so convincing, so terrific 
was Mr. Wells's bombardment of New York. Half an 
hour's bomb-dropping utterly destroyed Broadway and 
brought the city to submission. As yet, no such complete 
success has attended aerial warfare, and the expert doubt 
hs possibility. We shall know later. But one thing is 
fulfilled — the grotesquerie that has come upon warfare, 
its colossal engines, its long-distance destruction, its 
approximation to a Titanic laboratory, duly fitted with 
its infernal stink-chamber. The frightfulness of the 
Martians' methods has been to a great extent paralleled 
by the crumbling of cities under modern ordnance. 
The modern scale is too great. If man be the measure 
of all thiiigs, as the Greeks held, then there must be a 
limit to his weapons. He seems to have let his warfare 
get out of hand. Fighting is no longer relative to the 
physical frame and personal prowess of man, as it was, in 
the purest sense, at Troy, and so remained, in effect, down 
even to the days of an efficient, but now puny, artillery. 
There remains, certainly, the bayonet charge, 
which may, when all is done, reassert the legitimate 
scope of combat, as between man and man, and, perhaps, 
at length, to decide the Issue. But there, too, the 
combatants, that drab host, whose only tinge of colour 
is their own life-blood, have been forced into a strange 
disguise by the demon of misapplied science. Look at the 
first photographs of our soldiers equipped, at bitter 
Xieed, to meet the impersonal fiend of poison gas, and 
restrain, if you can^^ a cry of " Ichabod 1 -' for the gallant 
splendours of the ancient fighter. The helm of Hector^ 
the shield of Achilles have been brought into sorry 
contempt by the wiles of the Teuton professor. Man, 
when he stands up to his fellow-man, shou'd !i£< cut a 
comical figure. Our gallant boys, equipped wijj> ws- 
pirators, might be mistaken for somi ! less dignified 
troupe of Christy's Minstrels. But over it all the in- 
domitable spirit of Thomas Atkins triumphed. When 
called to face the camera in his respirator, he had his 
retort of eternal fitness, and did the g.)Ose-step. 
Right Irony. 
That joke of Thomas Atkins's was just the right 
irony for a situation forced upon him by a nation of bar- 
baric savants, whose chief academic sport is a duel 
fought by swordsmen in padded trappings which make 
them more grotesque even than the goggled motorist or 
airman. We have not hitherto seen the true inwardness 
of the German University duel. It starts into strange 
significance now. A Kultur supported on beer-competi- 
tions, the Berserker orgies of Kneipe and the schlager- 
verein, has brought forth Krupp, poison gas, and the 
rape of Belgium. By their fruits ye shall know them. 
They have exalted war to its utter degradation. Where 
would Homer find to-day a lovely epithet for arms and 
armour ? We have not yet fully realised the squalor of 
the modern field. 
That noble phrase of the " Iliad," " the bridges of 
war," whether it may mean the ground which divided 
the two lines of battle or the passage to be crossed be- 
tween them (commentators differ on this point), would 
to-day find its parallel in a less splendid metaphor. 
Rent with shaft and pit, where horrors fester, the field 
would now be more aptly described by some such phrase 
as " the kennels of war." The sense of free space has 
gone. Fighting has become for the most part a game of 
moles. Everywhere the fine elan of the attack is meanly 
hampered. The more credit, then, to those who still 
carry it through against such obstacles, very trying to 
the spirit. More trying still is that other hard condition 
of modern war, the struggle against a far distant, in- 
visible enemy. If our men have allowed themselves one 
grumble, and only one, it has been that some have re- 
turned wounded without ever having set eyes on a single 
German. A man likes to see what he is hitting, and to 
see the man that hits him. Otherwise he feels sold. 
Plainly, the scale is too vast, the machine is out of all 
proportion to the user. Which is absurd. 
Nowhere An Escape. 
Nowhere is there escape from the grotesque. Th« 
armoured motor-car and the armoured train, with their 
sinister grin of loopholes, are purely forbidding. The 
fort of to-day has little to tempt the painter. The ship of 
war, though changed, is still splendid, but chiefly be- 
cause the lines of her hull cannot be wholly wrested away 
from the likeness of a ship. Her armament is a horrid 
excrescence, not as in the old days, an auxiliary to her 
picturesque ensemble. Not hers the majesty of the Vic- 
tory's open ports with her guns run out for a broadside. 
In proportion as a devilish ingenuity has discounted the 
physical strength of man in warfare, so his engines have 
declined from grace. Milton noted the beginnings r/ 
the evil when he dreamed that Essen factory of Hell in 
his Sixth Book. For that the only remedy was for the 
hosts of Heaven to tear up mountains and hurl them on 
the fiends. To-day those who are on the side of the 
angels are driven figuratively to similar tactics. 
The time is not yet, but one day, looking back, we 
shall marvel at the grotesquerie of it all, and weep for its 
degradation of arms and the man. We shall wonder, 
too, that the whole hideous and ludicrous nightmare did 
not dissolve in inextinguishable laughter. 
W 
