April 27, 1 916 
LAND ifc WATER 
15 
War in Fiction and in Fact 
By J. D. Symon 
IN the dim prehistoric times that He beyond August, 
1914, our notions of war were of two kinds, wars 
of the past and wars of the future. Past wars, 
if we visuaUsed them at all, seemed in spite of 
inevitable horrors, a gay and gallant pageant, wherem 
the man in a flashing uniform rose superior to the machine. 
Realistic painters and strict historians told us of rags 
and tatters, of men going barefoot, of squalor unspeakable, 
but that did not greatly alter the popular concept. The 
terrible pencil of Verestchagin may have lifted the curtain 
a little way for the more reflective ; but the pictures of 
iJetaillc and de Neuville, of Vernet, Meissonier andWood- 
\ille, the splendid elan and onward sweep of Lady 
Butler's " Scotland for Ever ! " gave the key-note to 
the home-keeping civilians' idea of the stricken field. 
" Le Regiment qui passe," with its rhythm of parade 
maintained amid the stress of active service, summed up 
the popular ideal. The war of fact seemed a romance, 
not a business. 
It was otherwise with the war of the future, that 
;trange portent in which the late nineteenth or early 
twentieth century began to interest itself, lured thereto by 
the arts of one ingenious writer. Others had attempted 
the same theme, Ijut their imagined wars were all based 
upon the old conventions. They were mere Battles of 
Dorking, with a faint adumbration of modernised 
machinery. The late Captain Clarke's lively novel 
of a supposed Franco-British conflict (how absurd that 
seems to-day !) was read by the late 'nineties as a very 
plausible foreshadowing of .what might be. The Chief 
in his motor-car, passing rapidly and easily from point to 
point, seemed quite wonderful. That was a touch of real 
progress. Wellington on " Copenhagen " had been 
superseded by a Prince on Petrol. And magazine-rifle 
fire received its due. But the area of operations was quite 
small, and high explosives were not. Colossal concen- 
trations of Titanic artillery found no place in the story, 
and as for air-craft, a sane writer (not, mind you, without 
imagination) did not indulge in impossible flights of 
fancy. Verisimilitude was carefully observed, the licence 
of ajules Verne would have tended towards an uncon- 
vincing narrative. 
Ruthless Malignity 
But the other fiction of future wars struck a bolder note. 
The scale was magnified many times and mighty engines 
of destruction had full play. Further, the novelist 
allowed himself to postulate a frightful and ruthless 
malignity. In the old forecasts the game was played upon 
the ancient chivalrous rules. In the new war scruples of 
humanity found no place. But in order to give that ele- 
ment its proper force it was necessary to go outside the 
world. I)id we not live under a Hague Convention ? 
Tile war of the future on earth was to be as humane as 
possible. The monstrous engine, therefore, and the 
monstrous malignity must be assigned to a race of super- 
intellectuals from another planet. It was these hideous 
creatures who, using the secret devices of science, blasted 
open towns with a heat-ray and drove before them pitiful 
crowds of civiliiins. The ultra-loathsome in war was no 
creation of humanity. A novelist who attributed such 
methods to humankind would have been voted an 
outrageous dreamer. 
It is entirely to the author's credit and in accordance 
with his fundamental optimism that he should have found 
it thus necessary to bring his thorough exponents of 
frightfiflness from beyond this present world, to wit, from 
the red planet of the War-God. How far that neighbour 
orb has been libelled we shall not know until communica- 
tion is established. If the first message be a writ served 
on the novelist, let us hope it will come when we are once 
more at peace to enjoy so piquant a cause celehre. A 
people believed to be mighty civil-engineers may have a 
real grievance, for civil-engineering, being in itself stupen- 
dous beneficence, goes ill with stupendous malignity. And 
the novelist, consistently enough, if cruelly, portrayed his 
Apostles of Horror as themselves most horrible of aspect. 
His whole conception would almost appear to be a subtle 
satire on intellect sharpened to superhuamn keenness. 
Perhaps he did not quite see how harshly his parable 
reflected upon Physical Science exalted to godhead, at 
the expense of the' humanities. Or perhaps he meant it. 
How-ever that may be, he was careful to remove all human 
likeness from these mere brains raised to the nth power. 
Aerial Weapons 
Another future war of the noveUst's was waged by a 
civilised power with aerial weapons, and in a manner 
sufficiently terrible, but still, on the face of it, save for the 
bombing of open cities, legitimate. We read and were vastly 
entertained, but set it aside with a smile at the author's 
ingenuity. Such things were not going to happen. The 
wars of the future would be astounding, of course, but tiiey 
would mean clean fighting, and even if air-navigation 
did come into its own, the old rules would hold good. 
Air-craft would be used only against military positions. 
The imagined unscrupulousness conveyed no warning. 
We applauded the teller of tales and asked for more. 
No civilised power would ever take a leaf out of his 
nightmare goblin books. 
But to-day, what of it ? We are living in the midst of 
all that, and worse, and have become so numbed by 
horror on horror piled, that it is doubtful whether we 
can realise this present welter. The detached eye of our 
grandson scanning the files of our 1916 newspapers will 
appreciate this super-novel we live in as we cannot hope 
to do. 'This morning's news sheet, could we but see it 
aright, would beggar any imagining of the futurist war 
■ novelist of yesterday. He might as well go out of business 
at once, for his occupation is plainly gone. He conceived 
certainly the malignant power that would seek conquest 
by'sheer terror, but it is doubtful whether he ever thought 
that his hints would be taken and improved upon in his 
own time. A Yellow Power, in some remote epoch, 
might thus assault civilisation, but white men, no. 
We thought the Germans were whi1,e men. That was our 
cardinal blunder. So here we are, bombed o' nights from 
the sky, torpedoed at sea as we voyage peacefully on our 
lawful occasions, our open cities shattered by a Brobding- 
nagian artillery, whole nations driven into exile at one fell 
stroke ; pain, misery, famine and sickness stalking at large 
throughout Europe, rapine and atrocity rampant, and in 
the legitimate field of battle such carnage as the world 
has never seen. Every other day brings its Titanic 
disaster in a double sense, and we have come to take it 
as all in the day's work. The " very newsboys have 
ceased to cry " 'orrible disaster." It is no longer a 
business asset. Therein lurks a parable for the enemy. 
" 'Orrible disaster " has never been a business asset for 
him. One day he will find that out, and at last he will 
know the stomach of this people. He banked upon plunging 
the world into the actualities of a super-war novel. Thus 
his sentimentality envisaged " Frightfulness." He knew 
how a taste of that medicine would affect himself. But he 
knew not the white man. 
The Fat Boy's grisly fictions translated into action 
do but touch a deeper futility. The super-novel of war 
was effective only as fiction. As fact, it becomes a 
brutal stupidity which civilisation, standing serene 
above panic, has made it her stern business to suppress. 
The Bright- Eyes of Danger, by John Foster (W. and R. 
Chambers, 6s.) is a tale of the '45, and altliough the subject 
of Bonnie Charlie is one that has inspired a vast mass of 
reading matter of various sorts and qualities, tlie author of this 
book has caught the true spirit of romance and steered well 
away from hackneyed tracks and scenes. The fortunes of 
Edmund I.ayton, Westmorland gentleman and loyal to King 
George, and of Charlotte Macdonnell, Jacobite by race and 
instinct, takes us to Edinburgh at the time of the Pretender's 
occupation of the city, to Prestonpans, to CuUoden, and to 
the long hunt that ended the last attempt to win back the 
throne for the Stuarts. Yet it is not with Charlie, but with 
the man and woman, Edmund and Cljarlotte, that the interest 
lies, and because of their fine qualities and their love— because, 
too, all the world loves a good story of stirring incidents and 
vivid characterisation - this book should make many friends. 
