LAND & WATER 
June 28, 1917 
The Transformation of War 
By Hilaire Belloc 
THJi. lengili ol time over which the war has already 
spread, the great change in liabits which it lias 
produced, c specially in this country, and the impossi- 
bility pi fixing a term for its conclusion, have, between 
them, made men regard it as a sor^of separate epoch deter- 
mining a new world. 
The change it will produce in the general arrangement of 
European attairs will probably not prove at once so vast as 
expectation or fear no\V proclaims. The political change, 
especiallv in the arrangement of frontiers, may be consider- 
able, but an intimate change within the structure of society 
is always, and necessarily, a slow thing. 
There is a particular' department, however, with which 
these columns arc concerned, in which change has already 
been ajjparent and mav hs. apparently, continued in- 
definitely and upon an indefinitely increasing scale. This 
department is that of the military art. 
It is of great practical import and occupies the 
attention of many students, especially in this, country, 
since the striking object-lesson of the Wytschaete 
Kidge ; though the obvious truth that war had changed in the 
course of the last three years and had taken on certain new 
forms, many of which might be permanent, has long been 
apparent to all. 
^It is of practical import to study these things liecause it is 
always a practical thing for a nation to prepare itself as well 
as it can for the realities of the future. It strengthens the 
State for citizens not to be too far WTong upon the develop- 
ments that are to come. No man can foresee, but one 
can judge of probabilities, estimate existing tendencies, 
and arrive at a conclusion which is the best within our 
]X)wers. Such a process always guides and informs 
though it can never pretend to accurate foreknowledge. 
There are two main group.i of novelty in development 
which the war has shown : unexpected general effects, as in 
linancial resources and national feeling ; and unexpected 
technical effects not yet exhausted. 
The first wholly unforeseen action of modern war, the fii>t 
negation which it has imfxjsed upon all previous judgments, 
js the neglected one that war upon such^ a scale and so 
prolonged should be possible at all. 
It is fair to say tliat all the judgments passed upon this 
coming European decision (for most men who knew 
their Europe took it for granted that it was coming when 
once Prussia had been permitted to erect a new immorality of 
her own a generation ago, and so to destroy the cohesion of 
Europe) not one but either took for granted, or implied, or 
explicitly said that the strain of conflict between whole nations 
mobilised would neccessarily be a sliort one : a matter of a 
few days or weeks, hardly of months. The pace would kill. 
Now in the issue we have found this by actual experience 
to be entirely false. For close upon three years all Central 
Europe and the French Republic — ev-erything between- the 
Pyrenees and the Vistula, you may say, and between the 
.Alps and the Baltic — has been fully mobilised and suffering 
tiie full strain of war. Great Britain, by a slower 
jirocess, has come to be fully mobilised, and in their degrees 
Italy and what was the F-mpire of Russia. 
The countries which were fully mobiUsed at the origin and 
have fought with their full powers the whole time, now feel 
the strain most, of course, and are the most exhausted. The 
Dual Monarchy is nearest to the stage of complete exhaustion. 
Next to tlie Dual Monarcliy the German Empire. Judged 
merely in loss of men these belligerent groups stand, in 
])rop;)rtion to! their populations, in a degree of exhaustion 
tliffering with each State by about 5 per cent, or a little less. 
F\>r instance, Austro- Hungary was compelled to put into the 
firing line recruits of the 1918 class and to call up for training 
. recruits of the iqig class rather less than a year ago. The 
German Empire called up the 1918 class a few months later 
and put it into the firing line tlys spring, and it called up for 
training the 1919 class^the greater part of it — last May — 
Seven weeks ago. 
The French Republic called up its 191S class much later 
and still has it under training : it has not yet been put into 
the field ; nor have the French as yet been compelled to call 
up the 19 19 class at all. 
But though these originally mobilised Great Powers arc 
thus suffering from \arious degrees of exhaustion, the 
exhaustion is severe. With the difference applicable to 
a later full mobilisatiou a corresponding degree of exhaustion 
appoar.s in the other bclhgciciii naiions. As yet, of course 
it is far less severe among tlicni than among the origina 
fully mobilised powers ; this is true of even Great Britain, 
which has had to make side by side with its military effort 
an industrial effort and a naval effort out of proportion 
to its population. 
Now the remarkable tiling is that both on the moral side 
and on the material the exhaustion prophesied did not come 
at anything like the pace that was expected. 
The problem of financial exhaustion was misread, as it 
always is, through the apparently ineradicable illusion that 
the means of exchange govern the process of production. 
People talked of there being " no money " to carry on this 
great camp.iign, forgetting that money in all its forms — 
cheques, bdls, notes, written credits and the most informal 
verbal or even implied credits (for all these are " money ")— 
is but a machinery permitting the exchange of wealth. 
Wealth is nothing else but things to which economic values 
are attached by human labour. And this war has shown what 
wc now sec to be, after all, pretty obvious, that so long as 
there was labour — that is, man-power to produce the material 
things by which men were fed and clothed, iioth civiHans and 
military- and so long as men were determined to continue 
the struggle, the economic process stood firm. 
Economic Strain 
If there were exact calculation between the productive 
power of mankind as a whole, neutral and belligerent, and an 
exact knowledge of who would be neutral and who would be 
belligerent throughout, it would be possible so to anaiige 
combatant and non-combatant activity as to niakc certain 
that war would never fail from a merely economic cause. 
The reason that we arc now at last feeling a true economic 
squeeze has nothing to do with the presence or absence of 
money (credits have been indefinitely extended) ; it is due 
to the fact that the proportion of belligerent to non-belligerent 
has changed beyond the power of calculation, and that the 
earlier part of the war was organised by all the belligerents 
under tlie impression that the conflict would be a short one. 
In other words, none of the original belligerents allowed 
enough to productive labour. All of them took away too 
large a proportion of labour for military activity. 
But, at any rate, in general, the greatest novel condition 
produced by this war — and the one most ominous for the 
future — is the conviction by experience that even the modern 
complex nation fully armed can continue an intensive struggle 
for a very long time indeed. 
The next novel condition should be carefully noted, and is 
only second both in importance and in unexpectedness. It 
is the fact that the modern F-uropcan (at present, at any 
rate) makes of nationality a sort of religious feeling, some- 
thing more sacred than any other motive. The great mass 
of European men has not only passively endured things 
which were thought impossible of endurance, but has actively 
done the things which were thought impossible of perform- 
ance — for example, fighting in the air — under the motive of 
nationality. Even the great issue between capitalism and 
the proletariat in industrialised countries, which, it was 
thought would cut across the sentiment of nationality, has 
proved insignificant compared with patriotism. . 
People perhaps hardly recognise to-day how insignificant 
not only in number, but in influence, are the eccentrics 
who weaken, or tone down, the sentiment of patriotism. 
The educated classes hear a lot of them because your crank 
is always a man of some education —indeed, a superficial 
education is nearly always his banc. The politicians provide 
an absurdly large proportion because -well, because pro- 
fessional politics are what they are. But the mass of F^nglish- 
men. Frenchmen, Germans, hardly listen to the waverers 
except with the sort of annoyance provoked by any interrup- 
tion during a grave stiain. 
It may be said then that of these two general things, 
neither of them concerned with the technical process of war, 
surjirisc has been as it were in favour of war. War upon so 
enormous a scale has i)roved more possible and its coiUinuuKcc 
more possible than was expected. 
But if we turn to the technical side of the matter we find 
tliat the military art has been compelled by experience to 
considerable new decisions. These may roughly be classed 
ill three fields- 
