The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1914-10-02
THE WORLD SET FREE Europe's Armageddon and BY H. G. WELLS,
 The Last War copyr4eas 1o14 by H. C. weals&
BY H. c. WELLS,
Copyrtgnt, 1e14, by Fl. c. wel1s.


 And he was, he tells us, modern state's man, tsby instinct from the be. ginning He breathed in these ideas in the c1assrooms and laboratories of the Carnegie Foundation school that rose, long and deIicately beautiful facade along the south bank of the Thames opposite the ancient dignity of Somerset house. Such thought was interwoyen with the very fabric of that pioneer school in the educational renascence in England. After the customary exchange years in Heidel- berg and Paris, hewent into the classi. cal school of London university. The older so called ssclassicaP' education of the British pedagogues, probably the most paralyzing, ineffective and foolish routine that ever wasted human life, had already been swept out of this great institution in favor of modern methods and he learned Greek and Latin as well as he had learned German, Spanish and French, so that he wrote and spoke them freely and used them with an unconscious ease in his study of the foundation civilizations of the European system to which they were the key. (This change was still so recent that he mentions an encounter in Rome with an Oxford donn who spoke Latin with Wiltshire accent and manifest discomfort, wrote Greek letters with his tongue out, and seemed to think al Greek sentence charm when it was a quotation and an i'm propriety when it wasn't.'')
 Barnet saw the last days of the coal steam engines upon the English rail ways and the gradual cleansing of the London atmosphere as the smoke ere at1ng sea coal fires gave place to cleo tric heating. The building of labora- tories at Kensington was still in prog ress, and he took part in the students riots that delayed the removal of the Albert memorial. He carried a banner with we Like Funny Statuary'' on one side and on the other s'Seats and Canopies For Statues. Why Should Our Great Departed Stand In the Rain ?'' He learned the rather athletic aviation of those days at the univer- l sfty grounds at Sydenham, and he was fined for flying over the new prison for i political Ihe1ers at Wormwood Scrubs i 4sin manner calculated to exhilarate : the prisoners while at exercise" That was the time of the attempted sup 1 pression of any criticism of the public ] judicature, and the place was crowded with journalists who had ventured to call attention to the dementia of Chief Justice Abrahams. Barnet was not a very good aviator. He confesses he l was always little afraid of his ma l chine-there was excellent reason fo1 every one to be afraid of those clumsy early types-and he never attempted steep 'descents or very high flying. Ht l also, he records, owned one of those oil driven motor bicycles whose cIum sy complexity and extraYagant flthf ness still astonish the visitors to ths museum of machinery at South Ken sington- He mentions running over {
 dog and complains of the ruinoui price of ttspatchcoeks" in Surrey
 ttSpatchcocks,' 9 1t seems, was a slang term for crushed hens.
 He passed the examinations neces sary to reduce his military service tt
 a minimum, and his. want of any spe
 cial scientific or technical qualification Il and a certain precocious corpuIenc
 that handicapped his aviation indicate,
 the infantry of the line as his spher
 of training. That was the most gen
 eraltzed form of soldering. The de velopment of the theory of war ha,
 been for some decades but little assist
 ed by any practical experience. Wha
 fighting had occurred in recent year had been fighting in minor or unciv1
 nzed states with peasant or barbari soldiers and with but small equiI ment of modern contrfvances, and tn great powers of the world were cor tent for the most part to mainta1
 armies that gustained in their broade organization the traditions of the BU ropean wars of thirty or forty year , before. There was the infantry arm t which Barnet belonged and which wa supposed to fight on foot with the rtd ana De the main portion of the army There were cavalry forces (horse so dfersJ; having a ratio to the infanH , that had been determined by the ez ] Periences of the Franco German war i
 1871. There was also artillery, an
 for some unexplained reason much c this was still drawn by horses, thoug : there were also in all the Europea armies a small number of motor gun with wheels so constructed that the | could go over broken ground. In aC l. dition there were large development :, of the engineering arm, concerned wit f motor transport, motor bicycles scou c ing. aviation and the like.
 6 No first class intelligence had bee a sought to specialize in and work oJ $ the problems of warfare with the ne i appliances and under modern cond
 tions. but a succession of able jurists-