Evening star., 1942-05-31
BY II. g. Wells,
North American Newspaper Alliance.

Ine OuLtlHer OF history Is SnOlCn
as he arrived from London in o.
tOber, 1910, on his most recent
uisit to the United States.
A. P. Photo.
have no direct bearing upon the riddles
of the tortoise and the bird, had to be
made before these two problems were
solved. Ultimately, ip the first decade
of the Goth century, the land ironclad
crawled slowly and the airplane Topped
clumsily into possibility.
Debut of the Tank.
So far as the tank goes there was one
small group of experimenters who might
claim to be inventors, and, oddly enough,
1t is doubtful whether single one of
them had the slightest suspicion he was
inventing one of the two most revolu-
tionary instruments of war that man.
kind has even seen. They were working
upon tractors to be used in big scale
agriculture. There is no detailed record
of the successive devices of this group,
but one of the outstanding figures was
certainly B. J. Diplock. His caterpillar
tractor made it possible to spread heavy
weights over soft, unprepared ground.
1t liberated transport from roads, be-
laying it down in front of it and picking
it up behind
We need type of scientific worker who
does not yet exist. We need-what shall
call them?-professors of human
geology, or, if you want less precise
and pompous name, of foresight. 1t has
even been suggested there should be a
ministry of foresight Its business
should be the systematic thinking out of
what new inventions may do to us. Lack
ing the necessary endowments, this i'm
portant business is still left to amateurs
1t was an amateur In foresight who
pointed out in the Strand Magazine, as
early as 1903, that Diplock's pedrail re-
leased warfare from its limitations to
roads and railways and made fleet ac-
tions of land ironclads possible. By that
one device current military science was
outdated.
In the same way, by 1908, the old dis
tinction of conbatant and non combat
ant was superseded by the airplane, and
war in two dimensions gave way to war
in three. Except of course in the minds
of the senior military and naval authori-
ties, trained mot to reason why" trained
but to do or die" Unfortunately not
nearly so fast as the men under them.)
But tremendous as the transformation
of Ixyf fhoco ho
been, there have been other causes in
operation, less obvious but even more
fundamental. First and foremost is the
penetration of education and political
consciousness to the whole mass of the
belligerent population. For hundreds of
years the prevailing sorts of wars had
this in common; they were made and
carried on by very limited ruling class
which alone knew what was going on
and what it was all about. The armies
employed consisted for the most part of
illiterate fighting animals, who fought
rather like packs of dogs. Officers
barked words of command to them and
they obeyed mechanically. They had
to be fed. paid with apparent regularity
and blooded with occasional loot.
Mass Propaganda.
The economic and educational changes
of the past century have wiped all that
out. The whole population knows about
the war, can and must share in the war,
mentally as we'll as bodily, and so mass
propaganda to keep up the spirit and
solidarity of your own people and to de-
press and disorganize the enemy, has be-
come as important a factor in the trans
formation of war as the production of
planes and tanks. We are fighting now
as populations, whose average age is far
higher and whose mentality far maturer
than any populations that have ever
been at war before, who read, who listen
in, who keep on thinking, who argue and
whisper when you try to stop them talk
ing out loud. Down to the very basis Of
the social order they are asking, What
are our war aims? Why are we doing
these things? Why are we being made
to do these things? How can we end
this sort of trouble forever?"
A rising tide of human common sense
and consciousness threatens to swamp
all but the most cherished traditions Of
nationalist history by q realization of the