Читать книгу The Times Great War Letters: Correspondence during the First World War - James Owen - Страница 63

THE MOBILIZATION OF INVENTION

11 June 1915

SIR,—WE HAVE RECONSTRUCTED our Government and it is not for an innocent Englishman outside the world of politicians to estimate the advantages and disadvantages of the rearrangement of the House of Commons. But there is a matter beyond the range of party politics which does still seem to need attention and which has been extraordinarily disregarded in all the discussion that has led to the present Coalition, and that is the very small part we are still giving the scientific man and the small respect we are showing scientific method in the conduct of this war. I submit that there is urgent need to bring imaginative enterprise and our utmost resources of scientific knowledge to the assistance of the new-born energies of the Coalition; that this is not being done and that until it is done this war is likely to drag on and be infinitely more costly and infinitely less conclusive than it could and should be.

Modern war is essentially a struggle of gear and invention. It is not war under permanent conditions. In that respect it differs completely from pre-Napoleonic wars. Each side must be perpetually producing new devices, surprising and outwitting its opponent. Since this war began the German methods of fighting have been changed again and again. They have produced novelty after novelty, and each novelty has more or less saved their men and unexpectedly destroyed ours. On our side we have so far produced hardly any novelty at all, except in the field of recruiting posters. It is high time that our rulers and our people came to recognize that the mere accumulation of great masses of young men in khaki is a mere preliminary to the prosecution of this war. These masses make the body of an army, but neither its neck, head, nor hands, nor feet. In the field of aviation, for which the English and French temperaments are far better adapted than the German, there has been no energy of organization at all. There has been great individual gallantry and a magnificent use of the sparse material available, but no great development. We have produced an insufficient number of aviators and dribbled out an inadequate supply of machines. Insufficient and inadequate, that is to say, in relation to such a war as this. We have taken no steps to produce a larger and more powerful aeroplane capable of overtaking, fighting, and destroying a Zeppelin, and we are as far as ever from making any systematic attacks in force through the air. Our utmost achievements have been made by flights of a dozen or so machines. In the matter of artillery the want of intellectual and imaginative enterprise in our directors has prevented our keeping pace with the German improvements in trench construction; our shortness of high explosives has been notorious, and it has led to the sacrifice of thousands of lives. Our Dardanelles exploit has been throughout unforeseeing and uninventive; we have produced no counterstroke to the enemy’s submarine, and no efficient protection against his improved torpedoes. We have still to make an efficient use of poison gas and of armoured protection in advances against machine-guns in trench warfare. And so throughout almost the entire range of our belligerent activities we are to this day being conservative, imitative, and amateurish when victory can fall only to the most vigorous employment of the best scientific knowledge of all conceivable needs and material.

One instance of many will serve to show what I am driving at. Since this war began we have been piling up infantry recruits by the million and making strenuous efforts to equip them with rifles. In the meantime the actual experiences of the war have been fully verifying the speculations of imaginative theorists, and the Germans have been learning the lesson of their experiences. The idea that for defensive purpose one well-protected skilled man with a small machine-gun is better than a row of riflemen is a very obvious one indeed, but we have disregarded it. The Germans are giving up the crowding of men for defense purposes (though the weakness of the national quality obliges them still to mass for attacks), and they are entrusting their very small and light machine-guns in many cases to officers. They have, in fact, adopted as their 1915 model of trench defence the proper scientific thing. Against this we fire out shrapnel and hurl our infantry.

Now these inadequacies are not incurable failures. But they are likely to go on until we create some supplementary directive force, some council in which the creative factors in our national life, and particularly our scientific men and our younger scientific soldiers and sailors, have a fuller representation and a stronger influence than they have in our present Government. It is not the sort of work for which a great legal and political career fits a man. That training and experience, valuable as it is in the management of man and peoples, does indeed very largely unfit men for this incessantly inventive work. A great politician has no more special aptitude for making modern war than he has for diagnosing diseases or planning an electric railway system. It is a technical business. We want an acting sub-Government of scientific and technically competent men for this highly specialized task.

Such a sub-Government does in effect exist in Germany. It is more and more manifest that we are fighting no longer against that rhetorical system of ancient pretensions of which the Kaiser is the figure-head. In Flanders we are now up against the real strength of Germany; we are up against Westphalia and Frau Krupp’s young men. Britain and France have to get their own brilliant young engineers and chemists to work against that splendid organization. Unless our politicians can add to the many debts we owe them, the crowning service of organizing science in war more thoroughly than they ever troubled to do it in peace, I do not see any very great hope of a really glorious and satisfactory triumph for us in this monstrous struggle.

Very sincerely yours,

H. G. WELLS