The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871-1914 : Fictions of Future Warfare and ofBattles Still-to-come 0853234590

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The Tale of The Next Great War, 1871-1914

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies General Editor DAVID SEED Series Advisers I. F. CLARKE EDWARD JAMES PATRICK PARRINDER AND BRIAN STABLEFORD 1. ROBERT CROSSLEY, Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future, ISBN 0-85323-388-8 (hardback) 2. DAVID SEED (ed.), Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors, ISBN 0-85323-348-9 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323418-3 (paperback) 3. JANE L. DONAWERTH AND CAROL A. KOLMERTEN (ed.), Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference, ISBN 085323-269-5 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-279-2 (paperback) 4. BRIAN W. ALDISS, The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy, ISBN 0-85323-289-X (hardback), 0-85323-299-7 (paperback) 5. CAROL FARLEY KESSLER, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia, with Selected Writings, ISBN 0-85323-489-2 (hard­ back), ISBN 0-85323-499-X (paperback) 6. PATRICK PARRINDER, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy, ISBN 0-85323-439-6 (hardback), ISBN 085323-449-3 (paperback) 7.1. F. CLARKE (ed.), The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871-1914; Fictions of Future Warfare and of Battles Still-to-come, ISBN 0-85323459-0 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-469-8 (paperback) 8. JOSEPH CONRAD AND FORD MADOX FORD, Introduction by DAVID SEED, Foreword by GEORGE HAY, The Inheritors, ISBN 085323-560-0 (paperback) 9. QINGYUN WU, Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias, ISBN 0-85323-570-8 (hardback), 0-85323-580-5 (paperback)

The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871-1914 Fictions of Future Warfare and of Battles Still-to-come EDITED BY

I. F. CLARKE

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

First published 1995 by LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

PO Box 147, Liverpool, L69 3BX United Kingdom Copyright © 1995 in the Introduction, and in this compilation, by I. F. Clarke

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A British Library CIP Record is available ISBN 0-85323-459-0 cased 0-85323-469-8 paper Text set in 10^2/12 x/2 Meridien by Action Typesetting Limited, Gloucester

Printed and bound in the European Community by Bell & Bain Limited, Glasgow

For Julian and Elaine

Contents Acknowledgements Illustrations Introduction: The Paper Warriors and their Fights of Fantasy i. f. clarke The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (1871) GENERAL SIR GEORGE TOMKYNS CHESNEY The Battle of Dorking (1871) anonymous Der Ruhm; or, The Wreck of German Unity. The Narrative of a Brandenburger Hauptmann (1871) ANONYMOUS

La Guerre au Vingtième Siècle (1887) albert robida The Taking of Dover (1888) Horace Francis lester In a Conning Tower: How I Took HMS Majestic into

SWINTON

77 95 113 162 193

234 251 257 271 281 293

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

SOMMERFELD

27 74

210

The Trenches (1908) captain c.e. vickers The Secret of the Army Aeroplane (1909) a.a. milne The Unparalleled Invasion: Excerpt from Walt Nervin's Certain Essays in History (1910) jack London A Vision of the Future (1912) gustaf janson ''Planes!'(1913) Frederick britten Austin Danger! Being the Log of Captain John Sirius (1914)

Bibliographical Notes Biographical Notes

1

139

Action HUGH OAKLEY ARNOLD-FORSTER

The Stricken Nation (1890) hugh grattan donnelly The Raid of Le Vengeur (1901) george Griffith The Green Curve (1907) major-general sir ernest

Frankreichs Ende im Jahr 19?? (1914)

ix xi

adolf

321 364 377

Acknowledgements This anthology owes much to the advice and assistance of many people; and I now take this opportunity to thank all those who have helped me in the selection and preparation of the various entries. I am greatly indebted to the knowledge and professional skills of librarians, and especially to: the Librarian, Imperial War Museum, London; Service Historique, Ministère des Armées, Paris; Katalogabteilung, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek; Storage and Delivery Branch, British Library. The staff of the London Library were of great assistance, and I owe a special debt to the Bodleian Library, especially to Ms Rosemary McMcarthy of the Quick-Copy Service who supplied perfect xerographic copies of many extracts and short stories. In some ways my greatest debt is to the staff of the Depart­ ment of Manuscripts, National Library of Scotland. They guided me through the abundant correspondence and many files in the Black­ wood Papers; and in particular I thank Mr Kenneth Dunn for the advice and information he gave me. The various extracts from the Blackwood Papers are published with the permission of the Keeper of Manuscripts and the Trustees of the National Library of Scot­ land. M. Guy Costes of Quetigny, France, proved a true bibliophile and a good friend, when he sent me at short notice two missing pages that had vanished from a photocopy of Robida's La Guerre au XXme siècle. The translation of Robida's marvellous story owed everything to the extensive knowledge and careful work of Mrs Penny Bath. Invaluable information on those eminent Royal Engineers— Chesney, Swinton, and Vickers—came from Captain Arnold, Librarian, RE Corps Library. Another expert, Commander Jeff Tall, Director of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum, Gosport, looked at the specifications of the submarines in Danger}; and he gave Conan Doyle top marks for intelligent anticipation. Neil Barron, librarian and bibliographer in seemingly remote California, worked through several internet systems to discover information on Hugh Grattan Donnelly, a writer who seems to have vanished almost without trace. In the end all things fell into place and were put into good order by Mrs Sue Hughes. I thank her for the great care she took in the

x

Acknowledgements

editing of this collection. Finally, and most of all, I am greatly indebted to my wife, my best and kindest critic. She has lived through the evolution of this book and she has survived. I.F. Clarke Milton under Wychwood

Illustrations Page

'Bataille de Marengo', French print of 1801 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris).

3

'Le Ballon militaire', French print of 1794 showing observer balloon in action at the Battle of Fleurus (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris).

5

'La Thilorière, ou Déscente en Angleterre', described as 'A Project for a Montgolfière capable of transporting 3,000 men'. One of the many propaganda prints from the Napoleonic period (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris).

9

'Vue d'Optique', an anticipatory view of Napoleon embarking at Boulogne for the invasion of England (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris).

11

Anonymous print circa 1800 showing a supposed troop transport for the invasion of England (Musée de la Marine, Paris).

11

'Petersen's Aerial War Vessel', a projection of a military air ship from the Scientific American, 20 July 1885, p. 99.

14

Artist's impression of the Cowen and Sweetlong armoured fighting vehicle presented in their application for patent in 1855.

16

'Nasmyth's Anti-Invasion Floating Mortar' from the Illustrated London News, 14 January 1853, p. 37.

20

The title-page of Rear-Admiral P. Colomb and others, The Great War of 1892, as it first appeared in Black and White, 2 January 1892.

23

'New York Must Surrender or Perish', an illustration from Cleveland Moffett, The Conquest of America, Hodder & Stoughton, 1916, London.

25

Bataille de Dorking. Invasion des Prussiens en Angleterre, Henri Pion, Paris, 1871, co ver-page illustration from the French translation of 1871 with preface by Charles Yriarte.

29

xii

Illustrations

The Battle of Dorking: A Dream of John Bull's, music-hall song of 1871.

37

'German Landwehr on the March', The Graphic, 3 September 1870, p. 233.

42

'The Storming of Bicetre by the Bavarians', The Graphic, 15 October 1870, p. 364.

47

'Impregnable Iron Fortress for the Coast and River Defence of the United Kingdom', Illustrated London News, 24 March 1860, p. 293.

56

'German Hussars charge the Don Cossacks' from Rear-Admiral P. Colomb and others, The Great War of 1892, first published in Black and White, 2 January 1892.

66

'Cardwell's Collapse', Punch, 12 August 1871, p. 187.

78

'The Flying Machine Épervier', from Albert Robida, La Guerre au vingtième siècle, Georges Decaux, Paris, 1887, p. 7.

96

'Les brouillardiers volants lay down their smoke-screen', from La Guerre au vingtième siècle, p. 8.

98

Scene from La Guerre au vingtième siècle as it originally appeared in La Caricature, 27 October 1883, p. 106.

100

'Grandes manoeuvres. Charge de Bicyclistes', La Caricature, 27 October 1883, p. 108.

102

'Le corps médical offensif, from Albert Robida, La Guerre au vingtième siècle, 1887, p. 18.

104

'Les scaphandriers ennemis, or the skin-divers in action', from La Guerre au vingtième siècle, 1887, p. 31.

106

'Le Bataillon de la Suprématie Féminine from Albert Robida, Le Vingtième siècle, Georges Decaux, Paris, 1883, p. 96.

109

'French troops in the Channel Tunnel', Penny Illustrated, 30 July, 1881, pp. 271-72.

114

'The Invader in the Tunnel', Judy, 11 September 1883, p. 294.

117

'John Bull's Nightmares', Kladderadatsch, 28 May 1882, p. 94.

120

'The Tunnel between England and France', Kladderadatsch, 19 March 1882, p. 52.

130

The Tale of the Next Great War

xiii

Frontispiece to the illustrated edition of Hugh Oakley ArnoldForster, In a Conning Tower, 1898.

141

The engagement between the Monitor and the Merrimac, from Century Magazine, 20 December 1884, p. 752.

143

'The Sims-Edison Electric Torpedo', cover-page illustration from the Scientific American, 13 July 1889.

146

Ts the Battleship Doomed?', The London Magazine, July 1904, p. 611.

149

Scene from Sir W. Laird Clowes and Alan H. Burgoyne, Trafalgar Refought, London, 1905.

153

The ramming action as shown in the illustrated edition of Hugh Oakley Arnold-Forster, In a Conning Tower, 1898.

158

Cover illustration to Hugh Grattan Donnelly, The Stricken Nation, 1890.

164

'The Warfare of the Future', cover-page illustration to The Graphic, 6 April 1878.

173

'Washington under Gunfire', back-cover illustration to Hugh Grattan Donnelly, The Stricken Nation, 1890.

183

A fantasy of future air transportation from Henri de Graffigny and Georges Le Faure, Aventures extraordinaires d'un savant russe, 1891-96.

194

'Submarine vessel', Scientific American, 14 May 1885, p. 406.

201

'Les aérostats porteurs de bombes incendiaires', from Louis Figuier, Les Merveilles de la science, Pion, Paris, 1868.

206

'The War Office Secret', The Sketch, 31 March 1909.

213

'The Bombardment of Varna', from Rear-Admiral P. Colomb and others, The Great War of 1892, Black and White, 12 February 1892.

220

The Martian fighting machine in H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, illustrated edition, 1906.

223

The first appearance of the Martian warriors in H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, illustrated edition 1906.

230

'A large clumsy black insect,' illustration from H.G. Wells, 'The Land Ironclads', Strand Magazine, December 1903, p. 755.

236

xiv

Illustrations

'The Land Ironclads in action', from 'The Land Ironclads', Strand Magazine, December 1903, p. 758.

244

'Zeppelin crew at work inside the gas chambers of a zeppelin', H.G. Wells, The War in the Air, 1908.

248

'Citizens of London', from William Le Queux, The Invasion of 1910, 1906.

252

'Der perfekte Billardspieler', Kladderadatsch, 28 March, 1909.

254

Front-cover to Commandant Driant's LTnvasion jaune, Flammarion, Paris, 1905.

259

'The Bombing of China in 1976', from Jack London's The Unparalleled Invasion first published in McClure's Magazine, July 1910, p. 313.

264

'A Lecture on the End of Old China', McClure's Magazine, July 1910, p. 315.

268

'Dive-bombing in the future', Century Magazine, May 1910, p. 304.

272

'Anti-aircraft defences of the future', The London Magazine, April 1909, p. 639.

278

'Here comes the BogyBird', cover-illustration for The Sketch, 4 August 1909.

284

'Mene Tekel Zeppelin', Kladderadatsch, 13 December 1908, p. 198.

290

Opening pages of Arthur Conan Doyle's Danger in the Strand Magazine, July 1914, p. 1.

300-01

'The Submarine U.S.S. Holland in War Trim', Harper's Magazine, June 1900, p. 567.

310

'The Franco-German War', Black and White, 6 January 1906.

324

'The End of the British Empire', as shown in Henri de Nousanne, La Guerre Anglo-Franco-Russe, special number of Le Monde Illustré, 10 March 1900.

331

'We Wilhelm ... ' from William Le Queux, The Invasion of 1910, Nash, London, 1906.

339

'Englands Invasionsmanover 1912', Kladderadatsch, 22 September 1912.

347

'Listim Zukunftskrieg', Kladderadatsch, 5 July 1908.

357

Introduction: The Paper Warriors and their Fights of Fantasy I. F. CLARKE

This selection of short stories offers a return journey through the future as it used to be. Time speeds backward to the 1870s, to the alpha point of modern futuristic fiction, when a new college of prophets and predictors first began to describe the new machines, the new societies, and the new wars that would follow in the next decade or the next century. The 1870s were the opening years of that enchanted period before the First World War when Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and many able writers delighted readers from Sydney to Seattle with their most original revelations of things-to-come. In all their anticipations, the dominant factor, and the prime source of their material, was the recognition that the new industrial societies would continue to evolve in obedience to the rate of change. One major event that caused all to think furiously about the future was the Franco-German War of 1870. The new weapons and the new methods of army organization had shown that the conduct of warfare was changing; and, in response to that perception of change, a new form of fiction took on the task of describing the conduct of the war-to-come. The 1870s saw the beginning of a profitable and ever-expanding publishing industry, dedicated exclusively to presenting decidedly partisan versions of the Zukunftskrieg, La Guerre de demain, and The Next Great War. Ever since the unprecedented uproar that followed on the publication of the anonymous tale of the Battle of Dorking in May 1871, the projections of the war-to-come have earned their reputation as a dedicated, instant response form of fiction. From time to time, these anticipations of the course and consequences of future wars have done much to shape public opinion. On notable occasions they have caused national commotions, international recriminations, even worldwide astonishment. These tales of the next great war, like divisional artillery, go from one sudden bombardment to another. Their characteristic reactions to targets of opportunity are immediately recognizable nowadays in the high

2

Fantasies offuture warfare

seriousness of so many recent accounts of the Cold War period. There is, for example, the final conflict in The Third World War: A Future History (1978) by General Sir John Hackett and associates; the end of all human life in Stanley Kramer's film On the Beach (1959); and in Russian Hide and Seek (1980) an ingenious variation on the Russian occupation theme by Sir Kingsley Amis. The imaginary wars in this collection are powerful remembrances of dominant expectations as these were perceived and projected during a fateful period of European history. Old antagonisms and once flourishing alliances are here restored to the full life of fiction. They are venerable echoes from the last age of innocence, before the military technologies of the First World War demonstrated in the most brutal ways that the unexpected can make nonsense of assumptions about the future. In this fiction, after a century of occa­ sional alarms and sporadic projections, fire for effect began in 1871 with the sudden appearance of the perfect archetype—Chesney's account of The Battle of Dorking. That prodigiously successful short story about a rapid German conquest of the United Kingdom was the first tale of the future to attract immediate attention through­ out the world. After Chesney, the rolling barrage of the future war stories moved forward year by year. As the major industrial nations advanced from ironclad warships to the first dreadnoughts, a succession of paper warriors—British, French, German, and some Americans—made it their business to describe the most likely shape of the war-to-come in many tales of glorious victories and salutary defeats. And then in July 1914, as time suddenly ran out for this anticipatory fiction, the Strand Magazine published Danger, an unusu­ ally prescient tale of submarine warfare and one of the last of these stories to appear before the real war broke out. The author was Arthur Conan Doyle, who had already tried his hand at an end-ofcivilization fantasy with The Poisoned Cloud in 1913. Later on, in 1918, he said that he had written his account of the coming end to British naval superiority in order to put the case for a Channel Tunnel.1 The short stories in this collection are all prime examples of the first main phase in brain warfare. This powerful and popular form of futuristic fiction is one of several crucial literary inventions that have taken their themes from the range of contemporary possibili­ ties—social, political, technological—and they have used timeto-come as the most apt means of projecting the worst or the best that could be. Ideal worlds, police states, the everlasting nuclear winter, interplanetary conflicts and marvellous adventures in distant galaxies, devastating wars and the end of humankind—these are all

The Paper Warriors

3

familiar topics in the immense outpouring of futuristic fiction in modern times. In their different ways, they show that the tale of the future has been the most favoured means of mediating between the reader and tomorrow's world ever since the appearance of Jules Verne's De la terre a la lune in 1865, J. F. Maguire's The Next Generation in 1871, and Edward Maitland's By and By in 1873.

The old-style battle, with both sides in full view, the generals following every move, as observed at Marengo, on 14 June 1800

Today, in marked contrast to those imaginative projections, a new profession of calculators and predictors has sought to bring order and greater rigour to the old business of prophecy. Since the 1950s innumerable down-to-earth experts—social analysts, statisticians, demographers, forecasters and futurologists, experts from the think­ tanks and the commissions for the twenty-first century—have laboured to deliver the most up-to-date news about the state of the world in the next millennium. These latest refinements in detecting patterns of probabilities are a practical recognition of the process of change forever at work in any advanced technological society. They are, however, no more than the most recent entries in the great book of future-think. The modern stage in the never-ending search for the true shape of coming things began in the seventeenth century with the writings of Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, first Viscount St Albans and Lord

4

All the bright hopes of the coming age

Chancellor of England. In the De Augmentis of 1605, and more partic­ ularly in the Novum Organum of 1620, Bacon set out to show Europe how to achieve the Kingdom of Man over nature. 'No book ever made so great a revolution in the mode of thinking'—so Lord Macaulay wrote of the Novum Organum in a famous essay. What the historian admired most was 'the vast capacity of that intellect which, without effort, takes in at once all the domains of science, all the past, the present, and the future, all the errors of two thousand years, all the encouraging signs of the passing times, all the bright hopes of the coming age'.2 Macaulay had in mind Bacon's future-directed proposition that the end of scientific knowledge must be 'the endowment of human life with new inventions and riches'. In the Novum Organum Bacon had outlined a method for exploiting nature to the advantage of mankind; and in his New Atlantis, which he finished in 1623, this remarkable man evolved a most appropriate mode for presenting his vision of a scientific community toiling away at the frontiers of knowledge. In the other-world of Bensalem, far beyond the utmost reach of navigation, Bacon revealed a working model of the future as it might be, if the world attended to what he had to say about the sciences. Although his College of the Six Days' Work existed in an everlasting there-and-now at the edge of the known world, 'this glorious prophecy', as Macaulay called it, was the manifest and true bill of the wonders that would follow from the division of scientific labour. The objective of all research in Bensalem is to empower humankind. All their operations aim at 'the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire to the effecting of all things possible'. With that cele­ brated phrase, the source of true wisdom for his devoted followers, Bacon separated the moral from the material, and thereby left a time-bomb ticking away in his earthly paradise. The earnest, complacent calculator could not foresee the consequences of his projected military inventions—of making weapons 'stronger and more violent than yours are, exceeding your greatest cannons and basilisks'. Bacon's propositions had no direct influence on the development of the sciences, but his ideas continued to signal the coming break­ through in the great campaign for the mastery of nature. In November 1750, when Diderot issued the first prospectus for the Encyclopédie, that most Baconian compilation of knowledge, he saluted the author of the Novum Organum as 'the greatest, the most universal and the most eloquent of philosophers'. That was the time

The Paper Warriors

5

when ideas about human progress had begun to circulate through­ out Europe. An early and emphatic statement of the new doctrine of bigger-better-wiser came from Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, a student of the Sorbonne at the time and later Contrôleur Général des Finances. On 11 December 1750 Turgot presented a paper en­ titled 'A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind'. History, he said, was the record of the long advance from barbarism to the fullness of civilization. One of the first lessons from history showed that 'the whole human race, through alternate periods of rest and unrest, of weal and woe, goes on advancing, although at a slow pace, towards greater perfection'.3 Mankind was entering on a new age of increasing knowledge: 'Already Bacon has traced out for posterity the road which it must follow.' Although Turgot was confident that the great advance would continue, he could not foresee the way ahead. For an aspirant cleric, as Turgot was at that time, the future was best left to prayer: 'May men continually make new steps along the road of truth! Rather still, may they continually become better and happier!'

The French army established the first balloon company in history on 2 April 1794. It consisted of one hydrogen balloon and a crew of two. The company saw service in the French victory at Fleurus on 26 June 1794

6

George VI: paragon of a warrior king

As the road to the future opened up in the second half of the eight­ eenth century, a process of convergence started between the limitless possibilities of fiction and the ever more confident hopes of the greater changes still to come. The new and the potential were matters that demanded their proper form. So, in a hesitant and experimental way, the tale of the future began as a marriage of convenience between old styles and new opportunities. The first major English example of this transformation is the anonymous Reign of George VI, 1900-1925 of 1763. Like so many of his successors in the business of constructing future worlds, the author built with borrowed material. The score for this first hymn to an ideal future was programme music from a bygone age; for the author had taken his principal ideas from the archaic scheme of monarchical government that had appeared in Bolingbroke's Idea of a Patriot King of 1749. Nevertheless, the form of the story is truly original. The author has the distinction of inaugurating the tale of coming things with a double-take; for he combines two of the most effective modes in futuristic fiction in his account of the great warsto-come and of an ideal Britain in the early twentieth century. The alien geography and the other-world chronologies of the terrestrial utopias vanish. The long voyage to Bensalem and Lilliput becomes an instant time-journey through the future-imperfect of the United Kingdom during the troubled reigns of George IV and George V. Then comes the virtual reality of a better age, when King George VI succeeds to the throne on 16 February 1900. Happy days have come again. It was the beginning of 'a period the most remarkable, and abounding in the most astonishing events, that have ever been recorded in modern history'. This devoted Hanoverian fantasy displays for the first time the essential mechanism of the imaginary war story: the assessment of those contemporary enemies, coalitions, and alliances that can be expected to decide the future of any nation; the application of approved theories—political, military, technological—that will come together in a convincing demonstration of cause and effect; and the future victories, or the disasters and defeats, that will present the exemplary verdicts of a triumphant or a despairing posterity. True to his eighteenth-century assumptions, however, the author puts the future George VI in his rightful place—at the source of all power, as the prime mover in the affairs of state, and as the wise, prudent paragon of a warrior king. His chief service to his country will be twenty years of constant and most profitable warfare. Six of the ten chapters in The Reign of George VI are devoted to the many successful

The Paper Warriors

7

campaigns that make the British monarch ruler of Europe, King of France, and master of a vast empire overseas. This empire extends from the Philippines to Mexico and—note well—to 'the British American dominions in North America'. The global scale of the narrative is in marked contrast to the old-style convictions, which create a static, ever-lasting Hanoverian world of the future. The only conceivable changes in this sicut erit history are the territorial gains that come from successful campaigns. Technology has not begun to affect the conditions of warfare on land or at sea. Ships-of-the-line, cavalry, and musketeers continue the practices of the eighteenth­ century drill books. War is not yet a matter for citizens: it remains the favoured argument of kings. The European monarchs— Austrian, British, French, Russian, Spanish—maintain their own armies, recruit their own mercenaries, and plan their campaigns as they will; they select their senior officers from the aristocracy; and they never fail to lead their troops into battle. All the engage­ ments in The Reign of George VI, for example, are action replays of eighteenth-century warfare—one-day affairs fought during the campaigning season from April to September. Here is the British monarch in his role as commander-in-chief at the Battle of Alencon on 5 July 1925:4 The French army was posted in the most advantageous manner. In their front was a rivulet, behind which were nine redoubts mounted with cannon; their wings were defended in the same manner, and every approach guarded with artillery. The King, having reconnoitred the enemy's position, drew up his troops on the same plain at some distance in their front. As the French army outspread his, he disposed his cannon in his wings, in such a manner as to prevent his being surrounded; himself commanded the centre, the Duke of Devonshire the right, and the Earl of Bury the left. Every­ thing being prepared for the engagement, the King ordered the signal to be made for beginning it, and about nine in the morning the battle began which was at once to decide the fate of two mighty kingdoms. The French army was the most numerous; and commanded by their King. The Monarch of the English also headed them, and they were eager to engage, and obliterate by their bravery the memory of their late defeat. The fire of the artillery was the beginning of this great action; as the British troops advanced under cover of their

8

A shift in attitudes and expectations

own cannon, that of the enemy played on them with great fury, and some effect. But the skill of the English engineers so well directed their fire, that several batteries of the enemy were thrown into confusion. The King however soon brought on warmer work; at the head of the first line of his centre, he began the attack, which was received with firmness.

If the author lived on to the end of the century, he must have noted how the very different conditions of a revolutionary age had brought about distinct changes in the representation of the war-tocome. During the Napoleonic period, the desire for the greatest possible realism had made eager patriots turn to print-making and play-writing in order to portray their versions of the future as they hoped it would be. On the French side, the battles of tomorrow opened with highly dramatic presentations of the coming conquest of the United Kingdom in Les Prisonniers français en Angleterre in 1797, and La Descente en Angleterre: Prophétie en deux actes in 1798. The British response began in 1803, the year of greatest danger, when Napoleon's invasion forces were encamped at Boulogne, waiting for the crucial six hours of good weather that would permit them to cross the Channel. In London happy British audiences applauded the end of French ambitions in The Invasion of England: A Farce in Three Acts and the equally desirable calamities in The Armed Briton; or, the Invaders Vanquished. These British and French plays reveal the first signs of a shift in both attitudes and expectations which would come to dominate all future-war fiction from 1871 onwards. Monarchs and their dynas­ ties vanish from these dramas. The whole nation—soldiers, sailors, volunteers, and citizens—become the principal actors in the battleto-come; and, even more indicative of a change in perceptions, there are the earliest anticipations of new means of warfare. These appear at their most menacing in the many prints of the great invasion craft, powered by windmills, that were supposed to be waiting for GB Day in Boulogne harbour. The most original were French prints of an invasion by way of a secret Channel Tunnel, or by vast troop­ landing balloons speeding through the clouds on their way to Dover. When Nelson died in the action off Cape Trafalgar on 21 October 1805, it seemed that the British command of the sea was secure for generations to come. Within forty years, however, the technologies of the new iron age had begun to change the conduct of warfare. The sail navies changed to steamships, and then to ironclads in response to the first shell-guns. The armies abandoned the old

The Paper Warriors

9

Print warfare in Year XI of the Republic: a French projection of an air-landing brigade (3,000 men), transported by Montgolfier balloon across the Channel

muzzle-loading musket for the far more accurate rifle, and the artillery regiments greatly increased the rate and accuracy of their fire with the breech-loading gun. Although admirals and generals debated the effects of these changes at great length in many tracts

10

'The nations' airy navies'

about the application of the new weaponry, the tales of the war-tocome had little to say about the future.5 One reason was the prevailing belief in the idea of progress—the conviction that, as the Prince Consort put it in 1850, the British people were fortunate enough to be 'living at a period of most wonderful transition'. If all things were manifestly improving, it followed that the military tech­ nologies would advance the cause of universal peace as surely as the steamship and the railway had already done so much for the improvement of mankind. In 1841, it was fast forward and progress in all directions. That thought was written into the exultant verse of Tennyson's 'Locksley Hall': Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new: That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the people plunging thro' the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle­ flags were furl'd In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

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A French anticipation of the day when Napoleon would arrive in Boulogne for La Descente en Angleterre

Artist's impression of vast French landing craft, powered by wind-mills, supposed to be ready for the invasion of Britain

12

Steam navies and invasion

In the new age of steam navies, only a major enemy—possessed of a great army and a large fleet—could disrupt the dream of peace. That unlikely combination made for a relaxed attitude. Even in 1841, when the Prince de Joinville caused some alarm by his proposals for a large French navy, the British press took matters calmly on the whole. A typical response appeared in an editorial in the Illustrated London News. It began with the sensible observation: 'The landing of a French army on the sea coast is an event not very probable; but, as there have been invasions in times past, there is at least a possibility of it—quite enough to throw timid people into a sense of mild terror.'6 There was, however, a momentary tremor of alarm in 1851, when Louis Napoleon staged the coup that made him ruler of France. The combination of a French steam navy and the memory of the first Napoleon was enough to set the alarm bells ringing in the press. And yet, the response in fiction to the antici­ pated dangers was one short story, The History of the Sudden and Terrible Invasion of England by the French—a tale of French treachery and the most conspicuous British incompetence. Louis Napoleon is a villain: 'Vain, dissipated and insignificant, during his exile in England he associated only with the wildest spirits of the aristocracy; but under the cloak of gaiety he concealed an undying hatred to the British name.' The British government does not understand that 'it was no longer possible to guard the long line of coast against the sudden attacks of steamers; and that, in fact, we are now become a Continental nation, and, like the rest, would be compelled to keep up a large and powerful standing army to preserve our firesides from invasion'. For the French army, well prepared and well armed, the invasion is little more than annual manoeuvres. London surrenders, and the Londoners pay £20 million to be saved from the looters. Or so they hoped. But:7 In levying this heavy contribution some disputes arose between the citizens and the conquerors, which led to blows, and the ruthless soldiers of Bonaparte immediately commenced an indiscriminate massacre and pillage which continued for three days, till the Algerian warriors were forced to show mercy, because, through sheer exhaustion, they could no longer continue their barbarities. With the concentrated vengeance of three days they effaced the bitter recollections of centuries: Cressy, Agincourt, Salamanca, and Waterloo, were all dust in the balance with the sacking of London. The destruction of life was enormous, especially in

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the City; and few of the public buildings escaped the ruthless violence of the enemy. The Punch office and Printing-house Square were made especial bonfires of, and all was conflagra­ tion and dismay. The parapets of Waterloo-bridge were hurled into the Thames, and Waterloo-place with a consider­ able part of Regent-street was utterly destroyed by fire. Even the wild animals of the Zoological-gardens were let loose, and, like the tigers of Tippoo at the storming of Seringapatam, added confusion and terror to the scene. Twenty years later, the rapid and totally unexpected German victories in the War of 1870 astounded the world and caused great alarm in the United Kingdom. Newspapers were filled with articles about the new kind of warfare, as editors sought to take full advan­ tage of the national nervousness. Naval historians, admirals, and generals presented their views on 'Future Naval Battles', 'Are we Ready?', 'Our Naval Supremacy', and 'National Armies and Modern Warfare'. They wrote at length on the importance of railway systems in concentrating and transporting troops, the new means of control and rapid communication in the electric telegraph, the new rifles and the new artillery which 'have effected a complete revolution in the methods of combat, the organisation of the troops, and their instruction'. Throughout 1870 and well into 1871, the comments varied from statements of stupefaction to forecasts of the conse­ quences for Europe. So, what did the future hold? In a lecture delivered on 25 April 1871, the eminent historian, Lord Acton, told his audience that the future was beyond the calculation of historians: 'To exhibit a coher­ ent chain of causes in the revolution of the last nine months, which has shifted the landmarks of European politics, and has given new leaders to the world, is still an impossible task.'8 A week later another historian, Edward Augustus Freeman, told the readers of Macmillan's Magazine that they had every reason to rejoice in the defeat of the French. As for their anxieties about invasion, it was all a fit of the vapours: 'We have been passing through, perhaps we have not yet fully come out of, one of those curious fits of panic which seem ever and anon to seize upon the English nation, and which, after exciting everybody for a while, die away and are forgotten.'9 Lord Acton and Edward Freeman were not to know that the greatest literary explosion of the nineteenth century was already in train, as the typesetters completed work on No. 667 of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. When the May issue burst upon the nation, the

14

Success of The Battle of Dorking

With the beginnings of the illustrated press in the 1840s, the look-into-the-future became a popular feature of the new magazines

first entry proved so startling that by the end of the month readers throughout the world had learnt the message of The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer. The anonymous author was a distin­ guished officer of Engineers, Lieutenant-Colonel at the time, later General Sir George Tomkyns Chesney. His intention in writing was to warn his fellow-countrymen that the War of 1870 could easily be repeated on their home ground, if the nation did not accept the need for a reorganization of the army and for conscription. The extraordinary success of The Battle of Dorking derived for the most part from a well-told story which compelled readers to partic­ ipate in the imagined defeat and humiliation of their country. Chesney had three advantages: he knew how to write about warfare; he had the good sense to base his narrative on the episodic I-was-there style of the then popular Erckmann-Chatrian stories; and he went into print at a time when there was great debate and some anxiety about the shape of wars-to-come. The result was a fast-moving tale of total disaster and the most damning incompe­ tence, told by the Volunteer who observes and explains those sins of omission in manpower and of commission in strategy that led to the final lamentation: 'Truly the nation was ripe for a fall; but when I reflect how a little firmness and self-denial, or political courage and foresight, might have averted the disaster I feel that the judgement must have really been deserved.' By the end of May Blackwood's Magazine had gone through six reprints, and still the demand was for more. In June, when John Blackwood started to publish The Dorking as a sixpenny pamphlet, the sales went up and up at the rate of 20,000 a week to reach the

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grand total of 110,000 in July. And then, on 2 September, the British Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, attacked the 'alarmism' of the Chesney story in a speech at Whitby. On 5 September William Blackwood wrote to his uncle and partner, John Blackwood: 'Glad­ stone's speech is contemptible but it will do "The Dorking" good and introduce it to quite a new class of people. We will soon have to think of a people's edition. I think at Id or 2d.'10 It was a sign that the times were changing. War had become the concern of all citi­ zens. A short story for the middle-class readers of Blackwood's Magazine had caught the attention of 'a new class of people' throughout the world. As populations had gone on increasing during the great forward movement of the nineteenth century, and as the levels of literacy continued to rise in the major industrial nations, more and more publications were able to meet the demand for information about coming things. So, there were translations of the Blackwood's story into Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Swedish; and there were instant reprints in New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. By the end of 1871 there had been some eighteen British variations and counter-blasts on the lines of The Battle of Dorking: A Myth, and, in final proof of an unprecedented notoriety, there were two music-hall songs on the invasion theme and a fictitious edition of The Official Despatches and Correspondence relative to the Battle of Dorking, as moved for in the House of Commons, 21st July 1920. The 'Dorking' episode was the beginning of the great flood of future war stories that continued right up to the summer of 1914. The new wave of writers learnt the basics of their trade from Chesney. His name and reputation lived on in faithful imitations and occasional reprints. In fact, the recollection of his invasion story was powerful enough to lend support to Colonel Maude's account of The New Battle of Dorking in 1900. A more sinister occasion was the reap­ pearance of The Dorking in 1940, published by the Nazi propaganda machine with the apposite title of Was England erwartetl From 1871 to 1914, the tale of the next great war was a staple of the European press. Year by year, patriotism and profit worked happily together to produce more and more of these stories to satisfy the ever-growing interest in coming things. It was the first great age of the future—that primal time when the potential found appropri­ ate shape in ideal states like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887, in the heroic enterprise fiction of Jules Verne, and in the earliest essays in future-think that appear in David Goodman Croly's collection of speculations, Glimpses of the Future: Suggestions as to the

16

New means of warfare

Drift of Things (1888). They were all fantasies of the conscious mind; they made the seemingly logical connections between today and tomorrow.

The first patent application (No. 747) for an armoured fighting vehicle was presented on 3 April 1855 by James Cowen and James Sweetlong. 'This invention consists of an im­ proved locomotive battery to be used in the field of battle, and is so constructed as to exert a most destructive force against the enemy, while protected from damage in return'

This may-be fiction opened up two main lines into the future. First, the political account in the Chesney mode described how cata­ strophe—or victory—would surely follow, because the nation had—or had not—adopted whatever safeguards the authors consid­ ered essential in any future conflict. Later on, when the technological narratives began in the 1880s, they broke new ground by combining entertainment with instruction in exciting tales about 'what it will be like' in the new kind of war at sea or in the air. In 1888, for instance, Hugh Arnold-Forster, an MP at the time and later Secretary of the Admiralty, wrote In a Conning Tower: A Story of Modern Ironclad Warfare in order to give the readers of Murray's Maga­ zine 'a faithful idea of the possible course of an action between two modern ironclads availing themselves of all the weapons of offence and defence which an armoured ship at the present day possesses'. Ironclads, then submarines, destroyers, and aeroplanes—there was no end to speculation. In 1900, for example, the American inventor,

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J. P. Holland, delivered the first effective submarine to the US Navy; and in 1901 George Griffith wrote The Raid ofLe Vengeur, an ingeni­ ous tale of anti-submarine warfare. On 25 July 1909 Louis Blériot made the first aeroplane crossing of the English Channel, and at once the new versions of the war-in-the-air began to multiply. The Swedish writer Gustaf Janson considered the inhumanity of air warfare in his Vision of the Future (1912); and the British writer Fred­ erick Britten Austin described an air attack on infantry and the breakdown of morale in "Planes!' (1913). Thus, the future war story is at all times a specific response, both in form and in content, to the perceived potential in contemporary society. For two decades after 1871, the tales of the next great war kept close to the Chesney model. Most of them began as short stories in the principal middle-class magazines; and most of their authors were eminent Victorians who wrote their tales of the war-to-come in order to give the public the benefit of their views on military or naval matters. For example, General Sir William Francis Butler, a distinguished soldier, wrote The Invasion of England (1882) to call attention to the materialism that could endanger the nation. In 1887 Sir William Laird Clowes and Alan Hughes Burgoyne brought out The Great Naval War in 1887, in which they presented a French conquest of the United Kingdom as 'the natural result of years of indifference, mismanagement, and parsimony'. The guiding princi­ ple in these stories was: tomorrow's wars begin today. In 1882, for instance, the proposals for a Channel Tunnel led to a sudden flurry of I-told-you-so stories—How John Bull lost London, The Story of the Channel Tunnel, The Seizure of the Channel Tunnel. The dastardly French invaders come secretly by train to Dover. They leap from the carriages—Zouaves disguised as tourists—and depart at the double to seize Dover Castle. The enemy in these stories know nothing of chivalry and the rules of war. In The Taking of Dover there is an early example of the fifth column at work, for Horace Francis Lester makes a feature of the despicable behaviour of the French and Russians agents as they assemble a secret assault group for the capture of Dover. In fact, the primary law in this fiction is: the more political the story, the greater the uniformity in the telling. A secondary law holds that the end will always justify the means. Change the circumstances, and the narrative style of the invasionof-England story reappears in The Stricken Nation, an anti-British projection from across the Atlantic. This tale of the great American disaster, like the Channel Tunnel stories, was a product of the times. In the 1880s a debate had opened in the United States about the

18

New weapons and old ideas

need for a large navy; and in 1889, when Congress began to consider a naval construction programme, Henry Grattan Donnelly decided to put the case for a great American navy in the Chesney manner. His test to destruction was a tale of terror in which naval superiority leads to the conquest of the United States. In his story the British are as vile as the French in The Taking of Dover: 'There were British spies on our ships, British spies in our arsenals, and British influences had for years been powerful enough to defeat every attempt that was made to get appropriations for defence.' The attention Donnelly gave to British armaments was one sign of a growing interest in the seemingly limitless possibilities of ever more lethal weaponry. The most striking example of this new direction in fiction is undoubtedly the magnificently illustrated album of La Guerre au vingtième siècle ('War in the Twentieth Century') of 1887. The author and the illustrator was Albert Robida, a gifted caricaturist with a sharp eye for the grotesque. This most original artist took the idea of the future as his theme, and in a series of illustrated stories in the weekly La Caricature he created his own iconography of daily life in the twentieth century—many varieties of mechanical transporta­ tion, submarine pleasure boats, video-phones, television news, trips to the moon for 80,000 francs, even synthetic foods. The stories later appeared as books, of which the most remarkable are La Vie électrique, La Vie au vingtième siècle, and most of all La Guerre au vingtième siècle. The images of the world war of 1945 in that book—chemical warfare battalions, bombing planes, submarines, and armoured fighting vehicles—are an ironic commentary on the assumptions of a techno­ logical epoch. No matter what the weapons might be, the citizens of the great industrial nations thought that future wars would continue to be like the limited and relatively humane engagements of the old days. New weapons and old ideas—that fatal combination would make nonsense of all their anticipations of coming wars. They failed to scale up the casualty lists, and they could not even begin to guess at the changes for the worse to be expected in the great technological war of the future. Experience had deceived them. The future very rarely turns out to be what was expected, as so many Kremlin­ watchers discovered not so long ago. The nineteenth-century prophets could contemplate the possibil­ ity of future wars with equanimity. Like Tennyson, they had looked into the future and they had seen 'the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be'. The diffusion of knowledge, the constant improvement in education, the increasing wealth of nations, the convenience and security of life in the great new urban centres, the

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application of world-changing technologies and the benign discover­ ies of the medical sciences, the spreading European empires and the growing interdependence of nations—all those familiar phrases from the non-stop discourse on progress encouraged a positivist, optimistic attitude to the future. The data persuaded some world­ changers, like Josiah Strong, that all the signs pointed to a decisive conflict for the domination of the planet. The time was coming when the world would 'enter upon a new stage of its history—the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon race is being schooled—this powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and Southern America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond. And can anyone doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the "survival of the fittest?" '.u From the same data there came a very different set of assump­ tions, which looked forward to peace and worldwide co-operation. They promised that the meek would find their heaven in any of the characteristic nineteenth-century ideal worlds of the future. Indeed, in the most popular of them all, Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy noted in a postscript that his description of the peaceful and co-oper­ ative world-state in the year 2000 was intended 'in all seriousness, as a forecast, in accordance with the principles of evolution, of the next stage in the social and industrial development of humanity'. Destiny was the bell-ringer of the coming age. These prophets knew where they were going; for it was written that the social and tech­ nological achievements of the nineteenth century were the marvellous prologue to the growing harmony and increasing happi­ ness of all humankind. No one put that conviction better than H. G. Wells in 1901, when he welcomed the twentieth century with his forecasts of coming things in Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. The future was, he declared, in the safe hands of the New Republicans. They are 'the new class of modern efficients', those educated and rational minds that 'will already be consciously and pretty freely controlling the general affairs of humanity before this century closes'. The fortunate peoples of planet Earth will go on for ever and ever in the good hands of these prudent managers; for their 'broad principles and opinions must necessarily shape and determine that still ampler future of which the coming hundred years is but the opening phase'. Optimism came easily to Wells and his contemporaries. Their fore­ casts of things-to-come had no entries for global warming, shrinking

20

The limits of the possible

Possibilities of future military technology fascinated the readers of the illustrated magazines, as is apparent in the proposal by James Nasmyth for a 'floating mortar ... for destroying, by one masterly blow, the largest ship of an invading army'

tropical forests, the nuclear winter, future-shock, or ecological cata­ strophes such as the desolation of the Aral Sea. In their speculations about time-to-come, they assumed that their successors would manage change, even in warfare, as well as their predecessors had controlled the development of the great industrial societies. As new armaments appeared, the imagination raced ahead to the limits of the possible. Dynamite cruisers, electric rifles, giant submarines, vast flying machines—these appeared regularly in the many popular accounts that began in the 1890s. The perfection of this new style is apparent in the remarkable sequence of full-length stories from H. G. Wells. In The War of the Worlds of 1898, he took weaponry as far as he could imagine in the Martian fighting machines, the Black Smoke, and the Heat Ray; in 1908 he came closer to the possible in the air bombardments described in The War in the Air; and in 1913 he produced the most fateful anticipation of all these stories in his account of the atomic

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war in The World Set Free. Out of that great evil, Wells plucked the blessings of universal peace and the union of all nations in the World Republic. From 1890 onwards, the tales of the war-to-come multiplied and diversified in various ways. The armed forces and their role in any future war had become matters of absorbing interest for readers at all levels throughout Europe. Everywhere, writers met the demand for more exciting and more chauvinistic fiction with full-length stories that gave their versions of the expected war against France, or Russia, or Germany. In 1892, for example, The Times naval corres­ pondent and historian of the Royal Navy, Sir William Laird Clowes, dedicated the 308 pages of The Captain of the 'Mary Rose' to answering the question, 'What will the sea-fighting of tomorrow be like?' In France, from 1889 to 1910 there was a succession of twelve books, some 12,000 pages in all, about La Guerre qui vient from Capitaine Danrit, the nom de guerre of the distinguished officer of Chasseurs, Commandant Émile Auguste Driant. And there were illustrated stories in French magazines. For example, La Guerre Anglo-FrancoRusse, Henri De Nousanne's account of the total defeat of the British, was published as a special supplement to Le Monde filustre for 10 March 1900. In Germany, tales of Der Krieg gegen England first began to affect opinion from the time of the Navy Bill of 1900. An opening shot in the Zukunftskrieg against the British had the apt title of Die Abrechnung mit England (1901). Indeed, the German tales of the next great war had the most uncompromising titles: August Niemann, Der Weltkrieg—Deutsche Träume (1904); Karl Bleibtreu, Die 'Offensiv­ invasion' gegen England (19W7); and so on to the most inflammatory of them all: Paul Georg Münch, Hindenburgs Einmarsch in London (1915). Although the short story continued to hold its own in Blackwood's, The Strand, and the other major British journals, the immutable laws of supply and demand gave the best of the trade to the new popular press and to the book publishers. Astute newspaper proprietors, entrepreneurs like Pearson and Harmsworth, sought to increase sales by giving their readers long, lurid accounts of the next great war against the French in the 1890s and against the Germans after 1903. These serial stories became the norm in the popular press and in the more expensive weekly illustrated magazines. The first of the new serials appeared in January 1891. This was the fully illustrated projection of The Great War of 1892, which the editor of Black and White had commissioned from Admiral Colomb and his eminent associates. The experts gave their readers what they wanted: a

22

The German menace in fiction

professional analysis of the expected European war to be fought by Germany and the United Kingdom against France and Russia. Their forecast proved so popular, especially in the book edition, that jour­ nalists—George Griffith, Robert Cromie, F. T. Jane, and Louis Tracy, for example—took to writing future war stories. The most successful, and certainly the most notorious, of them all was William Le Queux. In 1894 he entered on his long collaboration with Alfred Harmsworth when he wrote The Great War in England in 1897 for Answers, the new Harmsworth weekly. It did wonders for the circulation figures, and Le Queux followed up that success with another war story, England's Peril (1899). Then, in 1906 he did better than ever for Alfred Harmsworth (Baron Northcliffe by that time) with his sensational account of German victories and British disas­ ters in The Invasion of 1910. Again, there was alarm and anger when the ridiculous story began to appear in the Daily Mail; and once again, a British prime minister felt it was necessary to denounce yet another tale of the great German invasion. Le Queux was a scare­ monger, said Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and his story was 'calculated to inflame public opinion abroad and alarm the more ignorant public at home'. Nevertheless, The Invasion of 1910 proved to be a greater commercial success than Chesney's Battle of Dorking. For six months it was the talk of the nation, and it enjoyed close scrutiny in the French and German press. The final balance sheet showed twenty-seven translations, and sales of the book at over one million copies. Between 1903 and 1914, every stage of the coming war against Germany was related for British readers in a literature of extraordin­ ary contrasts. There were the inflammatory serial stories, and there were stories of great originality and high quality. In 1903, for example, Erskine Childers described the rehearsal for a German invasion in his admirable Riddle of the Sands. In 1909, a bumper year, good patriots could choose to see Guy du Maurier's play An English­ man's Home at Wyndham's Theatre; and, if they made the effort, they could read a poetic version of the German invasion story in Charles Doughty's The Clouds. If they wanted to be amused, they had a brief piece in Punch, The Secret of the Army Aeroplane, in which the promising young humorist A. A. Milne made fun of Le Queux's Spies of the Kaiser Plotting the Downfall of England. Two months later another young humorist, P. G. Wodehouse, added to the merriment with his comic deflation of the future war story in The Swoop! or, How Clarence saved England. At the same time, the short story made an evolutionary advance

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to new themes. Out went the political and moral demonstrations that had once shaped and animated the old Chesney-style fiction, and in came more generalized stories. These concentrated on one or other aspect of warfare, and not on the known enemies and the expected wars of the serials. No doubt this retreat from the popular consensus on the next great war was the decision of the magazine editors. They must have realized that they could not compete with the serials in length, exciting episodes, and conspicuous chauvinism. An early and classic example of this new direction appeared in the Strand Magazine for December 1903. It was Wells's famous account of The Land Ironclads, and a favourite entry in the anthologies of the last forty years. Like Conan Doyle's study of submarine warfare in Danger, it was as near an essay in abstractions as these war stories can be. All the particularities of nations and alliances, all the linear projections of contemporary governments and military systems, all the customary bric-a-brac of would-be realistic stories such as The Invasion of 1910 have vanished. Wells develops his parable of possi­ bilities by giving his entire attention to the fighting vehicles and to the rift in thinking and expectations between the two cultures of the mechanical and lamentably unmechanical. There are the young engineers—'alert, intelligent, quiet'—in their land ironclads. Opposed to them are the miserable foot-slogging enemy, the un­ mechanized, whom the victors despise as 'some inferior kind of native'. A comparable concentration on essentials is apparent in the twenty stories that Lieutenant-Colonel Swinton, as he was then, wrote between 1906 and 1914 for Blackwood's Magazine, The Strand,

From 1890 onwards the illustrated magazines gave their readers tales of the next great war as these were expected to develop

24

Imagination and the rate of change

and The Cornhill. The best of these is undoubtedly The Green Curve, a clever tale of the life-and-death choices that have to be made in time of war. And here fact begins to come close to fiction, for the land ironclads of the Wells story of 1903 became the reality of the Swinton proposal to the Committee of Imperial Defence in October 1914. As the opposing armies dug themselves in for the trench warfare the military had not expected, Swinton argued that the answer to barbed wire, trenches, and machine-guns was a bespoke weapon. Let them invent the tank! Major-General Sir Ernest Swinton, KBE, CB, deserved his promotion and his honours. He had shown the world how to invent the secret weapon. Indeed, invention is the mother of futuristic fiction. All these tales of tomorrow—future wars, utopias and dystopias, space adventures and final holocausts—are the acknowledgement that imagination pays to the rate of change. This fact is most apparent in the tales of the next great war during the first main period of their development between 1871 and 1914. As will be apparent in this anthology, these stories are not the unfettered speculations of minds set free to consider every conceivable possibility: they are shaped by the domi­ nant expectations and assumptions of their day. Despite the startling originality of the stories from Wells and Conan Doyle, these tales of the war-to-come can never tell the whole story of what will be. They are solitary planets, moving through the eternal silence of a history that will never be written. In the beginning, in the circumscribed world of 1763, the author of The Reign of George VI had imagined that in 1915 his ever-victori­ ous British monarch would be building a magnificent new city on classical lines near Uppingham in Rutlandshire. He could not conceive how the world would have changed within a century and a half. By 1915, the American colonies had become a great nation and the small German principalities of the eighteenth century had been welded into a powerful Reich. Millions of combatants, employing weapons beyond all conjecture in 1763, were engaged in trench warfare along the Western Front. When Americans like the publisher George H. Putnam looked into the future, they foresaw the dangers that faced their country. Putnam was a great admirer of Chesney's Battle of Dorking; and on a visit to England in 1915 he 'spent some time in tramping over the Dorking region with the book in my hand to find how closely he had in his narrative followed the topography'.12 He applied the Chesney formula to the situation of the United States, and in 1915 he published America Fallen by J. Bernard Walker. It was an invasion story, designed to show 'that

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unless Americans are prepared to take active measures for the protection of their coasts, the United States is exposed to the risk of invasion'. By 1915, however, as the New World was preparing to play its part in the first great technological war in history, the tales of the

By 1916 American writers had taken to relating their own tales of the German invasion of the United States

26

German troops outside Buckingham Palace

future had dwindled to a trickle. The last tale of the war-to-come was in German: Hindenburgs Einmarsch in London, an Old World account of rapid victories and a final glorious triumph that brings down the curtain in the shadow theatre of the next great war. The wars that began with Chesney's Battle of Dorking now end with the spectacle of Hindenburg addressing the victorious German troops outside Buckingham Palace. They were to write down all they had seen and experienced, 'so that in the future, if in the course of the next centuries a war-like feeling arise again in Europe, your chil­ dren's children shall say, to your honour and to the confusion of our enemies: "One of my forefathers once bivouacked before Bucking­ ham Palace after helping to subdue a whole world of enemies." Good night, comrades!'

Notes 1. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Danger and Other Stories (1918), v-vii. 2. Lord Macauley, 'Lord Bacon', in Literary Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review (1932), 408. 3. Ronald L. Meek, (ed.), Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics (1973), 41. 4. I. F. Clarke (ed.), The Reign of George VI (1972), pp. 56-7. 5. A full account will be found in I. F. Clarke. Voices Prophesying War, (1992). 6. Illustrated London News, 18 December, 1847, p. 1. 7. Anonymous, The History of the Sudden and Terrible Invasion of England by the French ... in May, 1852 (1851), pp. 18-19. 8. Lord Acton, 'The War of 1870: A Lecture delivered at the Bridgnorth Literary and Scientific Institution on the 25th of April, 1871' (1871), p. 3. 9. Edward A. Freeman, 'The Panic and its Lessons', Macmillan's Magazine, May 1871, pp. 1-14. 10. National Library of Scotland, Blackwood MSS. 1871, Ms. 4271, no. 81. 11. Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and its Present Crisis (1891), p. 175. 12. George H. Putnam, Memories of a Publisher (1915), p. 67.

The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer GENERAL SIR GEORGE TOMKYNS CHESNEY

You ask me to tell you, my grandchildren, something about my own share in the great events that happened fifty years ago. 'Tis sad work turning back to that bitter page in our history, but you may perhaps take profit in your new homes from the lesson it teaches. For us in England it came too late. And yet we had plenty of warnings, if we had only made use of them. The danger did not come on us suddenly unawares. It burst on us suddenly, 'tis true, but its coming was foreshadowed plainly enough to open our eyes, if we had not been wilfully blind. We English have only ourselves to blame for the humiliation which has been brought on the land. Venerable old age! Dishonourable old age, I say, when it follows a manhood dishon­ oured as ours has been. I declare, even now, though fifty years have passed, I can hardly look a young man in the face when I think I am one of those in whose youth happened this degradation of Old England—one of those who betrayed the trust handed down to us unstained by our forefathers. What a proud and happy country was this fifty years ago! Free trade had been working for more than a quarter of a century, and there seemed to be no end to the riches it was bringing us. London was growing bigger and bigger; you could not build houses fast enough for the rich people who wanted to live in them, the merchants who made the money and came from all parts of the world to settle there, and the lawyers and doctors and engineers and others, and trades-people who got their share out of the profits. The streets reached down to Croydon and Wimbledon, which my father could remember as quite country places; and people used to say that Kingston and Reigate would soon be joined to London. We thought we could go on building and multiplying for ever. 'Tis true that even then there was no lack of poverty; the people who had no money went on increasing as fast as the rich, and pauperism was already beginning to be a difficulty; but if the rates were high, there was plenty of money to pay them with; and as for what were called the

28

If ever a nation had a plain warning!

middle classes, there really seemed no limit to their increase and prosperity. People in those days thought it quite a matter of course to bring a dozen children into the world—or, as it used to be said, Providence sent them that number of babies; and if they couldn't always marry off all the daughters, they used to manage to provide for the sons, for there were new openings to be found in all the professions, or in the government offices, which went on steadily getting larger. Besides, in those days young men could be sent out to India, or into the army or navy; and even then emigration was not uncommon, although not the regular custom it is now. Schoolmas­ ters, like all other professional classes, drove a capital trade. They did not teach very much, to be sure, but new schools with their four or five hundred boys were springing up all over the country. Fools that we were! We thought that all this wealth and prosperity were sent us by Providence, and could not stop coming. In our blindness we did not see that we were merely a big workshop, making up the things which came from all parts of the world; and that if other nations stopped sending us raw goods to work up, we could not produce them ourselves. True, we had in those days an advantage in our cheap coal and iron; and had we taken care not to waste the fuel, it might have lasted us longer. But even then there were signs that coal and iron would soon become cheaper in foreign parts; while as to food and other things, England was not better off than it is now. We were so rich simply because other nations from all parts of the world were in the habit of sending their goods to us to be sold or manufactured; and we thought that this would last for ever. And so, perhaps, it might have lasted, if we had only taken proper means to keep it; but, in our folly, we were too careless even to insure our prosperity, and after the course of trade was turned away it would not come back again. And yet, if ever a nation had a plain warning, we had. If we were the greatest trading country, our neighbours were the leading military power in Europe. They were driving a good trade, too, for this was before their foolish communism (about which you will hear when you are older) had ruined the rich without benefiting the poor, and they were in many respects the first nation in Europe; but it was on their army that they prided themselves most. And with reason. They had beaten the Russians and the Austrians, and the Prussians too, in bygone years, and they thought they were invincible. Well do I remember the great review held at Paris by the Emperor Napoleon during the great Exhibition,1 and how proud he looked showing off his splendid Guards to the assembled

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29

In 1871 Charles Yriarte translated the Battle of Dorking into French. In the preface he asked: '...if such a book, published here in 1869, might not have had an influence on our future'

30

The army was kept down

kings and princes. Yet, three years afterwards, the force so long deemed the first in Europe was ignominiously beaten, and the whole army taken prisoners. Such a defeat had never happened before in the world's history; and, with this proof before us of the folly of disbelieving in the possibility of disaster merely because it had never happened before, it might have been supposed that we should have the sense to take the lesson to heart. And the country was certainly roused for a time, and a cry was raised that the army ought to be reorganized, and our defences strengthened against the enormous power for sudden attacks which it was seen other nations were able to put forth. But our Government had come into office on a cry of retrenchment, and could not bring themselves to eat their own pledges.2 There was a Radical section of their party, too, whose votes had to be secured by conciliation, and which blindly demanded a reduction of armaments as the price of alle­ giance. This party always decried military establishments as part of a fixed policy for reducing the influence of the Crown and the aris­ tocracy. They could not understand that the times had altogether changed, that the Crown had really no power, and that the Govern­ ment merely existed at the pleasure of the House of Commons, and that even Parliament-rule was beginning to give way to mob-law. At any rate, the Ministry were only too glad of this excuse to give up all the strong points of a scheme which they were not really in earnest about. The fleet and the Channel, they said, were sufficient protection. So the army was kept down, and the militia and volun­ teers were left untrained as before, because to call them out for drill would 'interfere with the industry of the country'. We could have given up some of the industry of those days, forsooth, and yet be busier than we are now. But why tell you a tale you have so often heard already? The nation, although uneasy, was misled by the false security its leaders professed to feel; the warning given by the disaster that overtook France was allowed to pass by unheeded. The French trusted in their army and its great reputation, we in our fleet; and in each case the result of this blind confidence was disaster, such as our forefathers in their hardest struggles could not have even imagined. I need hardly tell you how the crash came about. First, the rising in India drew away a part of our small army; then came the diffi­ culty with America, which had been threatening for years, and we sent ten thousand men to defend Canada3—a handful which did not go far to strengthen the real defences of that country, but formed an irresistible temptation to the Americans to try and take them

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prisoners, especially as the contingent included three battalions of the Guards. Thus the regular army at home was even smaller than usual, and nearly half of it was in Ireland to check the talked-of Fenian invasion fitting out in the West. Worse still—though I do not know it would really have mattered as things turned out—the fleet was scattered abroad: some ships to guard the West Indies, others to check privateering in the China Seas, and a large part to try and protect our colonies on the Northern Pacific shore of America, where, with incredible folly, we continued to retain possessions which we could not possibly defend. America was not the great power forty years ago that it is now; but for us to try and hold terri­ tory on her shores which could only be reached by sailing round the Horn, was as absurd as if she had attempted to take the Isle of Man before the independence of Ireland. We see this plainly enough now, but were all blind then. It was while we were in this state, with our ships all over the world, and our little bit of an army cut up into detachments, that the Secret Treaty was published, and Holland and Denmark were annexed. People say now that we might have escaped the troubles which came on us if we had at any rate kept quiet till our other diffi­ culties were settled; but the English were always an impulsive lot: the whole country was boiling over with indignation, and the Government, egged on by the press, and going with the stream, declared war. We had always got out of our scrapes before, and we believed our old luck and pluck would somehow pull us through. Then, of course, there was bustle and hurry all over the land. Not that the calling up of the army reserve caused much stir, for I think there were only about 5,000 altogether, and a good many of these were not to be found when the time came; but recruiting was going on all over the country, with a tremendous high bounty, 50,000 more men having been voted for the army. Then there was a Ballot Bill passed for adding 55,500 men to the militia; why a round number was not fixed on I don't know, but the Prime Minister said that this was the exact quota wanted to put the defences of the country on a sound footing. Then the shipbuilding that began! Iron­ clads, despatch-boats, gunboats, monitors—every building-yard in the country got its job, and they were offering ten shillings a day wages for anybody who could drive a rivet. This didn't improve the recruiting, you may suppose. I remember, too, there was a squabble in the House of Commons about whether artisans should be drawn for the ballot, as they were so much wanted, and I think they got an exemption. This sent numbers to the yards; and if we had had a

32

We became wise when it was too late

couple of years to prepare instead of a couple of weeks, I daresay we should have done very well. It was on a Monday that the declaration of war was announced, and in a few hours we got our first inkling of the sort of preparation the enemy had made for the event which they had really brought about, although the actual declaration was made by us. A pious appeal to the God of battles, whom it was said we had aroused, was telegraphed back; and from that moment all communication with the north of Europe was cut off. Our embassies and legations were packed off at an hour's notice, and it was as if we had suddenly come back to the Middle Ages. The dumb astonishment visible all over London the next morning, when the papers came out void of news, merely hinting at what had happened, was one of the most startling things in this war of surprises. But everything had been arranged beforehand; nor ought we to have been surprised, for we had seen the same power, only a few months before, move down half a million men on a few days' notice, to conquer the greatest military nation in Europe, with no more fuss than our War Office used to make over the transport of a brigade from Aidershot to Brighton— and this, too, without the allies it had now. What happened now was not a bit more wonderful in reality; but people of this country could not bring themselves to believe that what had never occurred before to England could ever possibly happen. Like our neighbours, we became wise when it was too late. Of course the papers were not long in getting news—even the mighty organization set at work could not shut out a special corres­ pondent; and in a very few days, although the telegraphs and railways were intercepted right across Europe, the main facts oozed out. An embargo had been laid on all shipping in every port from the Baltic to Ostend; the fleets of the two great powers had moved out, and it was supposed were assembled in the great northern harbour, and troops were hurrying on board all the steamers detained in those places, most of which were British vessels. It was clear that invasion was intended. Even then we might have been saved, if the fleet had been ready. The forts which guarded the flotilla were perhaps too strong for shipping to attempt; but an ironclad or two, handled as British sailors knew how to use them, might have destroyed or damaged a part of the transports, and delayed the expedition, giving us what we wanted, time.4 But then the best part of the fleet had been decoyed down to the Dardanelles, and what remained of the Channel squadron was looking after Fenian filibusters off the west

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of Ireland; so it was ten days before the fleet was got together, and by that time it was plain the enemy's preparations were too far advanced to be stopped by a coup-de-main. Information, which came chiefly through Italy, came slowly, and was more or less vague and uncertain; but this much was known, that at least a couple of hundred thousand men were embarked or ready to be put on board ships, and that the flotilla was guarded by more ironclads than we could then muster. I suppose it was the uncertainty as to the point the enemy would aim at for landing, and the fear lest he should give us the go-by, that kept the fleet for several days in the Downs; but it was not until the Tuesday fortnight after the declaration of war that it weighed anchor and steamed away for the North Sea. Of course you have read about the Queen's visit to the fleet the day before, and how she sailed around the ships in her yacht and went on board the flag-ship to take leave of the admiral; how, over­ come with emotion, she told him that the safety of the country was committed to his keeping. You remember, too, the gallant old officer's reply, and how all the ships' yards were manned, and how lustily the tars cheered as her Majesty was rowed off. The account was of course telegraphed to London, and the high spirits of the fleet infected the whole town. I was outside the Charing Cross Station when the Queen's special train from Dover arrived, and from the cheering and shouting which greeted her as she drove away, you might have supposed we had already won a great victory. The leading journal, which had gone in strongly for the army reduction carried out during the session, and had been nervous and despond­ ing in tone during the past fortnight, suggesting all sorts of compromises as a way of getting out of the war, came out in a very jubilant form next morning. 'Panic-stricken inquirers,' they said, 'ask now, where are the means of meeting the invasion? We reply that the invasion will never take place. A British fleet, manned by British sailors whose courage and enthusiasm are reflected in the people of this country, is already on the way to meet the presumptu­ ous foe. The issue of a contest between British ships and those of any other country, under anything like equal odds, can never be doubt­ ful. England awaits with calm confidence the issue of the impending action.' Such were the words of the leading article, and so we all felt. It was on Tuesday, the 10th of August, that the fleet sailed from the Downs. It took with it a submarine cable to lay down as it advanced, so that continuous communication was kept up, and the papers were publishing special editions every few minutes with the latest

34

The sickening suspense of that day

news. This was the first time such a thing had been done, and the feat was accepted as a good omen. Whether it is true that the Admir­ alty made use of the cable to keep on sending contradictory orders, which took the command out of the admiral's hands, I can't say; but all that the admiral sent in return was a few messages of the briefest kind, which neither the Admiralty nor any one else could have made any use of. Such a ship had gone off reconnoitring; such another had rejoined—fleet was in latitude so and so. This went on till the Thursday morning. I had just come up to town by train as usual, and was walking to my office, when the newboys began to cry, 'New edition—enemy's fleet in sight!' You may imagine the scene in London! Business still went on at the banks, for bills matured although the independence of the country was being fought out under our own eyes, so to say; and the speculators were active enough. But even with the people who were making or losing their fortunes, the interest in the fleet overcame everything else; men who went to pay in or draw out their money stopped to show the last bulletin to the cashier. As for the street, you could hardly get along for the crowd stopping to buy and read the papers; while at every house or office the members sat restlessly in the common room, as if to keep together for company, sending out some one of their number every few minutes to get the latest edition. At least this is what happened at our office; but to sit still was as impossible as to do anything, and most of us went out and wandered about among the crowd, under a sort of feeling that the news was got quicker at in this way. Bad as were the times coming, I think the sickening suspense of that day, and the shock which followed, was almost the worst that we underwent. It was about ten o'clock that the first telegram came; an hour later the wire announced that the admiral had signalled to form line of battle, and shortly afterwards that the order was given to bear down on the enemy and engage. At twelve came the announce­ ment, 'Fleet opened fire about three miles to leeward of us'—that is, the ship with the cable. So far all had been expectancy; then came the first token of calamity. 'An ironclad has been blown up'—'the enemy's torpedoes are doing great damage'—'the flagship is laid aboard the enemy'—'the flagship appears to be sinking'—'the viceadmiral has signalled'—there the cable became silent, and, as you know, we heard no more till two days afterwards, when the solitary ironclad which escaped the disaster steamed into Portsmouth. Then the whole story came out—how our sailors, gallant as ever, had tried to close with the enemy; how the latter evaded the conflict

The Battle of Dorking

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at close quarters, and, sheering off, left behind them the fatal engines which sent our ships, one after the other, to the bottom; how all this happened almost in a few minutes.5 The Government, it appears, had received warnings of this invention; but to the nation this stunning blow was utterly unexpected. That Thursday I had to go home early for regimental drill, but it was impossible to remain doing nothing, so when that was over I went up to town again, and, after waiting in expectation of news which never came, and missing the midnight train, I walked home. It was a hot sultry night, and I did not arrive till near sunrise. The whole town was quite still—the lull before the storm; and as I let myself in with my latch-key, and went softly up-stairs to my room to avoid waking the sleeping household, I could not but contrast the peacefulness of the morning—no sound breaking the silence but the singing of birds in the garden—with the passionate remorse and indignation that would break out with the day. Perhaps the inmates of the house were as wakeful as myself; but the house in its stillness was just as it used to be when I came home alone from balls or parties in the happy days gone by. Tired though I was, I could not sleep, so I went down to the river and had a swim; and on returning found the household was assembling for early breakfast. A sorrowful house­ hold it was, although the burden pressing on each was partly an unseen one. My father, doubting whether his firm could last through the day; my mother, her distress about my brother, now with his regiment on the coast, already exceeding that which she felt for the public misfortune, had come down, although hardly fit to leave her room. My sister Clara was worst of all, for she could not but try to disguise her special interest in the fleet; and though we had all guessed that her heart was given to the young lieutenant in the flagship—the first vessel to go down—a love unclaimed could not be told, nor could we express the sympathy we felt for the poor girl. That breakfast, the last meal we ever had together, was soon ended, and my father and I went up to town by an early train, and got there just as the fatal announcement of the loss of the fleet was telegraphed from Portsmouth. The panic and excitement of that day—how the funds went down to 35; the run upon the bank and its stoppage; the fall of half the houses in the city; how the Government issued a notification suspending specie payment and the tendering of bills—this last precaution too late for most firms, Carter & Co. among the number, which stopped payment as soon as my father got to the office; the call to arms, and the unanimous response of the country—all this is

36

Preparing for invasion

history which I need not repeat. You wish to hear about my own share in the business of the time. Well, volunteering had increased immensely from the day war was proclaimed, and our regiment went up in a day or two from its usual strength of 600 to nearly 1,000. But the stock of rifles was deficient. We were promised a further supply in a few days, which, however, we never received; and while waiting for them the regiment had to be divided into two parts, the recruits drilling with the rifles in the morning, and we old hands in the evening. The failures and stoppage of work on this black Friday threw an immense number of young men out of employment and we recruited up to 1,400 strong by the next day; but what was the use of all these men without arms? On the Satur­ day it was announced that a lot of smooth-bore muskets in store at the Tower would be served out to regiments applying for them, and a regular scramble took place among the volunteers for them, and our people got hold of a couple of hundred. But you might almost as well have tried to learn rifle-drill with a broom-stick as with old Brown Bess; besides, there was no smooth-bore ammunition in the country. A national subscription was opened up for the manufacture of rifles at Birmingham, which ran up to a couple of millions in two days, but, like everything else, this came too late. To return to the volunteers: camps had been formed a fortnight before at Dover, Brighton, Harwich, and other places, of regulars and militia, and the headquarters of most of the volunteer regiments were attached to one or other of them, and the volunteers used to go down for drill from day to day, as they could spare time, and on Friday an order went out that they should be permanently embod­ ied; but the metropolitan volunteers were still kept about London as a sort of reserve, till it could be seen at what point the invasion would take place.6 We were all told off to brigades and divisions. Our brigade consisted of the 4th Royal Surrey Militia, the 1st Surrey Administrative Battalion, as it was called, at Clapham, the 7th Surrey Volunteers at Southwark, and ourselves; but only our battal­ ion and the militia were quartered in the same place, and the whole brigade had merely two or three afternoons together at brigade exercise in Bushey Park before the march took place. Our brigadier belonged to a line regiment in Ireland, and did not join till the very morning the order came. Meanwhile, during the preliminary fort­ night, the militia colonel commanded. But though we volunteers were busy with our drill and preparations, those of us who, like myself, belonged to government offices had more than enough of office work to do, as you may suppose. The volunteer clerks were

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allowed to leave office at four o'clock, but the rest were kept hard at the desk far into the night. Orders to the lord-lieutenants, to the magistrates, notifications, all the arrangements for cleaning out the workhouses for hospitals—these and a hundred other things had to be managed in our office, and there was as much bustle indoors as out. Fortunate we were to be so busy—the people to be pitied were those who had nothing to do. And on Sunday (that was the 15th of August) work went on just as usual. We had an early parade and drill, and I went up to town by the nine o'clock train in my uniform, taking my rifle with me in case of accidents and, luckily too, as it turned out, a mackintosh overcoat.