ns that begot ironclads in the
American Civil War. Science offers the soldier transport that he does
not use, maps he does not use, entrenching devices, road-making devices,
balloons and flying scouts, portable foods, security from disease, a
thousand ways of organizing the horrible uncertainties of war. But the
soldier of to-day--I do not mean the British soldier only--still insists
on regarding these revolutionary appliances as mere accessories, and
untrustworthy ones at that, to the time-honoured practice of his art. He
guards his technical innocence like a plumber.

Every European army is organized on the lines of the once fundamental
distinction of the horse and foot epoch, in deference to the contrast of
gentle and simple. There is the officer, with all the traditions of old
nobility, and the men still, by a hundred implications, mere sources of
mechanical force, and fundamentally base. The British Army, for example,
still cherishes the tradition that its privates are absolutely
illiterate, and such small instruction as is given them in the art of
war is imparted by bawling and enforced by abuse upon public drill
grounds. Almost all discussion of military matters still turns upon the
now quite stupid assumption that there are two primary military arms and
no more, horse and foot. "Cyclists are infantry," the War Office manual
of 1900 gallantly declares in the face of this changing universe. After
fifty years of railways, there still does not exist, in a world which is
said to be over devoted to military affairs, a skilled and organized
body of men, specially prepared to seize, repair, reconstruct, work, and
fight such an important element in the new social machinery as a
railway system. Such a business, in the next European war, will be
hastily entrusted to some haphazard incapables drafted from one or other
of the two prehistoric arms.... I do not see how this condition of
affairs can be anything but transitory. There may be several wars
between European powers, prepared and organized to accept the old
conventions, bloody, vast, distressful encounters that may still leave
the art of war essentially unmodified, but sooner or later--it may be in
the improvised struggle that follows the collapse of some one of these
huge, witless, fighting forces--the new sort of soldier will emerge, a
sober, considerate, engineering man--no more of a gentleman than the man
subordinated to him or any other self-respecting person....