develop a general impression of theoretically thorough war, go from
that to the nature of the State most likely to be superlatively
efficient in such warfare, and so arrive at the conditions of survival
under which these present governments of confusion will struggle one
against the other. The latter course will be taken here. We will deal
first of all with war conducted for its own sake, with a model army, as
efficient as an imaginative training can make it, and with a model
organization for warfare of the State behind it, and then the
experience of the confused modern social organism as it is impelled, in
an uncongenial metamorphosis, towards this imperative and finally
unavoidable efficient state, will come most easily within the scope of
one's imagination.

The great change that is working itself out in warfare is the same
change that is working itself out in the substance of the social fabric.
The essential change in the social fabric, as we have analyzed it, is
the progressive supersession of the old broad labour base by elaborately
organized mechanism, and the obsolescence of the once valid and
necessary distinction of gentle and simple. In warfare, as I have
already indicated, this takes the form of the progressive supersession
of the horse and the private soldier--which were the living and sole
engines of the old time--by machines, and the obliteration of the old
distinction between leaders, who pranced in a conspicuously dangerous
and encouraging way into the picturesque incidents of battle, and the
led, who cheered and charged and filled the ditches and were slaughtered
in a wholesale dramatic manner. The old war was a matter of long dreary
marches, great hardships of campaigning, but also of heroic conclusive
moments. Long periods of campings--almost always with an outbreak of
pestilence--of marchings and retreats, much crude business of feeding
and forage, culminated at last, with an effect of infinite relief, in
an hour or so of "battle." The battle was always a very intimate
tumultuous affair, the men were flung at one another in vast excited
masses, in living fighting machines as it were, spears or bayonets
flashed, one side or the other ceased to prolong the climax, and the
thing was over. The beaten force crumpled as a whole, and the victors as
a whole pressed upon it. Cavalry with slashing sabres marked the
crowning point of victory. In the later stages of the old warfare
musketry volleys were added t