ny, the great teacher of war,
that this demonstration of war's ultimate absurdity is completed.

For forty years Frankenstein Germany invoked war, turned every
development of material and social science to aggressive ends, and at
last when she felt the time was ripe she let loose the new monster that
she had made of war to cow the spirit of mankind. She set the thing
trampling through Belgium. She cannot grumble if at last it comes home,
stranger and more dreadful even than she made it, trampling the German
towns and fields with German blood upon it and its eyes towards Berlin.

This logical development of the Tank idea may seem a gloomy prospect for
mankind. But it is open to question whether the tremendous development
of warfare that has gone on in the last two years does after all open a
prospect of unmitigated gloom. There has been a good deal of cheap and
despondent sneering recently at the phrase, "The war that will end war."
It is still possible to maintain that that may be a correct description
of this war. It has to be remembered that war, as the aeroplane and
the Tank have made it, has already become an impossible luxury for any
barbaric or uncivilised people. War on the grade that has been achieved
on the Somme predicates an immense industrialism behind it. Of all the
States in the world only four can certainly be said to be fully capable
of sustaining war at the level to which it has now been brought upon the
western front. These are Britain, France, Germany, and the United States
of America. Less certainly equal to the effort are Italy, Japan, Russia,
and Austria. These eight powers are the only powers _capable of warfare
under modern conditions._ Five are already Allies and one is incurably
pacific. There is no other power or people in the world that can go to
war now without the consent and connivance of these great powers. If
we consider their alliances, we may count it that the matter rests now
between two groups of Allies and one neutral power. So that while on
the one hand the development of modern warfare of which the Tank is the
present symbol opens a prospect of limitless senseless destruction, it
opens on the other hand a prospect of organised world control. This
Tank development must ultimately bring the need of a real permanent
settlement within the compass of the meanest of diplomatic
intelligences. A peace that will restore competitive armaments has now
become a less desirable prospect for eve