The Literature of Alarm

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 123, 27 May 1933, Page 18

The Literature of Alarm

Dr. Preston William Slosson, Professor of History at the Michigan University, lectured at the University of Manchester recently on "Some curious anticipations of the Great War." Journalists, he said, were fond of describing the Great War as bursting unexpectedly on a world unprepared, but if in truth the war was unexpected, or the reading public were unprepared for it, it was not for lack of warning, but because warnings had become staled by repetition. There was a vast literature of alarm extending from tho Franco-Prussian War to the summer of--1914. Journalists, pamphleteers, selfdesignated experts, and novelists had all asked not "Will the war come?" but "When will it come?" Someday an industrious bibliographer would plumb to the bottom this mass of Cassandra literature, reports tho "Manchester Guardian." There was a long series of imaginary invasions of England by Germany, beginning in 1891 with "The Battle of Dorking" and a rather inferior drama, "Tho Englishman's Home." Predictions of war between Franco and Germany were even more frequent. There were, for instance, the notorious writings of General Bernhardi, Lord Fisher, Lord Roberts, Leo Maxsc, Robert Blatchford, J. H. Cramb, Rudyard Kipling, and innumerable others warned England against Germany. And only a week or two before the Sarajevo assassination Professor L. B. Namier, of the Manchester University, predicted that a European war would break out in the Balkans. Years before the war predictions were published concerning the manner in which Germany would invado Belgium in tho next war with France. And j when wo found the popular novelist outlining in advance the German policy of using submarines as a weapon against merchant shipping, predicting the deadlock of trench warfare, fore-j casting aerial scouting, long-range siege guns, and gas warfare we were today

moved to surprise at our own surprise at these developments. As early as 1905 English and French statesmen were so seriously alarmed about the possibility of German violation of Belgian 'neutrality that they took counsel with Belgium as to the necessary military precautions. Allied propaganda based on the alleged unexpectedness of the German attack now made queer reading in the light of the known facts. In February, 1910, the military correspondent of the "Fortnightly Review" gave a most accurate prediction of the use of strategic railways in a German invasion. Charles Sarolea, writing in 1912, gave the- best advance expression he had found of the nature of the Gorman peril to England. An American journalist named Daniel Hauson, writing in 1911, quoted a resident of Brussels as saying he did not wish to stay five years longer in that city because "a great European war is on tho way. It will be naval in nature to a certain extent, but eventually it is going to call into the field the greatest land forces ever assembled for military purposes. Where do you suppose they are going to fight'? Here in Belgium." j Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in a short story entitled "Danger" written in July,. 1914, forecast unrestricted submarine- warfare. Jules Verne, as long ago as 1879, predicted a great howitzer that would bombard Paris from a distance of thirty miles, with shells filled with asphyxiating gas. Writing in 1897, Jean de Bloch made remarkable predictions concerning trench warfare. Of course, Mr. H. G. Wells must be numbered among the prophets. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Wells's forecasts was his intuitive knowledge of the difference between war as fought in tho eighteenth century, when armies were like a team sent- out by a college and no special responsibility rested upon the civilian population as a whole, and war as fought between 1914 and 1918, which affected and enlisted every phase of civilian life and activity.