HIS PROPHECIES HAVE COME TRUE

New Zealand Herald, Volume 81, Issue 25030, 21 October 1944, Page 10

HIS PROPHECIES HAVE COME TRUE

WELLS ENVISAGED MODERN WAR

At a time when Science has fciflicted the world in horrible fact .with what once seemed to be the fantasies of the prophetic mind, it is well to remember that young man who looked so astonishingly far ahead. H. G. Wells did not only foresee the scientific menace that now pours robot comets into the air and bodes further rocketings; he outlined also the political preventives, states the Observer, London. He was not in his element as the organiser of campaigns, or as the sedulous ant of committee-work; he was the large-scale cartographer of human liberation from drudgery and destruction, drawing the map of a World Order rapidly, repeatedly, variously. He began his literary career with his fascinating scientific romances, hurling men into lunar spaces or making them grow giant-wise on the food of the pods; he then tried to rescue them from lunacy and to fit them for being human. Astounding Prevision He brought plans, federations. Utopias descending helpfully on the obstinate skull of homo insipiens. His victims enjoyed the services and paid for them, only reserving "the. right to remain as strictly insipient as before. It would be totally unjust to regard Wells as a Utopian dreamer only: he was essentially the practical prophet For example, if the British War Office had paid the slightest attention to the observations made just at the close of the Boer War by an ex-shop assistant turned science-master and Socialist pamphleteer the war of 1914 might have been won in a quarter of the time. To read now Wells' "Anticipations ' is to be astounded by his range of warning and prevision. In 1902 he told the cavalry men that in any great war there would be a deadlock of defensive marksmen; to break this he envisaged

land-cruisers or tanks. In 1902, seven years before the flimsiest aeroplane had crossed the Channel, he was writing; "Bv day the victor's aeroplanes will sweep down upon the apparatus of all sorts in tho adversary's rear, and will drop explosives and incendiary matters upon them, so that no apparatus or camp shelter will any longer be safe. At night his high-floating .searchlights will go to and fro and discover and check every desperate attempt to relieve or feed the exhausted marksmen of the fighting line. . . ■ "A general advance will occur under the aerial van; ironclad road fighting machines may perhaps plav a considerable part in this, and the enemy's line of marksmen will be driven back or starved into surrender, or broken up and hunted down Tt is uncanny prescience. He outlined, also in 1902. the rise of the highly-organised State and # the advantage with which a totalitarian nation would start a war. "The State that has not incorporated with its fighting organisation all its able-bodied manhood and all its material substance, its roads, vehicles, engines, foundries, and all its resources of food and clothing; the State which at the outbreak of war has to bargain with railway and shipping companies, replace experienced stationmasters by inexperienced officers, and haggle against alien interests for evcrv sort of supply, will he at an overwhelming disadvantage against a State which has . organised every element in its being." Wells the Historian Wells the prophet developed later into Wells the historian. But his intuitive grip on the shape of things to come was even firmer than his _ instructed hold upon the outline of things past. Though having a mercurial vitality and quenchless curiosity, not commonly connected with the F.uglishman, Wells is none the less pure native. He has been rears a Kentishman as well as a cosmopolite. What more English than his origin (.his father was professional cricketer mentioned in Wisden for_ a feat of bowling)? What more English

than the descriptions of Kentish countrv and character in "Kipps" and "Mr Polly"? . , e He has the cherry-ripe look of Ins shire and his moods can be tart or sweet as a pippin. He lias never written with affection of the sombre landscapes: he has liked Hiviera sunshine in his later years, but London and the Home Counties have held most of his life. Hero he would make his home and invent odd games, talk and enchant and quarrel and decant the generous vintage of ,a bubbling mind. He was ever a quick mover from idea to idea and he compounded a hundred j pills to purge the distempers of mankind Fie was. in his expository way, the Master Alchemist the prime dispenser of salves for society. Hut how he could, in "Tono Bungay," satirise the minor and commercial alchemy. Like nearly all Socialists, Wells is a vigorous individualist. He has preached co-operation with more fervour than be has practised it. He is. in any argument or campaign, a fiery particle Few men have brought more warmth of passion to the advocacy of cool, rational ways. He Hates Hocus-pocus Above all ho hates all mystical hocus-pocus, all bans and vetoes, and obscurantism. Free inquiry is the breath of life to him; hence his furious conflicts with the Roman Catholic Church. He had a bout of theism at one time, lint bis God was very Wellsian. rather tho benign invisible King of a WorldState than any conventional President 'of the Immortals. Wells has gone about anticipating everybody and everything. Tanks, aeroplanes. the war in the air. on the one hand: the cartoonists' Little Man, e.g.. Kipps and Polly, on the other. Scratch an Englishman and you find a Protestant; but not a glum one. There is always something to be found there of the laughing cavalier as well as of the serious roundhead. Wells is a chuckling, as well ns a combative, man: bis novels are full of laughter and his argument has the bite of a happily pugnacious man. He has ever piped us to the of reason, bringing to it bis own condiments, his zest, for all things liberal, the Attic salt of his wit. and. above all. the red pepper j which so abundantly flavours his anger I against muddle and misrule.