Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go. *7©
As soldiers dug into trenches that would endure for a half-decade, a terrible strategic fact dawned on the generals who led Europe’s armies. The Great War was going to bea charnel house. The continent had built itself into a battle machine, wired by trains and telegraphs and armies. There was no reverse gear. There was not even a switch to slow it down, let alone turn it off. A massive, technology- powered, fast-moving system with revolutionary implications, built beyond the comprehension of any one figure or nation, had slipped out of control. And the men in charge of planning and directing the use of this super-fast complex? They failed everyone: their soldiers, their kings, their armies. They were all but insensible to the real nature of their age.
Sound familiar? 2.
Here, then, is a question of the sort - violent, loaded with the possibility of tragedy - that you'd rather not have to consider: A new way of war arrives, a new weapon, a fresh idea about fighting. Does it make your world peaceful or treacherous? The lethality of the equation of guns x machines at the end of the 19 Century appeared to some industrialists and bankers and statesmen inarguable evidence for peace. Everyone with such a violently efficient weapon; who dares start a war? As we now know, machines x guns was a formula for some of the worst killing in human history. Gatling’s fond hope that his weapons would stop war was naive, insane even. His competitor Maxim had been clearer eyed. A friend told him: “Give up your chemistry and electricity. If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable those Europeans to cut each others’ throats with greater facility.”227
So: Let’s be a bit warmer about this. Networks x weapons = what exactly? Is there some disaster lingering in our own future, as unimagined from our current perspective as machine guns and trenches were a century ago? Do we consider war impossible now? There’s something sickening in such puzzles, of course. Think of the men and women who, over the millennia, have contemplated similar questions knowing full well the answer would be measured in blood and treasure and children. Put yourself in the place of the population of Melos, a peace-loving Mediterranean island whose destruction 2300 years ago was chronicled by Thucydides in The Peloponesian Wars. “Surely you have noticed that you are an island and we control the ocean,” an unwelcome Athenian general intimated to a Melian citizens’ council one day 243 BC as his soldiers and ships collected menacingly outside the city’s walls. Athens wanted the Melians to join an alliance
226 “You smug faced”: Seigfried Sassoon, “Suicide in the Trenches” in The War Poems of Seigfried Sassoon, (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2004), 64
227 “Give up your chemistry”: John Ellis, A Social History of the Machine Gun (New York: Pantheon, 1975) p.33
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