And what else is there for the cavalry to do?

It may be argued that horses can go over country that is impossible for automobiles.  That is to ignore altogether what has been done in this war by such devices as caterpillar wheels.  So far from cavalry being able to negotiate country where machines would stick and fail, mechanism can now ride over places where any horse would flounder.

I submit these considerations to the horse-lover.  They are not my original observations; they have been put to me and they have convinced me.  Except perhaps as a parent of transport mules I see no further part henceforth for the horse to play in war.

6

The form and texture of the coming warfare—­if there is still warfare to come—­are not yet to be seen in their completeness upon the modern battlefield.  One swallow does not make a summer, nor a handful of aeroplanes, a “Tank” or so, a few acres of shell craters, and a village here and there, pounded out of recognition, do more than foreshadow the spectacle of modernised war on land.  War by these developments has become the monopoly of the five great industrial powers; it is their alternative to end or evolve it, and if they continue to disagree, then it must needs become a spectacle of majestic horror such as no man can yet conceive.  It has been wise of Mr. Pennell therefore, who has recently been drawing his impressions of the war upon stone, to make his pictures not upon the battlefield, but among the huge industrial apparatus that is thrusting behind and thrusting up through the war of the gentlemen in spurs.  He gives us the splendours and immensities of forge and gun pit, furnace and mine shaft.  He shows you how great they are and how terrible.  Among them go the little figures of men, robbed of all dominance, robbed of all individual quality.  He leaves it for you to draw the obvious conclusion that presently, if we cannot contrive to put an end to war, blacknessess like these, enormities and flares and towering threats, will follow in the track of the Tanks and come trampling over the bickering confusion of mankind.

There is something very striking in these insignificant and incidental men that Mr. Pennell shows us.  Nowhere does a man dominate in all these wonderful pictures.  You may argue perhaps that that is untrue to the essential realities; all this array of machine and workshop, all this marshalled power and purpose, has been the creation of inventor and business organiser.  But are we not a little too free with that word “creation”?  Falstaff was a “creation” perhaps, or the Sistine sibyls; there we have indubitably an end conceived and sought and achieved; but did these inventors and business organisers do more than heed certain unavoidable imperatives?  Seeking coal they were obliged to mine in a certain way; seeking steel they had to do this and this and not that and that; seeking profit they had to obey the imperative of the economy.  So little did they plan their ends that most of these manufacturers speak with a kind of astonishment of the deadly use to which their works are put.  They find themselves making the new war as a man might wake out of some drugged condition to find himself strangling his mother.