The shape of things to c.., p.60
The Shape of Things to Come, page 60
§4 CHANGES IN WAR PRACTICE AFTER THE WORLD WAR
1. a ‘war to end war’: Although Wells published The War That Will End War in 1914, the shorter, more popular expression to describe the Great War, as a ‘war to end war’, was apparently coined by President Wilson in April 1917 when announcing American intervention in the conflict. In subsequent years, many dozens of people quoted the expression, including Wells here.
2. the Huns and the Mongols: The Huns, a nomadic people originating to the east of the Volga river, were the first warrior people to use cavalry in battle, overrunning much of Europe in the fifth century. The Mongols, also a successful cavalry force, built an empire during the thirteenth century which stretched from Korea to Hungary and was the largest land empire the world has ever known.
3. Rameses: Known as ‘the Great’ (1304-12.37 bc),he ruled Egypt from c. 1292 to c. 1225 bc and after defeating the Hittites, he made peace and built many magnificent monuments and temples. His mummy was discovered at Deir-el-Bahari in 1881.
4. Caesar: Gaius Julius Caesar (c. 100-44 Bc)was a Roman general and statesman who succeeded in reuniting the Roman Republic following years of internecine warfare. He was appointed dictator, but assassinated by Brutus (85-42 bc) and other conspirators who feared the loss of republican freedoms under Caesar.
5. the break-up of the irrigation of Mesopotamia by the Mongols: The Mesopotamian civilization was founded on an agricultural society made possible by a highly sophisticated irrigation system in the sixth century bc. However, with the Mongol conquest of Mesopotamia in 1258, the irrigation system was destroyed and the region fell into rapid economic decline.
6. the laying waste of Northumbria by William the Conqueror of England: William I (the Conqueror) (1027-87) became king of England (1066-87) following the Norman conquest in 1066. However, in 1068 Northumbria, under Earl Gospatric (1040-75), rose in revolt against William and as punishment his armies laid the region waste, massacring a large proportion of the population and destroying much property, thus successfully regaining full control.
7. the wars between Byzantium and Persia: Following the death of Alexander the Great Persia fought Byzantium to regain its independence. The first phase of warfare ran from 539 to 562 and the second phase between 572 and 591.
8. The New Warfare – was a war of whole populations: This phenomenon of whole populations being mobilized for war effort would nowadays be referred to as ‘Total War’.
9. Krupp-Kaiser militarism: First used by Wells in The War That Will End War (1914), this expression signified the German industrial and political thoroughness of organization for warfare during the Great War. ‘Krupp’ refers to the Krupp armaments manufacturers, which was Germany’s largest throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ‘Kaiser’ refers to the autocratic regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
10. Was a dummy Sultan – to the dismemberment of Turkey: This refers to the peace treaties presented to Turkey after the Great War. The Treaty of Sevres (192.0) was drafted at the Paris Peace Conference and accepted by the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed VI (1861-1926; reigned 1918-22). However, the Turkish military leader, Kemal Pasha (later known as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk) (1881-1938) refused to accept the treaty and revised its terms by force, which resulted in a new Treaty of Lausanne (1923) which was more acceptable to the new Turkish leader.
11. franc-tireurs: A sniper or guerrilla soldier.
12. The British – the tank in the World War: The tank was first developed by Frederick H. Simms (1863-1944) in 1899 and called the motor-war car, but the British army showed no interest in it. Only in 1915, when Ernest Dunlop Swinton (1868-1951) and Maurice Pascal Alers Hankey (1877-1963) demonstrated the Killen-Strait Armoured Tractor to senior politicians did the government commission their construction. The tank went into operation in June 1916, though it was never used in sufficient numbers to ensure overwhelming victory, and the early models were unreliable and often broke down on the battlefield.
13. Aldershot Museum: Although Wells is referring to an imaginary Aldershot Museum here, the Aldershot Military Museum was eventually founded in 1984.
14. Admiral Fisher’s equally belated oil Dreadnoughts: In 1906 the British Royal Navy launched the battleship HMS Dreadnought. It was distinguished by its unprecedented firepower in comparison to its predecessors. By the time of the Great War Britain had thirty-eight Dreadnought battleships and battlecruisers, while Germany had twenty-four.
15. armoured Wurms: ‘Wurm’ is German for dragon, though the suggestion here that it is the name of a more advanced kind of tank is Wells’s invention.
16. the fighting aeroplane: Warplanes were first used by the Italians in the Italo-Turkish War for Tripolitania (now Libya) in 1911. In that conflict the aviators simply dropped bombs over the side of the plane. Wells had predicted aerial warfare earlier, in his 1899 novel When the Sleeper Wakes (revised as The Sleeper Awakes in 1910) and in The War in the Air of 1908, as well as references to such craft in The War of the Worlds (1898).
17. the aerial torpedo: Aerial torpedoes were the forerunners of the modern guided missile. As a result of American military funding during the Great War, the Sperry-Curtis aerial torpedo was tested in March 1918 and although it made one short successful flight, the war ended before it could be perfected, and investment was withdrawn. The first aerial torpedo to be used successfully in numbers was the German Mistel which was launched in June 1944, targeted at enemy warships and at bridges, while in the same month Germany also launched the jet-propelled V-I aerial torpedo which had the range to bomb London from northern France. These flying bombs were followed by the German V-2 rocket-propelled aerial torpedo in September 1944.
18. Charles Lamb’s story of the invention of the roast pig: In i8z3 Charles Lamb (1775-1834), the British poet and essayist, published Essays of Elia (1823) which contained ‘A Dissertation upon Roast Pig’, a nonsense essay which demonstrates the roundabout way in which people do things when doing them for the first time.
19. Rasputinism: The mysticism of the Russian faith-healer, Grigoriy Efimovich Rasputin (c. 1871-1916), who allegedly cured the haemophilia of the Tsarevitch Alexei Nicolaievitch Romanov (1904-18) in 1905, thereby winning unprecedented influence over the Russian imperial court until his murder in 1916.
20. the Inter-parliamentary Union: The Inter-Parliamentary Union was founded in 1889 in Geneva as an international organization of parliamentarians. It is the focal point for world-wide parliamentary dialogue and works for peace and cooperation among peoples and for the establishment of representative democracy.
21. What would be the Character of a New War?: The full title of this pamphlet is What would be the Character of a New War?: Enquiry by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (1931) and the primary researchers and authors of it were: Gertrud Woker (1878-1968), a Swiss professor of biological chemistry at the University of Berne, and a campaigner against the manufacture and use of chemical weapons who founded the Committee Against Chemical Warfare at the Fourth International Congress of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1924 and published The Next War, a War of Poison Gas (c. 1927); and Sir Norman Angell (1872-1967), a British pacifist and author of The Great Illusion (1910) and The Great Illusion, 1933 (1933), and the winner of the 1933 Nobel Peace Prize.
22. Green Cross gas: This term was devised by the Germans during the Great War to identify ‘severely harmful’ gases, from the mark painted on the shells. Principally lung injurants, the group includes chlorine, phosgene, diphosgene and chloropicrin.
23. April 1915 at Ypres: This is a reference to the Second Battle of Ypres (22 April-24 May 1915) during the Great War, at which the Germans attempted to break through the British lines using poison gas. There was also a First (12 October-11 November 1914), Third (June-November 1917) and Fourth (March-April 1918) Battle of Ypres during the war.
24. Yellow Cross gas, or mustard gas: Also called dichloroethylsul-phide, it was first used by the German army on the Eastern Front of the Great War in 1915. Called mustard gas because of its smell, it causes severe blistering and haemorrhaging of the lungs.
25. the Blue Cross group: Blue Cross gas is the name given to diphenylchloroarsine, a nasal and pharyngeal tract irritant, first used by the Germans in 1917 during the Great War.
26. ‘Lewisite’, the discovery of a Professor Lewis of Chicago: Lewisite (or dichloro-2-chlorovinyl arsine) is an arsine derivative used in chemical warfare which causes severe blistering and respiratory irritation. It was invented by the American chemist, Winford Lee Lewis (1878-1943) in 1918.
27. eugenic applications: Eugenics is the pseudo-science of improving ‘racial stock’ through social engineering. Conceived by the British social Darwinist Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) in 1869, it divides into ‘positive eugenics’ (selective breeding) and ‘negative eugenics’ (the prohibition of breeding between certain genetic ‘types’ through sterilization and/or the destruction of undesirable offspring). Eugenics was popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wells being among those who considered its worth. Although largely discredited as a result of Nazi applications in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s eugenic proposals are becoming popular once again within the field of genetic research.
28. Hohenzollern Empire: Also called the Kaiserreich or Second Reich, this refers to Germany under the rule of the Hohenzollern dynasty following German unification in 1871. The empire came to an end in 1918 with defeat in the Great War and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
§5 THE FADING VISION OF A WORLD PAX: JAPAN REVERTS TO WARFARE
1. In 1931 an internal revolution in that country: In 1930 the Japanese prime minister, Osachi Hamaguchi (1870-1931), after compromising on Japanese naval strength at the London Naval Conference, was shot, dying the following year. That elimination of a political moderate allowed the military to assert itself, being solely accountable to the Emperor Hirohito (1901-89), and in September 1931 it invaded Manchuria and began a fourteen-year period of Japanese military expansion.
2. the Empire of the Great Mogul: Akbar Jelal-ed-din-Mohammed (known as Akbar the Great) (1542-1605) was the Mughal (or Mogul) emperor of India from 1556. He extended the Mughal Empire across all of north India and into Afghanistan, and introduced several liberal reforms including the abolition of slavery and unprecedented religious tolerance.
3. Pomeranian Junker: Pomerania was an area of Prussia in north-eastern Germany until 1946, when the territory was incorporated into Poland. A Junker was a German medium-sized landowner equivalent to the British yeoman. The Junker class was politically ascendant in Imperial Germany (1871-1918), and continued to remain significant in the German military until
4. the tentative of Shanghai: Between January and May 1932 Japan attempted to seize Shanghai, China, by force but was pushed back by Chinese military resistance and workers’ strike action. The incident was ended with the Song-Hu Armistice following Franco-Anglo-American intervention which guaranteed Shanghai as Chinese territory.
5. the invasion of Manchuria and the establishment of the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo (1932): The Japanese invasion of Manchuria occurred following an alleged explosion on a Manchurian railway line killing some Japanese nationals. The Japanese justified the invasion as they claimed Manchuria was not Chinese and required ‘liberating’. The Kingdom of Manchukuo was established with the last Chinese emperor, Pu Yi (1906-67), enthroned as a Japanese puppet ruler. With Japan’s defeat in the Second World War in 1945, Manchukuo was dissolved, and Manchuria restored to China.
6. the attack on Shanhaikwan: On 4 January 1933 Japan attacked the Chinese seaport of Shankaikwan and, despite Chinese resistance, captured it, reaching the Great Wall of China.
7. A ‘Lytton Report’: named after its architect, the Second Earl of Lytton (1876—1947), this report was commissioned by the League of Nations to investigate the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. The report concluded that, while Japan had some legitimate grievances against the Chinese government, it condemned the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and refused to recognize Manchukuo as an independent state. When the League of Nations formally adopted the report, Japan resigned from the organization.
8. Kuomintang: Also known as the Chinese Nationalist Party, it was formed in 1912. but was suppressed the following year despite being the largest party in the national assembly. From 1913 until 1928 it fought a successful civil war against the Chinese government. From 1928 until 1949 the Kuomintang fought a civil war against the Communist Party while also fighting the invading Japanese forces (1931-45), making occasional truces with the communists when national existence was in jeopardy. With the communist victory in the civil war in 1949, the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan where it upheld emergency rule until 1991. Thereafter multi-party elections have taken place in Taiwan, and the Kuomintang’s dominance has relatively declined.
9. Sun Yat Sen :Sun at-Sen(1866-1925)wasa Chinese revolutionary and first president of China (1912-13). He was the first leader of the Kuomintang (1912-25).
10. Nippon: This is the (transliterated) Japanese name for Japan, meaning the ‘land of the rising sun’.
11. the Ladrones – in possession had been first Spain and, after 1899, Germany: The Ladrone Islands are more commonly called the Mariana Islands. They are made up of fifteen volcanic islands of the Pacific Ocean, and are the largest island group of Micronesia. They were claimed by Spain in 1667 but the southern islands were ceded to the USA after the Spanish-American War of 1898, while the northern islands were sold to Germany. In 1919 the German Marianas were mandated to Japan by the Treaty of Versailles, though Japan in turn ceded them to the USA following Japan’s defeat in the Second World War.
12. [The student will be reminded – effacement from history by the sponge of Islam.]: This parenthetical note is Wells’s own. The wars between the Sassanid and Byzantine Empires occurred in present-day Iran between the fourth and seventh centuries, ending with the Saracens’ conquest of the Sassanid Empire in 651 and the limitation of the Byzantine Empire to the Balkans and Asia Minor.
§6 THE WESTERN GRIP ON ASIA RELAXES
1. The seizure and trial… passed upon them in 1933: The Meerut Conspiracy Trials lasted from March 1929 to July 1933 and involved the arrest and prosecution of twenty-seven Indian communists who were involved in organizing trade unions. Initially, the accused received prison sentences ranging from three to twelve years, with one being sentenced to transportation for life. Following international protest at the harshness of the sentences, however, an appeal court reduced the sentences to one to five years’ imprisonment for fourteen of the accused, with thirteen being released (eight with full acquittals).
§7 THE MODERN STATE AND GERMANY
1. That ingenious contrivance of President Wilson’s – was the particular mine that exploded first: This prophetic sentence accurately identifies the German casus belli which caused the outbreak of the Second World War. As the war broke out in September 1939, Wells was just a few months out in predicting a 1940 start date.
2. Dostoevsky: Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-81) was a Russian novelist, most famous for Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880).
3. Stresemann: Gustav Stresemann (1878-1929) was a German People’s Party politician, and German chancellor (1923) and foreign minister (1923-29). He helped negotiate the Locarno Pact (1925) and secured Germany’s entry into the League of Nations (1926). He was co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize with Aristide Briand (1862-1932) in 1926.
4. Brüning: Heinrich Brüning (1885-1970) was the leader of the German Catholic Centre Party (1929—34) and German chancellor (1930-32). He became professor of government at Harvard University (1939-52) and of political science at Cologne
5. Hindenburg’s: Paul von Hindenburg was a veteran of the Franco- Prussian War and Germany’s military leader during the Great War. Between 1925 and 1934 he was president of Germany.
6. (Fabian, by Erich Kästner, 1932): Erich Kästner (1899-1974) was a German poet, novelist, children’s writer and autobiogra-pher, most famous for Emil and the Detectives (1928) and The Flying Classroom (1933). Fabian: The Story of a Moralist (1931) is a scathing attack on the decadence of Weimar Germany and resulted in Kästner’s books being burned by the Nazis (1933) and his being banned from publishing (1942-5). Unusually, he remained in Germany during the Third Reich.
7. Kleiner Mann, was nun? by Hans Fallada, 1932: Hans Fallada (1893-1947) was the pseudonym of the German author Rudolf Ditzen. Kleiner Mann, was nun?, a novel about contemporary German social problems, was published in English as Little Man, What Now?
8. L. B. Namier: Sir Lewis Berstein Namier (1888-1960) was a Polish-born British historian, diplomat and journalist. His emphasis on microscopic analysis of events and institutions led to the coining of the ‘Namier school of history’, demonstrated in such works as Politics at the Accession of George III (1929) and England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930).
9. steel-tape records: In 1889 the Danish electrical engineer, Valde-mar Poulsen (1869-1942), invented the telegraphone, a wire recording device, forerunner of magnetic tape recorders. By using a telephone, an electromagnet, and a long piece of wire (later, steel tape), the telegraphone was able to capture sound as a region of varying magnetism. Although the sound quality of the telegraphone was poor, by the 1930s successful steel-tape recorders were in use across Europe.
10. he never carried with him even an absolute voting majority of the German public: Although Hitler’s National Socialist party became the largest, in the German Reichstag in March 1932, its popular support peaked in the (final) March 1933 elections when it scored 43.9 per cent of the votes.
11. the Swastika: A word of Sanskrit origin which means ‘it is good’ or ‘wellbeing’. The source of the swastika as a symbol is obscure, though it is Indie and carries religious connotations, symbolizing the sun or luck or the Hindu god, Brahma. In Europe the swastika was adopted by German extreme nationalists in the late nineteenth century and by the Nazis in 1920 (by whom it was called the Hakenkreuz or ‘hooked cross’) due to their belief that the Aryans of India were the prototypical white conquerors.
