Page 12 - All India Magazine Oct-2025
P. 12

nese  war  almost immediately proved that attack and victory were
        still possible and the battle-fury of man superior to the fury of his
        death-dealing engines, another book was published, called by a
        title which has turned into a jest upon the writer, The Great Illusion,
        to prove that the idea of a commercial advantage to be gained by
        war  and conquest was an illusion and that as soon as this was
        understood and the sole benefit of peaceful interchange realised,
        the peoples would abandon a method of settlement now chiefly
        undertaken  from  motives  of  commercial  expansion,  yet  whose
        disastrous result was only to disorganise fatally the commercial
        prosperity it sought to serve. The present  war  came as the imme-
        diate answer of the gods to this sober and rational proposition. It
        has been fought for conquest and commercial expansion and it is
        proposed, even when it has been fought out on the field, to follow
        it up by a commercial struggle between the belligerent nations.
                                                        CWSA 25:609

        Human nature and war
            The men who wrote these books were capable thinkers but
        they  ignored  the  one  thing  that  matters,  human  nature.  The
        present war  has justified to a certain extent the Russian writer
        though by developments he did not foresee; scientific war fare has
        brought military movement to a standstill and baffled the strate-
        gist and the tactician, it has rendered decisive victory impossible
        except by overwhelming numbers or an overwhelming weight of
        artillery. But this has not made war impossible, it has only changed
        its character; it has at the most replaced the  war  of military deci-
        sions by that of military and financial exhaustion aided by the grim
        weapon of famine. The English writer on the other hand erred by
        isolating the economic motive as the one factor that weighed; he
        ignored the human lust of dominion which, carried into the terms
        of commercialism, means the undisputed control of markets and
        the exploitation of helpless populations.  ...


        12                            All India Magazine,  October 2025
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