Page 12 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

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