The World Set Free

Section 5

The establishment of the new order that was thus so humanly begun, was, if one measures it by the standard of any preceding age, a rapid progress.  The fighting spirit of the world was exhausted.  Only here or there did fierceness linger.  For long decades the combative side in human affairs had been monstrously exaggerated by the accidents of political separation.  This now became luminously plain.  An enormous proportion of the force that sustained armaments had been nothing more aggressive than the fear of war and warlike neighbours.  It is doubtful if any large section of the men actually enlisted for fighting ever at any time really hungered and thirsted for bloodshed and danger.  That kind of appetite was probably never very strong in the species after the savage stage was past.  The army was a profession, in which killing had become a disagreeable possibility rather than an eventful certainty.  If one reads the old newspapers and periodicals of that time, which did so much to keep militarism alive, one finds very little about glory and adventure and a constant harping on the disagreeableness of invasion and subjugation.  In one word, militarism was funk.  The belligerent resolution of the armed Europe of the twentieth century was the resolution of a fiercely frightened sheep to plunge.  And now that its weapons were exploding in its hands, Europe was only too eager to drop them, and abandon this fancied refuge of violence.

For a time the whole world had been shocked into frankness; nearly all the clever people who had hitherto sustained the ancient belligerent separations had now been brought to realise the need for simplicity of attitude and openness of mind; and in this atmosphere of moral renascence, there was little attempt to get negotiable advantages out of resistance to the new order.  Human beings are foolish enough no doubt, but few have stopped to haggle in a fire-escape.  The council had its way with them.  The band of ‘patriots’ who seized the laboratories and arsenal just outside Osaka and tried to rouse Japan to revolt against inclusion in the Republic of Mankind, found they had miscalculated the national pride and met the swift vengeance of their own countrymen.  That fight in the arsenal was a vivid incident in this closing chapter of the history of war.  To the last the ‘patriots’ were undecided whether, in the event of a defeat, they would explode their supply of atomic bombs or not.  They were fighting with swords outside the iridium doors, and the moderates of their number were at bay and on the verge of destruction, only ten, indeed, remained unwounded, when the republicans burst in to the rescue….