Page:The Outline of History Vol 2.djvu/587

Rh first cheerless dawn of a long day of creative effort. The conferences of the Ten, of the Four, of the Big Three, had no trace of creative power; there was no light in the men of Versailles; the dawn was manifest rather as a grey light of critical disapproval that broke through the shutters and staled the guttering candles of the old diplomacy as the conference yawned and drawled to its end. Creation was not there. But a great process of thought spreads throughout the world; many thousands of men and women, in every country, for the most part undistinguished and unknown people, are awakening to their responsibility, are studying, thinking, writing, and teaching, getting together, correcting false impressions, challenging foolish ideas, trying to find out and tell the truth; and upon them it is that we must rest our hope, such hope as we can entertain, of a saner plan to take the place of this first flimsy League and this patched and discomforting garment of treaties that has been flung for a while over the naked distresses of our world.

§ 14

The failure to produce a more satisfactory world settlement in 1919-20 was, we have suggested, a symptom of an almost universal intellectual and moral lassitude, resulting from the overstrain of the Great War. A lack of fresh initiative is characteristic of a fatigue phase; everyone, from sheer inability to change, drifts on for a time along the lines of mental habit and precedent.

Nothing could be more illustrative of this fatigue inertia than the expressed ideas of military men at this time. It will round off this chapter in an entirely significant way, and complete our picture of the immense world interrogation on which our history must end, if we give here the briefest summary of a lecture that was delivered to a gathering of field-marshals, generals, major-generals, and the like by Major-General Sir Louis Jackson, at the Royal United Service Institution in London one day in December, 1919. Lord Peel, the British Under-Secretary for War, presided, and the reader must picture to himself the not too large and quite dignified room of assembly in that building, and all these fine, grave, soldierly figures quietly intent upon the lecturer's words. He is describing, with a certain subdued enthusiasm, the probable technical developments of military method in the "next war."