And most of the tremendous outfit we English-speaking peoples carry isn’t even good for war. It is like a battle-axe in a tramcar, a terrifying offensive affair, but not really effective in a fight at close quarters. The time when war was a generalised thing is past. You can no longer have an army or navy that goes anywhere and does everything. For Britain to fight France, or Japan, or the United States, or Russia, or Italy, demands in each case a different sort of warfare, with different methods and different appliances. British battleships camouflaged as cruisers and docks for them half-way round the earth would be no good against Russia or Italy, and very little use against France. Against Japan they would be good for her submarines to chase and blockade while our submarines chased and blockaded the Japanese warships. A big air force, again, would be little use against the United States or Japan. Considered in relation to any possible specific war they may have to wage, the present war establishments of the great belligerent Powers, the miscellaneous elaborate material that the armament people and their unimaginative army traditions have induced them to buy are as likely to be efficient as the equipment of the White Knight in _Alice in Wonderland_. The methods and objectives and so forth of any next war that may surprise the politicians (just as children are surprised by fires when they play with matches), conducted by the sort of soldiers we possess and with the stuff they will handle as “equipment,” will certainly be more discursive and silly and ineffective even than those great pushes and counter-attacks and raids and bombings and so forth of the last great war, and in their inconclusive way infinitely more destructive.