I note that the people who make these remarks do not refuse to travel by railway or motor-car, to use electric light, or to read mechanically printed newspapers. Nor do they install a well in their back-gardens to enjoy drinking the richer water of a pre-scientific age, with its interesting and variegated fauna. But it is quite easy to show that the destructive and horrible nature of modern warfare is due, not to the weapons used, but largely to the other applications of science which constitute the material basis of our civilization. Let us imagine the Great War fought with all our means of transport and preventive medicine, but no weapons more complicated than swords, spears, and possibly a few bows. With fewer munitions the armies could have been mobilized even more rapidly, and more men put in the fighting line. The Germans would probably have tried, as they tried in 1914, to bring about a “Schlacht ohne Morgen,” a battle on reversed fronts modelled on Cannae. The fighting would probably have been about as severe as at Cannae, and men would have been fighting in close order, ten or twenty deep, along a hundred-mile front. No doubt it would have been over sooner, but the losses would probably have been just as great. The French and Germans would doubtless both have gone on fighting until at least half their armies had become casualties, and, with four years’ fighting compressed into as many weeks, it would have been impossible to tend more than a fraction of the wounded. The chief difference might have been that the Russians would have been victorious by mere weight of numbers, and the French defeated. In former wars slaughter was limited by the fact that large armies could not be fed, and developed epidemic diseases. They also moved very slowly. So it took twenty-three years (from 1792 to 1815) to wear down the resistance of the French nation. Moreover, the Great War was the first since the Second Punic War of the 3rd century B. C. between two great civilized nations, each fighting with all its might. This fact accounts for its ferocity. Modern transport and hygiene made its scale possible; the weapons used merely served to prolong it.