Mr. Britling Sees It ThroughWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
Mr. Britling Sees It Through
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
War stories; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
His two days in London had filled him with matter, and he was glad to
have something more than Hugh and Teddy and Mrs. Britling to talk it
upon. What was happening now in Great Britain, he declared, was
_adjustment_. It was an attempt on the part of a great unorganised
nation, an attempt, instinctive at present rather than intelligent, to
readjust its government and particularly its military organisation to
the new scale of warfare that Germany had imposed upon the world. For
two strenuous decades the British navy had been growing enormously under
the pressure of German naval preparations, but the British military
establishment had experienced no corresponding expansion. It was true
there had been a futile, rather foolishly conducted agitation for
universal military service, but there had been no accumulation of
material, no preparation of armament-making machinery, no planning and
no foundations for any sort of organisation that would have facilitated
the rapid expansion of the fighting forces of a country in a time of
crisis. Such an idea was absolutely antagonistic to the mental habits of
the British military caste. The German method of incorporating all the
strength and resources of the country into one national fighting machine
was quite strange to the British military mind--still. Even after a
month of war. War had become the comprehensive business of the German
nation; to the British it was an incidental adventure. In Germany the
nation was militarised, in England the army was specialised. The nation
for nearly every practical purpose got along without it. Just as
political life had also become specialised.... Now suddenly we wanted a
government to speak for every one, and an army of the whole people. How
were we to find it?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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