## CHAPTER THE FIRST. THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY

### Section 5

Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre is one of those autobiographical novels that were popular throughout the thirdand fourth decades of the twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must understand Wander Jahrerather in a spiritual and intellectual than in a literal sense. It is indeed an allusive title, carrying the world back tothe Wilhelm Meister of Goethe, a century and a half earlier.
Its author, Frederick Barnet, gives a minute and curious history of his life and ideas between his nineteenth andhis twenty−third birthdays. He was neither a very original nor a very brilliant man, but he had a trick ofcircumstantial writing; and though no authentic portrait was to survive for the information of posterity, he betraysby a score of casual phrases that he was short, sturdy, inclined to be plump, with a 'rather blobby' face, and full,rather projecting blue eyes. He belonged until the financial debacle of 1956 to the class of fairly prosperouspeople, he was a student in London, he aeroplaned to Italy and then had a pedestrian tour from Genoa to Rome,crossed in the air to Greece and Egypt, and came back over the Balkans and Germany. His family fortunes, whichwere largely invested in bank shares, coal mines, and house property, were destroyed. Reduced to penury, hesought to earn a living. He suffered great hardship, and was then caught up by the war and had a year ofsoldiering, first as an officer in the English infantry and then in the army of pacification. His book tells all thesethings so simply and at the same time so explicitly, that it remains, as it were, an eye by which future generationsmay have at least one man's vision of the years of the Great Change.
And he was, he tells us, a 'Modern State' man 'by instinct' from the beginning. He breathed in these ideas in theclass rooms and laboratories of the Carnegie Foundation school that rose, a long and delicately beautiful facade,along the South Bank of the Thames opposite the ancient dignity of Somerset House. Such thought wasinterwoven with the very fabric of that pioneer school in the educational renascence in England. After thecustomary exchange years in Heidelberg and Paris, he went into the classical school of London University. Theolder so−called 'classical' education of the British pedagogues, probably the most paralysing, ineffective, andfoolish routine that ever wasted human life, had already been swept out of this great institution in favour ofmodern methods; and he learnt Greek and Latin as well as he had learnt German, Spanish, and French, so that hewrote and spoke them freely, and used them with an unconscious ease in his study of the foundation civilisationsof the European system to which they were the key. (This change was still so recent that he mentions an encounterin Rome with an 'Oxford don' who 'spoke Latin with a Wiltshire accent and manifest discomfort, wrote Greekletters with his tongue out, and seemed to think a Greek sentence a charm when it was a quotation and animpropriety when it wasn't.')
Barnet saw the last days of the coal−steam engines upon the English railways and the gradual cleansing of theLondon atmosphere as the smoke−creating sea−coal fires gave place to electric heating. The building oflaboratories at Kensington was still in progress, and he took part in the students' riots that delayed the removal ofthe Albert Memorial. He carried a banner with 'We like Funny Statuary' on one side, and on the other 'Seats andCanopies for Statues, Why should our Great Departed Stand in the Rain?' He learnt the rather athletic aviation ofthose days at the University grounds at Sydenham, and he was fined for flying over the new prison for politicallibellers at Wormwood Scrubs, 'in a manner calculated to exhilarate the prisoners while at exercise.' That was the
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time of the attempted suppression of any criticism of the public judicature and the place was crowded withjournalists who had ventured to call attention to the dementia of Chief Justice Abrahams. Barnet was not a verygood aviator, he confesses he was always a little afraid of his machine−−there was excellent reason for every oneto be afraid of those clumsy early types−−and he never attempted steep descents or very high flying. He also, herecords, owned one of those oil−driven motor−bicycles whose clumsy complexity and extravagant filthiness stillastonish the visitors to the museum of machinery at South Kensington. He mentions running over a dog andcomplains of the ruinous price of 'spatchcocks' in Surrey. 'Spatchcocks,' it seems, was a slang term for crushedhens.
He passed the examinations necessary to reduce his military service to a minimum, and his want of any specialscientific or technical qualification and a certain precocious corpulence that handicapped his aviation indicatedthe infantry of the line as his sphere of training. That was the most generalised form of soldiering. Thedevelopment of the theory of war had been for some decades but little assisted by any practical experience. Whatfighting had occurred in recent years, had been fighting in minor or uncivilised states, with peasant or barbaricsoldiers and with but a small equipment of modern contrivances, and the great powers of the world were contentfor the most part to maintain armies that sustained in their broader organisation the traditions of the Europeanwars of thirty and forty years before. There was the infantry arm to which Barnet belonged and which wassupposed to fight on foot with a rifle and be the main portion of the army. There were cavalry forces (horsesoldiers), having a ratio to the infantry that had been determined by the experiences of the Franco−German war in# 1871. There was also artillery, and for some unexplained reason much of this was still drawn by horses; though
there were also in all the European armies a small number of motor−guns with wheels so constructed that theycould go over broken ground. In addition there were large developments of the engineering arm, concerned withmotor transport, motor−bicycle scouting, aviation, and the like.
No first−class intelligence had been sought to specialise in and work out the problem of warfare with the newappliances and under modern conditions, but a succession of able jurists, Lord Haldane, Chief Justice Briggs, andthat very able King's Counsel, Philbrick, had reconstructed the army frequently and thoroughly and placed it atlast, with the adoption of national service, upon a footing that would have seemed very imposing to the public of# 1900. At any moment the British Empire could now put a million and a quarter of arguable soldiers upon the
board of Welt−Politik. The traditions of Japan and the Central European armies were more princely and lessforensic; the Chinese still refused resolutely to become a military power, and maintained a small standing armyupon the American model that was said, so far as it went, to be highly efficient, and Russia, secured by a stringentadministration against internal criticism, had scarcely altered the design of a uniform or the organisation of abattery since the opening decades of the century. Barnet's opinion of his military training was manifestly a poorone, his Modern State ideas disposed him to regard it as a bore, and his common sense condemned it as useless.Moreover, his habit of body made him peculiarly sensitive to the fatigues and hardships of service.
'For three days in succession we turned out before dawn and−−for no earthly reason−−without breakfast,' herelates. 'I suppose that is to show us that when the Day comes the first thing will be to get us thoroughlyuncomfortable and rotten. We then proceeded to Kriegspiel, according to the mysterious ideas of those inauthority over us. On the last day we spent three hours under a hot if early sun getting over eight miles of countryto a point we could have reached in a motor omnibus in nine minutes and a half−−I did it the next day inthat−−and then we made a massed attack upon entrenchments that could have shot us all about three times over ifonly the umpires had let them. Then came a little bayonet exercise, but I doubt if I am sufficiently a barbarian tostick this long knife into anything living. Anyhow in this battle I shouldn't have had a chance. Assuming that bysome miracle I hadn't been shot three times over, I was far too hot and blown when I got up to the entrenchmentseven to lift my beastly rifle. It was those others would have begun the sticking....
'For a time we were watched by two hostile aeroplanes; then our own came up and asked them not to, and−−thepractice of aerial warfare still being unknown−−they very politely desisted and went away and did dives andcircles of the most charming description over the Fox Hills.'
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All Barnet's accounts of his military training were written in the same half−contemptuous, half−protesting tone.He was of opinion that his chances of participating in any real warfare were very slight, and that, if after all heshould participate, it was bound to be so entirely different from these peace manoeuvres that his only course as arational man would be to keep as observantly out of danger as he could until he had learnt the tricks andpossibilities of the new conditions. He states this quite frankly. Never was a man more free from sham heroics.