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Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go. 226

As soldiers dug into trenches that would endure for a half-decade, a terrible
strategic fact dawned on the generals who led Europe’s armies. The Great War was
going to be a charnel house. The continent had built itself into a battle machine,
wired by trains and telegraphs and armies. There was no reverse gear. There was
not even a switch to slow it down, let alone turn it off. A massive, technology-
powered, fast-moving system with revolutionary implications, built beyond the
comprehension of any one figure or nation, had slipped out of control. And the men
in charge of planning and directing the use of this super-fast complex? They failed
everyone: their soldiers, their kings, their armies. They were all but insensible to the
real nature of their age.

Sound familiar?

2.

Here, then, is a question of the sort – violent, loaded with the possibility of tragedy –
that you’d rather not have to consider: A new way of war arrives, a new weapon, a
fresh idea about fighting. Does it make your world peaceful or treacherous? The
lethality of the equation of guns x machines at the end of the 19th Century appeared
to some industrialists and bankers and statesmen inarguable evidence for peace.
Everyone with such a violently efficient weapon; who dares start a war? As we now
know, machines x guns was a formula for some of the worst killing in human history.
Gatling’s fond hope that his weapons would stop war was naïve, insane even. His
competitor Maxim had been clearer eyed. A friend told him: “Give up your chemistry
and electricity. If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will
enable those Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility.” 227

So: Let’s be a bit warmer about this. Networks x weapons = what exactly? Is there
some disaster lingering in our own future, as unimagined from our current
perspective as machine guns and trenches were a century ago? Do we consider war
impossible now? There’s something sickening in such puzzles, of course. Think of
the men and women who, over the millennia, have contemplated similar questions
knowing full well the answer would be measured in blood and treasure and
children. Put yourself in the place of the population of Melos, a peace-loving
Mediterranean island whose destruction 2300 years ago was chronicled by
Thucydides in The Peloponesian Wars. “Surely you have noticed that you are an
island and we control the ocean,” an unwelcome Athenian general intimated to a
Melian citizens’ council one day 243 BC as his soldiers and ships collected
menacingly outside the city’s walls. Athens wanted the Melians to join an alliance

226 “You smug faced”: Seigfried Sassoon, “Suicide in the Trenches” in The War
Poems of Seigfried Sassoon, (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2004), 64
227 “Give up your chemistry”: John Ellis, A Social History of the Machine Gun (New
York: Pantheon, 1975) p.33

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