The Nation in Arms

Colmar, von der Goltz (fully: Wilhelm Leopold Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, also "Goltz Pasha").[1] The Nation in Arms (Das Volk in Waffen). 1883. Philip A. Ashworth, translator (1887). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Library — scanned, 2009.[2] The nation in arms: a treatise on modern military systems and the conduct of war / by Baron Colmar von der Goltz; translated by Philip A. Ashworth. 1906. Library of the Australian War Memorial.[3]

Handled in ch. 3 of I. F. Clarke's Voices Prophesying War, "Science and Wars-to-Come, 1880-1914," for its argument typical of the era from a major voice in that era among writers on military matters and important actors in war and politics. In The Nation in Arms, the eventual military governor of Belgium puts "the case in favor of technological warfare." Recognizing "the complaint that 'all advances made by modern science and technical art are immediately applied to the abominable art of annihilating mankind,'" he shows to his satisfaction, and in what is to become a cliché of the defense of high-tech warfare, that this phenomenon is indeed a kind of progress.

The fact that each new inventions and each mechanical improvement seems somehow [...] to find its way into military service need not [...] alarm us, much less be regarded as a step backward in humanity and civilization. By these means, on the contrary, the battle is only the more rapidly decided and the war brought to an end sooner than in the days of old. (Clarke p. 72)

Clarke goes on to show an "English version" of such ideas "in a plain history of science, Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century, which put the militarist case at the beginning of a chapter on firearms," which also makes the point that "[...] if we must have wars, the more effective the implements of destruction, the shorter and more decisive will be the struggles, and the less the total loss of life [...]" (p. 72).

That the chapter ends in 1914 is significant, the Great War showing how wrong such analysis could be. The American initial compiler of Clockworks 2 will add that the Franco-Prussian War of 19 July 1870 to 28 January 1871[4] was indeed short and decisive (until 1914), but the well-studied US Civil War of 1861-65 was emphatically not short at over four years and was both decisive in the short-term and in the longer term, as "the Lost Cause"[5] very much a factor in US politics and culture. And in terms of "total loss of life" and other costs, as the Wikipedia article notes,

The war resulted in at least 1,030,000 casualties (3 percent of the population), including about 620,000 soldier deaths — two-thirds by disease — and 50,000 civilians. Binghamton University historian J. David Hacker believes the number of soldier deaths was approximately 750,000, 20 percent higher than traditionally estimated, and possibly as high as 850,000. The war accounted for more American deaths than in all other U.S. wars combined.[6]

(The military writers of the 1870s f. really should have known better.)

The background of books such as The Nation in Arms is significant for popular culture works because, in Clarke's words, "The compound of complacency, ignorance, and innocence was the primary condition for the great growth of war fiction during the last quarter of the nineteenth century; and the new genre became so well known that writers and reviewers commented on the latest stories as specimens of les guerres imaginaries, der Zukunftskrieg, or the tale of 'the next great war'" (Clarke p. 73).

RDE, finishing, 12Dec20