“In four brief years,” the English novelist and seer H. G. Wells insisted in 1919, “Europe was compelled to develop a warfare monstrously out of proportion to any conceivable good which the completest victory would possibly achieve for either side.” If that was so, “all Geneva Conventions and such palliative ordinances, though excellent in intention and good in their immediate effects, make ultimately for the persistence of war as an institution. They are sops to humanity, devices for rendering war barely tolerable to civilized mankind, and so staving off the inevitable rebellion against its
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