Guerres Imaginaires

The weekend of the 11th and 12th of December Glasgow hosts a conference entitled "On or about December 1910, human character changed": Centenary reflections and contemporary debates: Modernism and beyond. I'm part of an organising team for a parallel postgraduate symposium called Interceptions: Theory's Modernism and Modernism's Theory. A while ago, I wrote a small article on "future-war fiction" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for the 1910 Centenary Reflections conference blog. You can see that version here. Below is a longer version.

On the 19 March 1906, the Daily Mail began the serialization of William Tuffnell Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910, an "invasion-fantasy" in which Germany invades Britain. It was enormously popular (no doubt helped by marketing that included sending actors in German military uniforms to march down London's Regent Street), greatly increasing the Mail's circulation and translated into 27 languages. Somewhat surprisingly for a bestseller, the book made some interesting formal choices, couching the events as a military history with excerpts from journals and military descriptions of troop movements. Subscribing to the theory that Britain was in constant threat of invasion by the Germans, the book stressed the importance of preparation and training. Nevertheless, apparently unable to countenance a total German victory, Le Queux describes a British resistance called the "League of Defenders" who lead an uprising against the invading hoardes. A film version, retitled If England Were Invaded, was released in October 1914.

Having been an art student in Paris in the 1880s, Le Queux went on to become a journalist and prolific author. One of three books he published in 1910 was the intriguingly titled The Unknown Tomorrow, with an even more intriguing subtitle of How the Rich Fared at the Hands of the Poor. 2010 eyes may find equally fascinating the title of a 1913 book by Le Queux The Lost Million, somewhat underestimating the carnage to be wrought over the subsequent five years. Two books published in 1914 bear the titles The German Spy, A Present-day Story and The War of the Nations.

In his article "Future-War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871-1900", I.F. Clarke notes that after Francis Cheynell's Civil War-infused Aulicus his Dream of the Kings Sudden Comming to London, published in May 1644, the future-war genre failed rather conclusively to take off. Until, that is, the year 1871, the year of the Paris Commune and the unification Germany. Clarke's article traces the explosion in stories of guerres imaginaires across Britain, France and Germany, all if which imagined variations on "the next European war" utilising the new weaponry made possible by technological development. Some writers (notably H.G. Wells in his 1914 book The World Set Free) went as far as to imagine a bomb so massive in its destructive capabilities that its use as a deterrent would lead to a new era of peace on earth.

The tone of this "massive European interest in The Next Great War, der nächste Krieg, La Guerre de demain" was a "cheerful language of anticipation", a language by no means limited to the military minds that first wrote such stories, nor the popular press that took over.

"With you I would have liked to depart for the Great War, which we are all expecting and which is so long in coming. Under your flag I still hope to see it, if there is a god of battle and he can hear me. To while away the waiting I have dreamed of this war, this holy war in which we shall be victorious." So wrote Commandant Šmile Augustin Cyprien Driant (known as Capitaine Driant), dedicating his book War in Open Country (1888) to his old regiment.

Compare the above to Marinetti and the Futurists, describing in 1909 how "like young lions we ran after Death". Singing "the love of danger", they "glorify war -- the world's only hygiene -- militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture". These are "beautiful ideas worth dying for", lit by "the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons".

If, then, 1910 ushers in a new mode of human consciousness, human character, one may be forgiven for thinking that it was long in the making. Long in the making, and wide in its reach, too; not merely the artistic consciousnesses of those that went to the Grafton Galleries in the last months of the year. Woolf may well have been right about the “human” scale of it. With these future-war tales and fantasies, it appears people were longing for a change, desperate in these “fantasies of the future” for what Clarke calls a “newer universe”.