dwelling, which is as private as a harem and much like it in appearance; for even the courtyard garden, the patio, is inside the house, and open only to the sky. She loves exercise as little as she does the sun. She cares neither to play tennis nor walk nor ride for pleasure. In a world where every man goes horseback, even if only to go around the corner, it is rare to see a lady on a horse, except sometimes in the parks of the biggest cities. The tropical woman does not awake to life till the trade-wind has given its last furious scourging to the palms, and the light of the vivid, shadeless day gives way to a cool transparency that fills the Caribbean world abrim. When the vast sun dives, as if pulled swiftly by a hand under the horizon, and the land-breeze flows softly, like a scented tide, the mysterious houses open wide. Through the door-spaces, as huge as Northern barns, the passer-by can see into all the rooms, and through them into the gorgeous patios, where fireflies of unfading lights make erratic lines of green fire. In the rooms are figures moving about in graceful indolence, in laces and filmy, cloudy garments. Roses or scarlet hibiscus blooms glow in coal-black crowns of hair. Sumptuous fans hide faces, so that a momentary glance may be shot at the stranger who stares in boldly. The tropic night, intoxicating, thrilling, has come, and the tropical women are of it. Spanish tropics. Scarcely does the evening flood in, before the women cluster in consciously picturesque groups behind the bars. Caballeros ride through the narrow, sidewalk-less streets, brushing the housefronts as they pass. If you are on foot, you take the wall. The caballero is busy looking into the windows. If you are busy yourself, as you will be, the horses will take care of your welfare. They are accustomed to the task. They are the only living creatures that are not abroad for the one purpose of looking. Part of what you see will be due to rouge and rice-powder. The Spanish-American belle dotes on rice-powder. But there will be a plenty of complexions genuine enough. And when you see one of these under the Caribbean moon,-a forehead of fair ivory beneath a coronet of blue-black hair; tiny ears, barely flushed, like a bud; cheeks flashing darkly crimson through a softly tinged skin; lips more scarlet than the flower in the black hair,-and when that face looks out of a barred window, beneath a roof that is Moorish, with eyes— Here it is in order to say, "Alas!" like every well-constituted traveler who writes about the tropics, and to add, "the beauties of that ardent world bloom early, but fade soon." Only they do not exactly fade. If you would see what they do, mark the overwhelmingly healthful, unfaded proportions of the aunts and married sisters of the beauty. The great need of the They dine early in the old-fashioned Caribbean tropics is banting. THE LAST WAR IN THE WORLD A STORY OF THE FUTURE BY H. G. WELLS Author of "Tono Bungay," "The New Machiavelli," "Marriage," etc. I STUDIED from the point of view of human affairs on the a sane and ambitious social order, it is difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow, the motives that plunged mankind into the war that fills the histories of the middle decades of the twentieth century. It must always be remembered that the political structure of the world at that time was everywhere extraordinarily behind the collective intelligence. That is the central fact of that history. For two hundred years there had been no great changes in political or legal methods and pretensions; the utmost change had been a certain shifting of boundaries and a slight readjustment of procedure, while in nearly every other aspect of life there had been fundamental revolutions, gigantic releases, and an enormous enlargement of scope and outlook. The absurdities of courts and the indignities of representative parliamentary government, coupled with the opening of vast fields of opportunity in other directions, had more and more withdrawn the best intelligences from public affairs. The ostensible governments of the world in the twentieth century were following in the wake of the ostensible religions. They were ceasing to command the services of any but secondrate men. After the middle of the eighteenth century there are no more great ecclesiastics upon the world's memory; after the opening of the twentieth, no more statesmen. Everywhere one finds an energetic, ambitious, short-sighted, commonplace type in the seats of authority, blind to the new possibilities, and litigiously reliant upon the traditions of the past. Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were the boundaries of the various "sovereign states," and the conception of a general predominance in part of some one particular state. The memory of the empires of Rome and Alexander squatted, an unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human imagination; it bored into the human brain like some grisly parasite, and filled it with disordered thoughts and violent impulses. For more than a century the French system exhausted its vitality in belligerent convulsions, and then the infection passed to the German-speaking peoples, who were the heart and center of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs. Later ages were to store and neglect the vast insane literature of this obsession, the intricate treaties, the secret agreements, the vast knowingness of the political writer, the cunning refusals to accept plain facts, the strategic devices, the tactical manoeuvers, the records of mobilizations and counter-mobilizations. It ceased to be credible almost as soon as it ceased to happen, but in the very dawn of the new age their state-craftsmen sat with their historical candles burning, and, despite strange new reflections and unfamiliar lights and shadows, still wrangling and planning to rearrange the maps of Europe and the world. THE WARLIKE PRIMITIVE MAN PRIMITIVE man had been a fiercely combative animal; innumerable generations had passed their lives in tribal warfare, and the weight of tradition, the example of history, the ideals of loyalty and devotion, fell in easily enough with the incitements of the international mischief-maker. The political ideas of the common man were picked up haphazard; there was virtually nothing in such education as he Copyright, 1914, by THE CENTURY CO. was given that was ever intended to fit him for citizenship, and it was therefore a comparatively easy matter to fill his vacant mind with the sounds and fury of exasperated suspicion and national aggression. But all this emotion was the fickle emotion of minds without established ideas; it was with most of them, Barnet says, as it was with himself, a natural response to collective movement, and to martial sounds and colors, and the exhilarating challenge of vague dangers. When at last, after many rumors of a "Grave International Situation," the central European powers suddenly attacked the Slav confederacy, and France and England joined the Slavs, there was no immediate comprehension of the calamity. People had been so long oppressed by the threat of and preparation for war that its arrival came with an effect of positive relief. II In the great hall of the War Control, the windows of which looked out across the Seine to the Trocadéro and the palaces of the western quarter, a series of big-scale relief-maps were laid out upon tables to display the whole seat of war, and the staff-officers of the control were continually busy shifting the little blocks which represented the contending troops as the reports and intelligence came drifting in to the various telegraphic bureaus in the adjacent rooms. In other smaller apartments there were maps of a less detailed sort, upon which, for example, the reports of the British Admiralty and of the Slav commanders were recorded as they kept coming to hand. Upon these maps, as upon chess-boards, Marshal Dubois, in consultation with General Viard and the Earl of Delhi, was to play the great game for world supremacy against the central European powers. Very probably he had Very probably he had a definite idea of his game; very probably he had a coherent and admirable plan. But he had reckoned without a proper estimate either of the new strategy of aviation or of the possibilities of atomic energy that Holsten had opened for mankind. While he planned intrenchments and invasions and a frontier war, the central European generalship was striking at the eyes and the brain. And while, with a certain diffident hesitation, he developed his gambit that night upon the lines laid down by Napoleon and Moltke, his own scientific corps, in a state of mutinous activity, was preparing a blow for Berlin. "These old fools!" was the key in which the scientific corps was thinking. On the night of July 2, the War Control in Paris was an impressive display of the paraphernalia of scientific military organization as the first half of the twentieth century understood it. To one human being at least the consulting commanders had the likeness of world-wielding gods. She was a skilled typist, capable of nearly sixty words a minute, and she had been engaged in relay with other similar women to take down orders in duplicate and hand them over to the junior officers in attendance, to be forwarded and filed. There had come a lull, and she had been sent out from the dictating-room to take the air upon the terrace before the great hall and to eat such scanty refreshment as she had brought with her until her services were required again. From her position upon the terrace this young woman had a view not only of the wide sweep of the river below her and all the eastward side of Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to St.-Cloud, great blocks and masses of black or pale darkness, with pink and golden flashes of illumination and endless interlacing bands of dotted lights under a still and starless sky, but also the whole spacious interior of the great hall, with its slender pillars and gracious arching and clustering lamps, was visible to her. There over a wilderness of tables lay the huge maps, done on so large a scale that one might fancy them small countries; the messengers and attendants went and came perpetually, altering, moving the little pieces that signified hundreds and thousands of men; and the great commander and his two consultants stood amid all these things, and near where the fighting was nearest, scheming, directing. They had only to breathe a word, and presently away there, in the world of reality, the punctual myriads moved. Men rose up and went forward and died. The fate of nations lay behind the eyes of these three men. Indeed, they were like gods. Most godlike of the three was Dubois. It was for him to decide; the others at most might suggest. In a passion of instinctive worship, her woman's soul went out to this grave, handsome, still old man. Once she had taken words of instruction from him direct. She had awaited them in an ecstasy of happiness-and fear; for her exaltation was made terrible by the dread that some error might dishonor her. She watched him now through the glass with all the unpenetrating minuteness of an impassioned woman's observation. He said little, she remarked. He looked but little at the maps. The tall Englishman beside him was manifestly troubled by a swarm of ideas-conflicting ideas; he craned his neck at every shifting of the little red, blue, black, and yellow pieces on the board, and wanted to draw the commander's attention to this and that. Dubois listened, nodded, spoke a word, and became still again, brooding like the national eagle. His eyes were so deeply sunken under his white eyebrows that she could not see them; his mustache overhung the mouth from which those words of decision came. Viard, too, said little; he was a dark man with a drooping head and melancholy, watchful eyes. He was more intent upon the French right, which was feeling its way now through Alsace to the Rhine. He was, she knew, an old colleague of Dubois; he knew him better, she decided, he trusted him more, than this unfamiliar Englishman. Not to talk, to remain impassive, and as far as possible in profile-these were the lessons that old Dubois had mastered years ago. To seem to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse to hurry, itself a confession of miscalculation, by attention to these simple rules Dubois had built up a steady reputation from the days when he had been a promising junior officer, a still, almost abstracted young man, deliberate, but ready. Even then men had looked at him and said, "He will go far." Through fifty years of peace he had never once been found wanting, and at manœuvers his impassive persistence had perplexed and hypnotized and shattered many a more actively intelligent man. Deep in his soul Dubois had hidden his one profound discovery about the modern art of warfare, the key to his career. And this discovery was that nobody knew; that to act, therefore, was to blunder, that to walk was to confess, and that the man who acted slowly and steadfastly and, above all, silently, had the best chance of winning through. Meanwhile one fed the men. Now by this same strategy he hoped to shatter those mysterious unknowns of the central European command. Delhi might talk of a great flank march through Holland with all the British submarines and hydroplanes and torpedo craft pouring up the Rhine in support of it; Viard might crave for brilliance with the motor-bicycles, aëroplanes, and skee-men among the Swiss mountains and a sudden swoop upon Vienna: the thing was to listen, and wait for the other side to begin experimenting. It was all experimenting. And meanwhile he remained in profile, with an air of assurance, like a man who sits in an automobile after the chauffeur has had his directions. And every one about him was the stronger and surer for that quiet face, that air of knowledge and unruffled confidence. The clustering lights threw a score of shadows of him upon the maps; great bunches of him, versions of a commanding presence, lighter or darker, dominated the field, and pointed in every direction. Those shadows symbolized his control. When a messenger came from the wireless room to shift this or that piece in the game, to replace under amended reports one central European regiment by a score, to draw back or thrust out or distribute this or that force of the allies, the marshal would turn his head and seem not to see, or look and nod slightly, as a master nods who approves a pupil's self-correction, "Yes, that 's better." How wonderful he was! thought the woman at the window, how wonderful it all was! This was the brain of the Western World; this was Olympus, with the warring earth at its feet. And he was guiding France-France so long a sentful exile from imperialism-back to her old predominance. It seemed to her beyond the desert of a woman that she should be privileged to participate. re It is hard to be a woman, full of the stormy impulse to personal devotions, and to have to be impersonal, abstract, exact, punctual. She must control herself. She gave herself up to fantastic dreams -dreams of the days when the war would be over and victory enthroned. Then perhaps this harshness, this armor, would be put aside, and the gods might unbend. Her eyelids drooped. THE FIRST BLOW OF THE NEW WARFARE SHE roused herself with a start. She became aware that the night outside was no longer still; that there was an excitement down below there on the bridge, and a running in the street, and a flickering of search-lights among the clouds from some high place away beyond the Trocadéro. And then the excitement came surging up past her and invaded the hall within. One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of the room shouting something and gesticulating. And all the world had changed-a kind of throbbing. She could not understand. It was as if all the water-pipes and concealed machinery and cables of the ways beneath were beating, as pulses beat. And about her blew something like a wind-a wind that was dismay. Her eyes went to the face of the marshal as a frightened child might look toward its mother. He was still serene. He was frowning slightly, she thought, but that was natural enough; for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand gauntly gesticulating, had taken him by the arm, and was all too manifestly disposed to drag him toward the great door that opened on the terrace. And Viard was hurrying toward the huge windows, and doing so in the strangest of attitudes -bent forward and with eyes upturned. Something up there? And then it was as if thunder broke overhead. The sound struck her like a blow. She crouched together against the masonry and looked up. She saw three black shapes swooping down through the torn clouds, and from a point a little below two of them there had already started curling trails of red. Everything else in her being was paralyzed; she hung through moments that seemed infinities, watching those red missiles whirl down toward her. She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the world but a crimson-purple glare and sound-deafening, all-embracing, continuing sound. Every other light had gone out about her, and against this glare hung slanting walls, pirouetting pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly flight of huge, angular sheets of glass. She had an impression of a great ball of crimson-purple fire like a maddened living thing that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly amid a chaos of falling masonry, that seemed to be attacking the earth furiously, that seemed to be burrowing into it like a blazing rabbit. She had all the sensations of waking up out of a dream. She found she was lying face downward on a bank of mold and that a little rivulet of hot water was running over one foot. She tried to raise herself, and found her leg was very painful. She was not clear whether it was night or day or where she was; she made a second effort, wincing and groaning, turned over, got into a sitting position, and looked about her. A HUSHED PARIS EVERYTHING seemed very silent. She was, in fact, in the midst of a vast uproar; but she did not realize this, because her hearing had been destroyed. At first she could not join what she saw to any previous experience. She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world, a world of heaped, broken things. And it was lit-and somehow this was more familiar to her mind than any other fact about her-by a flickering, purplish-crimson light. Then close to her, rising above a confusion of debris, she recognized the Trocadéro. It was changed; something had gone from it, but its outline was unmistakable. It stood out against a streaming, whirling uprush of red-lit steam. And with that she recalled Paris and the Seine and the warm, overcast evening and the beautiful, luminous organization of the War Control. She drew herself a little way up the slope of earth on which she lay, and examined her surroundings with an increasing understanding. The earth on which she was lying projected like a cape into the river. Quite close to her was a brimming lake of dammed-up water from which these warm rivulets and torrents were trickling. |