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Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-3749

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Voices Prophesying War traces the development of a peculiar brand of fiction - the tale of the future war. I.F. Clarke argues that a work of speculative fiction about future warfare reflects the attitudes towards war of the author's society. Furthermore, Clarke maintains that tracing the development of the genre as a whole allows for a better understanding of the attitudes that Europeans held about warfare since the nineteenth century, and also for a better understanding of how those attitudes changed.

On the face of it, merely stating that art reflects the values of the culture that created it does not seem like much of an argument. If one wanted to examine European art glorifying war, the paintings of Jacques-Louis David or the poems of Tennyson are readily at hand. For European art depicting war negatively, one may consult Picasso's Guernica or the poetry of Robert Graves. There does not really seem to be a need for a work such as Clarke's.

Yet, with Voices Prophesying War, Clarke has done something clever. It is true that The Charge of the Light Brigade presents British soldiers as noble and glorious, and that Guernica depicts the high cost of modern war. But these works are not generic treatises about the abstract concept of war, but rather commentaries on specific events that had already occurred. Clarke does not aim to measure reactions to specific events, but to get at the more general attitude towards war as an abstract concept held by the European masses in the modern period. To do that, Clarke investigates the way in which European's presented their view of imaginary wars. This body of evidence permits Clarke to gauge generic attitudes towards war, but also to measure attitudes about technology, the concept of progress, and nationalism that works simply reflecting on events cannot.

Clarke sees four distinct phases in the presentation of the future war, largely in line with the major military events of modern European history. The first runs from 1763 until 1871, beginning with the anonymous The Reign of George VI, an eighteenth-century vision of life in the twentieth century, and ends with the creation of a German nation-state. For this phase, Clarke argues that the bulk of the speculative fiction was English and French, and largely taken up with wars against the other, as one might expect from the Napoleonic era.

Clarke maintains that with the creation of the German Empire in 1871, the genre of the tale of the future war was properly born, with a groundbreaking English work, The Battle of Dorking by George Chesney. Chesney's story, published just months after the creation of Germany, posits a future German invasion of England, and is full of prescriptions for its prevention. Clarke demonstrates that Chesney's story had a deep impact, both in the world of fiction, and on the British public, who reacted to Chesney's story with panic. This infancy of the future-war story lasted, as one might expect, until 1914. Clarke presents this phase as one caught up with the European balance of power and technological progress. For those writers who focused on technology, science and its machines were seen as incredibly positive, and many writers envisioned a future without wars, or in which wars were waged with minimal human cost. "Not a single writer," Clarke writes, "ever guessed that industrialism plus mass conscription would make it possible for a Falkenhayn to plan the Battle of Verdun with the intention of bleeding the French armies to death."

The First World War changed all of that. Now, "the mood shaping most of these tales of the war-to-come was a profound sense of anxiety and doubt about the future." Following the Second World War, these tales took an even dimmer view. The awesome destructive power of atomic weapons convinced people that if there were ever another war, it could only result in the destruction of all. At the end of this journey, Clarke argues that in the history of the tale of the future war, one can trace a major shift in social attitudes to war that are not necessarily visible in more traditional types of historical evidence.

Clarke's argument is well founded, well documented, and also a pleasant historical exercise. Yet there are flaws. First, while Clarke's body of evidence at first seems vast, it becomes clear that Clarke is writing only about Western Europe and the United States. Although there are a few nods to the Russian experience, and the incorporation of some German works, the book seems very unbalanced. Second, Clarke's evidence is limited by medium. Clarke confines himself to the fiction of the printed word, but arguably, beginning in the interwar period, film and radio were at least equally important in shaping and representing social attitudes, and also offer a rich body of evidence regarding the war-to-come. Finally, Clarke fails to integrate his narrow scope of evidence into a broader evidential context. Missing are reviews of these works, detailed commentary on accompanying illustrations, and the non-fiction works by many of these prolific authors. Clearly, while Clarke has demonstrated the potential this body of evidence holds, much work remains.