The Early Palaeozoic explosion and its aftermath

Abstract

In the middle of the eighteenth century, war was the business of gentlemen and their hirelings. It was fought by relatively small armies which were manoeuvered across Europe and the world as chessmen across a chessboard. War was a polite, cruel business: the Huns and the Vandals had been forgotten. The victories of 1759, which set out the map of the modern world, were won by small forces in tiny decisive battles. Later, after the French Revolution came the democratic invention of citizen armies — masses of men trudged across the continents to do the duty of battle. Out of this came the machine gun and barbed wire, the slaughter of the American Civil War and the trenches of Flanders. For each new weapon of offence was an equal weapon of defence, and millions faced each other in a stalemate of ignorant armies clashing by night or, as in 1940, a desperate struggle for survival. We have now reached a splendidly final state where our best defence is the assurance that we can destroy the enemy even as we ourselves are destroyed.