It’s not as if no war could last longer than twenty years—the Thirty Years’ War and the Hundred Years’ War easily put the lie to that notion.
And it’s not as if such optimism is universal in wartime—quite the contrary. During World War I the futile trench warfare had many people convinced the war could drag on for a decade or more.
In 1933 H.G. Wells, in The Shape of Things to Come, accurately predicted that World War II would begin with a Japanese invasion of China, and that Europe would join in as a result of a staged border incident between Germany and Poland—he missed the exact start date of the European war by a little over three months, setting it in January 1940 rather than September 1939—but he assumed the war would drag on until at least 1950, and last until both sides were too exhausted to fight by conventional means anymore, whereupon biological weapons would be deployed…
No optimism there; Wells assumed that civilization would have to be utterly destroyed, by war, plague, famine, and total economic collapse, before matters could improve and a new and better civilization be built.
When the war actually began—well, I’ve read a great many science fiction stories written during World War II, and most that gave a date for the end of the war set it in 1947, 1948, 1951—very few, if any, thought it would be as soon as 1945.
The soldiers fighting in it certainly weren’t expecting it to end as soon as it did; remember that they were still finding isolated Japanese soldiers holding out in the 1970s.
I grew up during the Vietnam War, and I remember very well that everyone in my cohort assumed the war would drag on for decades. The possibility that it might end before we were all draft age never even occurred to any of us—it just wasn’t going to happen, we all knew that, despite Richard Nixon’s claims during the 1968 election. When the draft ended in 1973 we were astonished and disbelieving—and I was twenty-six days too young to be drafted, after all, an outcome I had never imagined.
Nor was it just my own age group. In the original off-Broadway version of the musical Hair (the show was cut considerably for its Broadway run), one of the characters has a vision of the end of the war, described in the song “One Thousand Year Old Man”—and that’s apparently in a far distant future. If the title is to be taken literally, centuries in the future.
In the 1980s, science fiction authors such as William Gibson and Lucius Shepard wrote stories that assumed the guerrilla wars in El Salvador and Colombia would continue into the middle of the twenty-first century.
And of course, any number of authors and pundits assumed that the Cold War would continue indefinitely.
In general, it’s been my own experience that people who have lived through a major war tend to be pessimistic about how long any given war will last. Why, then, did Jane Austen, who had seen the wars last twenty years already, take it for granted that they would soon be over? After ignoring the outside world for sixty chapters she could easily have avoided the issue for one more, yet she did not.
It seems unlikely that she didn’t think it was possible for the wars to continue; the England she describes in Pride and Prejudice hardly seems to be straining to support itself. In fact, the England she describes seems utterly untroubled by the war, or by the disturbances in the industrial north.
Read any story set during one of the World Wars, or during Vietnam, and even if the story is entirely set far away from the theater of battle, the war is a constant presence hanging over everything. Any young man may be called upon to fight, any soldier may die at any time. Yet in Pride and Prejudice, even the soldiers don’t worry about these gruesome possibilities, and the young men not already in service—Bingley, Darcy, and other potential husbands—are obviously in no danger.
Technically, although the army and militia were manned by volunteers, England did have conscription after a fashion at the time, in the form of naval press gangs that shanghaied able-bodied young men to serve below decks. Of course, this only affected the lower classes, and only in ports; Bingley and Darcy were quite right to be unconcerned. This was a time and place when an unfortunate young man might, under the right circumstances, be snatched away and bound to hard labor aboard a man o’ war, but that had nothing to do with the landed gentlemen among whom the Bennet sisters hoped to find spouses.
This, I believe, is one of the greatest differences between Austen’s world and our own—she was able to ignore the war because except for the dangers facing the three of her brothers who were in military service, it simply didn’t affect her directly. Despite occasional propaganda to the contrary, there was no real chance that Napoleon would invade Britain; the Royal Navy dominated the seas, and the French had no way to transport troops across the Channel. England was making a serious effort, sending ships and troops into the fray, but it did not even begin to resemble the sort of total war effort that was the norm in the twentieth century.
In fact, very little that happened on a larger scale intruded on the inhabitants of England’s country homes. Wars abroad, press gangs in the ports, riots in the industrial north, the decisions of kings and parliaments simply didn’t have any real effect on these people. There was no mass communication—even newspapers did not reach rural communities, let alone anything like radio or television. News traveled by word of mouth—and that wasn’t especially fast, since there were no highways, no railroads, nothing faster than a good horse.
Austen could ignore the wars and other events outside her own sphere without any real consequences, and without anyone thinking the less of her for it. Her world was one compartmentalized by class, location, and gender in a way that’s hard for us to imagine. About hundred and thirty years later cinema audiences would hear Humphrey Bogart tell Ingrid Bergman, “The problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” and it would resonate with them, because everyone, everywhere was caught up in the war then going on—but Jane Austen wrote about the problems of two little people as if they very much did amount to rather more than a hill of beans, even though a comparable war was going on around them.
Any novel set in 1944 that ignored World War II as completely as Austen ignored the Napoleonic Wars would be seen as eccentric, at the very least.
Any story written in 1944 that talked blithely about the housing problems of a ne’er-do-well lieutenant after the war would probably have been seen as in rather poor taste.
So why did Austen assume that the wars would end soon, and set Wickham at liberty?
We’ll never really know, but perhaps it was merely that she could not imagine anything as disorderly and unpleasant as a war continuing for much longer. Twenty years was quite long enough for such foolishness.
After all, although she is sometimes accused of cynicism and a mercenary view of things, Austen really seems to have maintained an optimistic outlook in most regards. She knew perfectly well that bad things could happen, and not be undone—misfortunes do befall her characters—but in the end, most things do work out well enough. Compromises are accepted, adjustments made, the irreparable endured, but all in all, Providence is generous enough. Lydia’s ruination is mitigated rather than avoided, Charlotte’s marriage to Mr. Collins is tolerable but hardly ecstatic, Mary and Kitty are left unwed, but Jane has Mr. Bingley and Elizabeth has Mr. Darcy, which is more good fortune than they might have reasonably expected. Predicting an end to the war may well have seemed no more outrageous than establishing Elizabeth as mistress of Pemberley; after all, she never did specify exactly when peace would be restored, merely that it would come while Lydia was still young.
Surely, it is a sign of her inherent optimism that she took it for granted that the French Wars would end soon. Or perhaps it was wishful thinking that her two brothers in the Royal Navy might soon be no longer at risk.
But before we start thinking of her as too light-hearted, it may be worthy of note that she speaks of peace being restored, but never mentions who won the war…
Just Who Were Those Martians, Anyway?
Originally published in The War of the Worlds: Fresh Perspectives
“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s… minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic…”
So said Wells’ narrator—but can we really believe him? How did he know? His own epilogue tells us just how little is really known of the Martians after the war, and he gives us no evidence at all to support his melodramatic introduction.
He knew that the Martians had a technology vastly superior to that of his own land and time, but does that really imply greater intelligence? Were the English of 1898 greater intelligences than their less fortunate neighbors in Africa and Asia, or their own ancestors of a thousand years before, or were Wells’ countrymen merely the beneficiaries of historical chance? I think any citizen of the twenty-first century will concede that our cellphones and computers do not mean we are ourselves superior in intelligence to our grandparents; technology is not, in itself, proof of superior intellect. And given that the narrator himself emphasizes that Mars is older than Earth—well, he interprets this as indicating that the Martians have presumably evolved further along our own supposed path, and are therefore our mental superiors, just as we are the superiors of our nearest cousin, the chimpanzee. But could it not just as well be true that Martian evolution did not follow that same path any farther than we have, and that the Martians are of roughly human-level intelligence? Evolution, we now know, is not linear, but a matter of fitting inherited traits to the available ecological niches, and it may well be that intelligence greater than our own has no real survival value.
In that case, the Martians’ advanced weapons would be merely the result of a more mature technology. If a few centuries could take humanity from stone castles and wooden plows to skyscrapers and John Deere, then surely a few thousand years of Martian history are adequate to explain heat rays and black smoke, without postulating greater-than-human intellect.
Perhaps the narrator thinks that the Martians’ oversize brains indicate greater intelligence; this may be a better indicator than their technology, but it is still unreliable—after all, elephants and whales, with brains much larger than our own, are bright enough, but well short of human levels, and who knows what effects the Martian environment may have had? Perhaps all that additional brain tissue is required to be effective in the cold, thin air of Mars.
Really, the only way to judge intelligence is from a creature’s behavior—and were the Martians’ actions indicative of high intelligence, signs of “intellects vast and cool”?
Consider: Ten cylinders, sent at one-day intervals, with no means of retrieving them should the invasion fail. The first arrivals more or less start blasting every Earthling in sight, ignoring attempts at communication. This is usually interpreted as sublime confidence on the Martians’ part, the result of their absolute certainty of their own superiority, but isn’t it just as easily interpreted as reckless, bloodthirsty stupidity?
Consider also that soul-searing moment in Chapter 4 when the Martians first emerge from their cylinder. Our narrator stares in horror at their hideous, alien, unprotected faces, and then… “Suddenly the monster vanished. It had toppled over the brim of the cylinder and fallen into the pit, with a thud like the fall of a great mass of leather.”
Superior intelligences, as far above us as we are above cattle, that don’t bother with spacesuits, armor, weapons, scanning equipment, signaling devices, or even a ladder before taking a pratfall out of their ship? Superior intelligences that don’t seem to have given any thought to the higher gravity, the thicker air, the possibility that some panicky farmer will put a load of buckshot into them at the first glimpse of alien life? Not worrying about microorganisms when their native environment apparently has none I can accept, but they hadn’t taken even the most basic precautions against environmental toxins!
I’m sorry, but these creatures are clearly not the vanguard of a carefully-planned attack by an ancient civilization of vast, cool intelligences.
Unsympathetic, yes—that description we can agree with. Otherwise, though, they seem no brighter than Star Trek’s Federation, with its mysterious inability to equip starships with seat belts or circuit breakers.
Are these really the best Mars can send against us?
In fact, I think it’s safe to conclude that they are not—a civilization that can survive in the cold and hostile Martian environment, that can launch unpowered craft across interplanetary distances in such a way that the passengers survive impact, can surely not have been built and maintained by fumble-tentacled doofuses.
But in that case, if these aren’t the elite leaders of a carefully-planned invasion by an advanced civilization, who are these guys?
Well, let us consider the evidence. A mere ten cylinders, sent on a one-way trip across the void—this isn’t much of an invasion at all. It’s generally assumed, with some sound reasons, that a technological civilization can’t exist without a population in the millions; automation and artificial intelligence might provide a way around that, but we see no evidence that these Martians have much in the way of robotics—their infamous tripods are piloted, not autonomous. There must, then, be millions of Martians back on Mars. Therefore, if they were serious about conquering and occupying a planet with roughly the land surface area of their own, they would have sent thousands or millions of troops, rather than a couple of hundred. If it were a scouting expedition, they would have provided a method of retrieving their forces. They did not. In fact, all the evidence indicates that they did not want these people back.
Why else use unpowered cylinders? Surely, the technology that created the fighting tripods could have built true spaceships, rather than suicide craft—but they didn’t, by choice.
In short, these were not an invasion fleet. My theory, which I think obvious in retrospect, is that they were exiles, being sent to Earth (and later Venus) to get them off Mars. Whether they were fleeing of their own free will, or being sent into exile by their enemies, we cannot immediately say—the evidence, though suggestive in ways I will describe shortly, is inconclusive. That they were indeed exiles, though, seems the only explanation for the manner of their arrival.
And really, given the evidence of their behavior on Earth, these Martians were a bunch of trigger-happy idiots; assuming that their native culture on Mars was a reasonably peaceful and civilized one, who can blame the authorities for wanting this group removed?
But wait, you say—why am I assuming that their native culture was peaceful?
Well, human scientists have been studying Mars for some time now, closely enough to observe the launching of the ten cylinders; have there been any observations of anything that might indicate large-scale warfare on the fourth planet? I’ve certainly never heard of any, nor does Wells mention any. Furthermore, Mars is an old world, with an advanced technology but a harsh environment and limited resources; war and conflict waste resources, while cooperation conserves them. If the Martians are as intelligent as humans, let alone possessed of minds “vast and cool,” they must surely have figured this out long ago. Ironically, it seems unlikely that the planet named for the god of war would be home to any wars.
The Martians we saw on Earth are anything but peaceful, of course—but the very fact that they were on Earth would seem to indicate that they’re the exception. If they were merely a losing faction on a war-torn and barbaric world, they would not have been exiled to Earth and Venus; they would have been exterminated. The fact that they were allowed to live, and precious resources devoted to sending them to another planet rather than just turning them into food or fertilizer, indicates that their opponents were humane and civilized, unlike the exiles themselves—or at any rate, they preferred to appear humane.
This would explain the exiles’ behavior nicely. These were the losing side in some internecine Martian brouhaha, ex
iled to another planet, allowed to take along some weapons to protect themselves from the native wildlife, probably on the assumption that there’s no sentient life on Earth for them to harm. These were the Martians too stubborn to realize they were on the losing side, too stupid to talk their way out of being shot into space, bitter and angry and scared when they land—of course they lashed out at the natives!
And once they had secured a position they linked up, tried to establish a defensible position and exploit the available resources. That’s sensible enough, from a military point of view.
The refusal to make any attempt to communicate with humans, though—that’s really a bit dumb. Humans are clearly intelligent, if perhaps not up to Martian levels; humans have cities and machinery, and as the “Thunder Child” demonstrates they can pose a genuine threat. Wouldn’t it have made sense to even the meanest intelligence to try to open communications, perhaps offer terms for England’s surrender to the Martians? The exiles’ overwhelming technological advantage meant they would win all the early encounters, but in the long run the sheer numbers of humans, the pre-existing industrial base in human hands, might turn the tide; wouldn’t it be obvious that a negotiated settlement would work to the Martians’ benefit? They could easily break the treaty later, if their position justified it.
But these were the Martians who fell on their faces climbing out of their own spacecraft, not the cream of the Martian intelligentsia. Apparently it wasn’t obvious to them.
I think we must conclude that not only were the exiles the losing side in some mysterious Martian dispute, but that they were stupid, arrogant, and bloody-minded, probably just as much so by Martian standards as by our own.
And perhaps we can guess just what sort of dispute got them exiled. Might they, perhaps, have been plotting a coup d’etat against the enlightened (they would undoubtedly say weak) and peaceful (they would surely say passive) government of Mars? Was their intent, perhaps, to use Earth as a base where they could regroup, rebuild, and launch a fresh attack?
Mind Candy Page 13
