Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go. 27° As soldiers dug into trenches that would endure for a half-decade, a terrible strategic fact dawned on the generals who led Europe’s armies. The Great War was going to bea charnel house. The continent had built itself into a battle machine, wired by trains and telegraphs and armies. There was no reverse gear. There was not even a switch to slow it down, let alone turn it off. A massive, technology- powered, fast-moving system with revolutionary implications, built beyond the comprehension of any one figure or nation, had slipped out of control. And the men in charge of planning and directing the use of this super-fast complex? They failed everyone: their soldiers, their kings, their armies. They were all but insensible to the real nature of their age. Sound familiar? Z, Here, then, is a question of the sort - violent, loaded with the possibility of tragedy - that you'd rather not have to consider: A new way of war arrives, a new weapon, a fresh idea about fighting. Does it make your world peaceful or treacherous? The lethality of the equation of guns x machines at the end of the 19 Century appeared to some industrialists and bankers and statesmen inarguable evidence for peace. Everyone with such a violently efficient weapon; who dares start a war? As we now know, machines x guns was a formula for some of the worst killing in human history. Gatling’s fond hope that his weapons would stop war was naive, insane even. His competitor Maxim had been clearer eyed. A friend told him: “Give up your chemistry and electricity. If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable those Europeans to cut each others’ throats with greater facility.”227 So: Let’s be a bit warmer about this. Networks x weapons = what exactly? Is there some disaster lingering in our own future, as unimagined from our current perspective as machine guns and trenches were a century ago? Do we consider war