Guerres imaginaires

Mark West (University of Glasgow) considers the literature of invasion:

On the 19 March 1906, the Daily Mail began the serialization of William Tuffnell Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910, an "invasion-fantasy" in which Germany invades Britain. Its enormous popularity was no doubt helped by a marketing strategy that included sending actors in German military uniforms to march down London's Regent Street. It sold over a million copies and was translated into 27 languages. One marker of its success was a film version entitled If England Were Invaded, released in October 1914.

From, I.F. Clarke, 'Future-War Fiction',
Science Fiction 24:3 (1997)

The book couches events as a military history, incorporating excerpts from journals and military descriptions of troop movements. Convinced that Britain was in constant threat of invasion by the Germans, Le Queux stresses the importance of preparation and training and devises a British resistance called the "League of Defenders" who manage to incite an uprising against the invading hordes.


The phenomenal success of The Invasion of 1910 testifies to the popularity of what I.F. Clarke calls “Future-War Fiction”, in the wake of the Paris Commune in 1871 and Germany’s unification. Writers across Britain, France and Germany imagined variations on “The Next Great War”, “der nächste Krieg”, and “La Guerre de demain”. H.G. Wells would go as far, in The World Set Free (1914), as to imagine a bomb so massive in its destructive capabilities that its use as a deterrent would lead to a new era of peace on earth.

Clarke suggests that the tone of this "massive European interest” in the next great was was a "cheerful language of anticipation", a language by no means limited to the military minds that first wrote such stories. Is it, then, a great leap between such popular fictions and the martial language of early Modernists, such as F.M. Marinetti and his gang of Futurists?

The Futurist Manifesto
in Le Figaro 20 February 1909

In his “Futurist Manifesto” of 1909, Marinetti describes how "like young lions we ran after Death". Singing "the love of danger", they "glorify war – the world's only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture". These are "beautiful ideas worth dying for", lit by "the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons".

If, as Virginia Woolf asserted, 1910 ushers in a new mode of human character, it was long in the making; and wide in its reach, too. Change of this kind embraces not merely the artistic consciousnesses of those that went to the Grafton Galleries in the last months of the year. These future-war tales and fantasies suggest a longing for change. There is a desperate desire in these “fantasies of the future” for what Clarke calls a “newer universe”. Of course, as we know now, the realisation of such a desire would have a terrible “human” cost.