VISUALISING THE FUTURE - WILLIAM LE QUEUX, The Great War in England in 1897 , Tower Publishing Co., London , 1894.

The illustrations to this book are by Captain Cyril Field and T.S.C.Crowther. They are serviceable and sometimes banal. They depict the invasion of Britain by the French with their Cossack allies, and supported by the massed ranks of unemployed, idle and alien. Although the book has been seen as a document, and a contribution to the War Scare that culminated in the Great War of 1914 - 1918, it was a very real contribution to the sensationalising of Foreign Relations, and a successful attempt to create a fear of the working classes.
 
The illustrations are no better nor effective in themselves than thousands of other depictions of explosions and Johnny Foreigner. Combined with Le Queux's texts, the insidious beat of prejudice, alarmism and prurience, they were immensely effective in presenting people with images that showed "what it would be like..."
 
See Daniel Pick, War Machine, The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age , Yale Univ.Press 1993.
A.J.A.Morris, The Scaremongers. The Advocacy of War and Rearmament 1896 - 1914 , Routledge Kegan Paul, London 1984.
 

 
• Carnage at Eastbourne.
• The Russians outside Glasgow
• Irish Volunteers to the rescue.

"To my Friend Alfred Charles Harmondsworth
A Generous Editor and Patriotic Englishman
I inscribe this Forecast of The Coming War"

In our own age there has been a multiplicity of similar works on screen and in print. Visualisation is not always in the cause of the constructive.