Without Knowing Mr Walkley

lost someone they loved. But this is the least of the effects of the war. ‘Pre-war’ and ‘post-war’ are as distinct from each other as are two Geological Periods; and the lost lives which meant so much to us, are, for the new generation, merely like fossils indicating the separate strata of that (to them) pre-historic epoch. The war is now studied in its broad effect on western civilization. What that effect really was it is hard as yet to say; but what strikes me personally, perhaps more than anything else, is that it has made our civilization self-conscious, and vocally self-conscious. Before the war we were quite satisfied that modern progress was taking its course and that all was improving with the world. We did not think overmuch about this and we lived our lives and enjoyed them. But now, from morning to night, we discuss ourselves, our predecessors, and our possible successors, and most of this discussion is profoundly pessimistic. I think this is a very outstanding characteristic of to-day as compared with yesterday.

In 1914, we had for two years been living in The Close. Then, as now, its walls held peace as in a cup. The great elms had not then been felled; and their broad shadows lay gently upon the grass which surrounded the cathedral like a flat green pool. Many visitors came in summer; and in the afternoons, nurses brought children to play upon the grass. The voices of visitors and of children alike were always subdued by their consciousness of the beneficent though resolute presence of the Close constable, who moved about near by, watching their doings with a disapproval which was never altogether unfriendly. At night, when the Close gates had been locked, and the Compline bell had sounded from the Chapels of the Palace and of the Theological College, the Close was lulled into a complete silence. The guests coming home from a Canon’s dinner party always took care to step very quietly through the Close, much as people, coming late into their houses, tiptoe past bedroom doors so as not to awake the sleeping family. For the Close was a family party. We all knew if people were going out late, and if we were awake we listened to hear them come home; but if we were asleep, we were annoyed when they woke us up. The city outside the Close walls seemed very far away; and when we sat in the garden on summer nights, my father often remarked that it was almost incredible that twenty thousand people could be living a few hundred yards away.

On the first Sunday in August 1914, this perpetual peace of the Close was broken by the constant reiteration of the word ‘War’. All through the previous week, that ugly word had prowled about outside, like a black panther trying to get in. Staff officers had hurried to and fro looking serious, but the Close took no more interest in Balkan affairs than did the rest of England. Few people even knew the name of the murdered Archduke, and nobody wanted to go to war about him.

Then, on that Sunday, the panther was inside the Close and at our doors. The wild beast had leapt across Europe, and was now, not in the Balkans, but in Belgium. In these after-days, people sometimes speak as if the country had been hurried into war by newspaper propaganda inspired from above; but nothing could be less true. To begin with, propaganda, as we know it today, is one of the horrid legacies of the war. As was the case with barbed-wire, in pre-war days people hardly knew what it meant. But, also, the newspapers were taken by surprise. They were busy with Irish affairs. The Government could not dictate a policy to them, for the Government itself was not agreed, and the Cabinet was divided until the very day that war was declared.

The country made up its mind first of all. As a whole it knew little of foreign politics, less about the military strength of the various powers, and least of all about the possibilities of modern warfare. Its first desire was to be let alone. But in some forgotten corner of his memory, every Englishman knew that we had pledged our word to protect the neutrality of Belgium; and from those forgotten corners there now sprang the consciousness that in honour we must now keep that pledge. We might dread the suffering and the sacrifice of war, but unexpectedly we found ourselves dreading even more the possibility that the Government might fail in what we could not doubt was our duty. On Sunday morning the Press seemed to think that we might keep out, and then young officers on the Plain talked of sending in their papers and of joining the French Army should we fail to keep our word; while my brother Sidney was so disgusted at the suggestion that such a thing could be possible, that he took the Sunday newspapers out into his garden and burnt them on the lawn. The attitude of mind of these days seems largely to have been forgotten, but I find it expressed very clearly in my journal.

On Monday it seemed as if the war was within our very gates. The green shade of the Close was unexpectedly invaded by swarms of dusty, exhausted soldiers. They lay about upon the grass as if they had come from some far-off battlefield and now could go no farther. Who could they be? Rumours fluttered out from every door. And with them there fluttered out too the Canons’ wives and the old ladies, all followed by neat maidservants carrying trays of tea to the tired soldiers. Thus the Close reacted to the trumpets of war. With cups of tea.

Our troops proved to be more thirsty for tea than for blood, and more accustomed to it. They were our own local Territorials, youths from the neighbouring villages, on their march to the