Havelock Ellis - Essays in War-Time - Further Studies in the Task of Social Hygiene

From the point of view of literature, the Great War of to-day has brought us into a new and closer sympathy with the England of the past. Dr. Woods and Mr. Baltzly in their recent careful study of European Warfare, Is War Diminishing? come to the conclusion that England during the period of her great activity in the world has been "fighting about half the time." We had begun to look on war as belonging to the past and insensibly fallen into the view of Buckle that in England "a love of war is, as a national taste, utterly extinct." Now we have awakened to realise that we belong to a people who have been "fighting about half the time."

Thus it is, for instance, that we witness a revival of interest in Wordsworth, not that Wordsworth, the high-priest of Nature among the solitary Lakes, whom we have never forsaken, but the Wordsworth who sang exultantly of Carnage as God's Daughter. To-day we turn to the war-like Wordsworth, the stern patriot hurling defiance at the enemies who threatened our island fortress, as the authentic voice of England.

But this new sense of community with the past comes to us again and again on every hand when to-day we look back to the records of the past. I chance to take down the Epistles of Erasmus, and turn to the letters which the great Humanist of Rotterdam wrote from Cambridge and London four hundred years ago when young Henry VIII had just suddenly (in 1514) plunged into war. One reads them to-day with vivid interest, for here in the supple and sensitive brain of the old scholar we see mirrored precisely the same thoughts and the same problems which exercise the more scholarly brains of to-day. Erasmus, as his Pan-German friends liked to remind him, was a sort of German, but he was, nevertheless, what we should now call a Pacifist. He can see nothing good in war and he eloquently sets forth what he regards as its evils. It is interesting to observe, how, even in its small details as well as in its great calamities, war brought precisely the same experiences four centuries ago as to-day. Prices are rising every day, Erasmus declares, taxation has become so heavy that no one can afford to be liberal, imports are hampered and wine is scarce, it is difficult even to get one's foreign letters. In fact the preparations of war are rapidly changing "the genius of the Island." Thereupon Erasmus launches into more general considerations on war. Even animals, he points out, do not fight, save rarely, and then with only those of other species, and, moreover, not, like us, "with machines upon which we expend the ingenuity of devils." In every war also it is the non-combatants who suffer most, the people build cities and the folly of their rulers destroys them, the most righteous, the most victorious war brings more evil than good, and even when a real issue is in dispute, it could better have been settled by arbitration. The moral contagion of a war, moreover, lasts long after the war is over, and Erasmus proceeds to express himself freely on the crimes of fighters and fighting.

Erasmus was a cosmopolitan scholar who habitually dwelt in the world of the spirit and in no wise expressed the general feelings either of his own time or ours. It is interesting to turn to a very ordinary, it may be typical, Englishman who lived a century later, again in a period of war and also of quite ordinary and but moderately glorious war. John Rous, a Cambridge graduate of old Suffolk family, was in 1623 appointed incumbent of Santon Downham, then called a town, though now it has dwindled away almost to nothing. Here, or rather at Weeting or at Brandon where he lived, Rous began two years later, on the accession of Charles I, a private diary which was printed by the Camden Society sixty years ago, and has probably remained unread ever since, unless, as in the present case, by some person of antiquarian tastes interested in this remote corner of East Anglia. But to-day one detects a new streak of interest in this ancient series of miscellaneous entries where we find that war brought to the front the very same problems which confront us to-day.

Santon Downham lies in a remote and desolate and salubrious region, not without its attractions to-day, nor, for all its isolation, devoid of ancient and modern associations. For here in Weeting parish we have the great prehistoric centre of the flint implement industry, still lingering on at Brandon after untold ages, a shrine of the archaeologist. And here also, or at all events near by, at Lackenheath, doubtless a shrine also for all men in khaki, the villager proudly points out the unpretentious little house which is the ancestral home of the Kitcheners, who lie in orderly rank in the churchyard beside the old church notable for its rarely quaint mediaeval carvings.

Rous was an ordinary respectable type of country parson, a solid Englishman, cautious and temperate in his opinions, even in the privacy of his diary, something of a country gentleman as well as a scholar, and interested in everything that went on, in the season's crops, in the rising price of produce, in the execution of a youth for burglary or the burning of a woman for murdering her husband. He frequently refers to the outbreak of plague in various parts of the country, and notes, for instance, that "Cambridge is wondrously reformed since the plague there; scholars frequent not the streets and taverns as before; but," he adds later on better information, "do worse." And at the same time he is full of interest in the small incidents of Nature around him, and notes, for instance, how a crow had built a nest and laid an egg in the poke of the topsail of the windmill.

But Rous's Diary is not concerned only with matters of local interest. All the rumours of the world reached the Vicar of Downham and were by him faithfully set down from day to day. Europe was seething with war; these were the days of that famous Thirty Years' War of which we have so often heard of late, and from time to time England was joining in the general disturbance, whether in France, Spain, or the Netherlands. As usual the English attack was mostly from the basis of the Fleet, and never before, Rous notes, had England possessed so great and powerful a fleet. Soon after the Diary begins the English Expedition to Rochelle took place, and a version of its history is here embodied. Rous was kept in touch with the outside world not only by the proclamations constantly set up at Thetford on the corner post of the Bell Inn—still the centre of that ancient town—but by as numerous and as varied a crop of reports as we find floating among us to-day, often indeed of very similar character. The vicar sets them down, not committing himself to belief but with a patient confidence that "time may tell us what we may safely think." In the meanwhile measures with which we are familiar to-day were actively in progress: recruits or "voluntaries" were being "gathered up by the drum," many soldiers, mostly Irish, were billeted, sometimes not without friction, all over East Anglia, the coasts were being fortified, the price of corn was rising, and even the problem of international exchange is discussed with precise data by Rous.

On one occasion, in 1627, Rous reports a discussion concerning the Rochelle Expedition which exactly counterparts our experience to-day. He was at Brandon with two gentlemen named Paine and Howlet, when the former began to criticise the management of the expedition, disputing the possibility of its success and then "fell in general to speak distrustfully of the voyage, and then of our war with France, which he would make our King the cause of"; and so went on to topics of old popular discontent, of the great cost, the hazard to ships, etc. Rous, like a good patriot, thought it "foul for any man to lay the blame upon our own King and State. I told them I would always speak the best of what our King and State did, and think the best too, till I had good grounds." And then in his Diary he comments that he saw hereby, what he had often seen before, that men be disposed to speak the worst of State business, as though it were always being mismanaged, and so nourish a discontent which is itself a worse mischief and can only give joy to false hearts. That is a reflection which comes home to us to-day when we find the descendants of Mr. Paine following so vigorously the example which the parson of Downham reprobated.