Dimming of the Day

21 The Making of the Myth of a Golden Age 1970, he devotes a chapter to the First World War and his first paragraph is worth repeating In a curiously subconscious way, those who lived before and took part in the First World War seem to have been aware that great, indeed enormous changes would result from that war, in all sorts of ways they could hardly guess. Indeed the full working out of those changes would not come until the Second World War, partly because the awareness had been subconscious rather than overt. This is, of course, why it is those who came to mature thought after the last war are unable to grasp what the general social set-up was before it, whereas those who came to mature thought after the First World War can very well understand the pre-1914 period. Both, to the present generation, are now history; but to the generation of thirty or forty years ago, not even the first seemed to be history. Yet there seems to have been this subconscious awareness of something enormous happening. It can be seen in the way that cricket came to a halt in August 1914 for all but a very few games – not only county cricket but club cricket too 11 . It can be seen, in its darker side, in the utterly fantastic war hysteria which gripped responsible citizens. Benny Green wrote A History of Cricket in 1988 12 (carefully calling it “A” rather than “The” history). Talking of W.G., he quoted Conan Doyle as testifying that the cause of the Doctor’s death was a broken heart in the face of appalling slaughter of a war whose methods he could not comprehend, and whose mindless brutality destroyed his faith in his own species. Green has a chapter headed Casualty Lists , and talks about the slightly strange way that county cricket went on after the declaration of war simply because there was no machinery to stop it. Peter Wynne-Thomas’s The History of Cricket: from the Weald to the World 13 quotes an editorial from the 8 August edition of A.C.MacLaren’s magazine The World of Cricket (shortly to collapse under its debts, like most of MacLaren’s business ventures). Armageddon may well be at hand. As one writes the talk is all of War- War-War! Cricket is naturally pushed into the background – naturally and rightly – big a part as the greatest of games plays in our natural life. Yet when the thrilling call – who is on our side? – goes forth, the debt the nation owes to cricket ought not to be forgotten. In spite of the occasional squabbles – Sydney barracking, Bloemfontein incidents, and the like – cricket has perhaps done more than anything else to weld together in links of sympathy the Mother Country and her wide- spread children. Wynne-Thomas mentions that some of the players were recalled to their 11 Up to a point. 12 Benny Green, A History of Cricket , Barrie & Jenkins, 1988 13 Peter Wynne-Thomas, The History of Cricket: from the Weald to the World , Stationery Office, 1997