Dimming of the Day

5 Foreword Eric Midwinter SURREY DOING BADLY German Army Lands in England This was the text of a news vendor’s placard in P.G.Wodehouse’s satire The Swoop! Or how Clarence saved England: a Tale of the Great Invasion , published in 1909. Cricket and warfare are granted their true priorities in this spoof of the many pre-1914 tales of German invasion, most notable of them Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands (1903). The contrast – some expecting war, some ridiculing the very notion – serves to demonstrate the ambiguities that beset the historian when looking at the opening phase of that dreadful conflict, the First World War. This ambivalence made itself manifest in several ways, all of which could marginally have affected the reactions of cricketers and cricket clubs to the crisis. The counterpoint over the likelihood of war – and, indeed, whether the traditional foe of France might be the adversary – must be judged against the general background of a nation that had not experienced a major war since the long Revolutionary and Napoleonic struggles that had ended in 1815 with the Battle of Waterloo. And there had been no large-scale pitched battle on British soil since the Battle of Culloden in 1746. In the hundred years since the defeat of Napoleon, Britain had been involved in several often colonial conflicts, with the Crimean War of 1854/56 the nearest to home. With overwhelming naval authority – Britain had, in 1914, 27 large warships to Germany’s 17 and France’s ten – war was widely regarded as an away rather than as a home fixture. Moreover, because all the combatants looked on past warfare as the model, the set- piece battle was still a la mode . It is informative that when the coming war degenerated into a trench-based bloodbath, Kitchener complained that it wasn’t war, rather like an old-fashioned buff moaning that the T20 version isn’t cricket. Coloured clothing, another cricketing issue, touches on this subject: most 1914 armies were flamboyantly uniformed as for quick-fire martial array, one exception being the British dressed in the khaki they had turned to for action in South Africa. Actually, the cricket time-span analogy was reversed, as the war turned out to be more a five-day Test than a one-day bash – and that is another factor. Very recent wars had been of relatively brief duration. The Franco- Prussian War of 1870/71 had been ten months: the First Boer War of 1880/81 had been less than five months; the Spanish-American War of 1898 had been less than five months, with only the Second Boer War of 1899/1902 at two years and seven months enduring substantially. Germany, for example, entered the First World War with only a six-month