Dimming of the Day

6 supply of gunpowder. Had it not been for the providential introduction of the new-fangled Haber-Bosch chemical process, the German army might have collapsed as early as 1916. This kind of (chronological) backward thinking fuelled the idea that it ‘would all be over by Christmas’ or everyone would, as Kaiser Wilhem put it, “be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” Here again there were shades of opinion, with some experts, including Kitchener himself, drawing perhaps on his experience of more spasmodic and attritional fighting against the Boers, believing that any new war might be prolonged. Others, such as H.G.Wells, were pessimistic about the scale of any coming warfare, although his 1908 dystopia War in the Air was basically thirty years too soon. What no single person anticipated was the type of war and the losses that would ensue. However, from a public viewpoint, all governments were keen to urge the brevity of war, should it come, as a booster for popular morale. The notion of a war that would be fought overseas as a pitched battle for a few months was, by and large, the expectation that one must understand in respect of the fag-end of the 1914 cricket season. This is the first factor in such an analysis. The second component for those engaged in such a scrutiny is a further if slightly different kind of uncertainty between competing portraits of British life at that crucial time. The conventional picture is of an Edwardian idyll of lazy ease and rich grandeur, of enchanted sunlit days at country houses with gilded youth dispatching exquisite cover-drives across razored greenswards – this paradise to be irrevocably disturbed by the horror of war. That is not an idle depiction but there was another dimension to it, probably best summarised by George Dangerfield in his elegiac classic, The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935). Therein he captures another view of England in those months before the First World War, one of a state threatened by internal peril. He picks three strands of the increasing militancy of the Suffragette movement, the imminent risk of civil war in Ulster and the impending threat of a crippling general strike by a well- organised alliance of trades unions angered by the government apathy over poor living conditions. He and other historians see the trio loosely linked, as did some contemporaries, as portents of social revolution. In fact some historians, notably Arno Mayer in, among other writings, his Persistence of the Old Regime (1971), argue that, in Britain as elsewhere, the war took the spotlight away from domestic strife, that ancient and modern trick of politicians anxious to dodge troubles at home with glories abroad. Whether by trick or by treat, the outbreak of war in 1914 certainly salvaged Britain from what some believe was its nearest modern approach to internal commotion of a tall order. What is important to realise, in looking how cricketers and other law-abiding citizens were disporting themselves during the cricket season of 1914, was that, for many, these more localised perils were much more compelling than an incident in faraway Sarajevo. The possibility of war, then, was not the only, perhaps not the most pressing, question in most minds. Donald Read in England 1868-1914 Foreword