CONCLUDING REMARKS
War Buries All
W. A. S. Colthurst
War Buries All
W. A. S. Colthurst
It is one of the great questions of British history. What would David Lloyd George have done with his premiership if the Great War had not intervened to dominate all things just over a year after his entry into No 10? However, it is only one of a hundred thousand such questions. Millions such questions. In addition to those whose plans and hopes were interrupted by the war, those whose prospects were changed by success or failure in the fight, those for whom the war changed their understanding of the entire world as they knew it, and, most of all, those who never came back.
The relative calm of politics in the time between the resolution of the 1909-10 Constitutional Crisis and the outbreak of war often lulls even historians of the era into seeing the major issues as solved. The war therefore interrupts a peacefully embedding settlement, upending the world and creating the issues of the post-war world. From diaries, news articles, novels, and other publications though, we can see the Britain of late 1910 and early 1911 was obsessed with the meaning of the Act of Union 1910, and of the future it would lead to.
Colin Ryan, officially leader of the INP after Redmond chose to retire with the 1910 General Election, wrote in his diary that the combination of a Dublin government and a successful Westminster INP could guide the way forward. If they remained kingmakers, and Dublin sufficiently diverged in its legislation and systems, then the argument for Dominion would become stronger and stronger. He himself was planning on standing down by the second Irish Commonwealth Election to run for First Minister. Instead, he would bleed out in Flanders on a cold night in September 1914, in the arms of an Englishman Ryan had come to consider his closest friend, begging him to send on a letter to the Englishwoman he was planning to propose to on his next leave from the front.
In the Liberal Party, Winston Churchill, Minister for the Federation before he was moved by an apoplectic Lloyd George to the Admiralty over his solution to Canadian Accession, was Ryan’s opposite counterpart. In his diaries and personal letters, he spoke of unifying the Federation through legislation that would create taxation and social programmes on the federal level, either through extension of National Insurance or a new scheme of its own. His fortunes would rise and fall more than once during the long years after he entered the Admiralty, hoping to modernise the Royal Navy and use it as a base to argue for the unification of the various services that were the legacy of Responsible Government.
Lady Ellinwood with Lord and Lady Baring, 1911
In the Conservative Party, Alexander Courtenay rose to leader after the resignation of Lord Brunel, who felt he could not possibly be PM from the neutered Lords. Courtenay began his tenure arguing for a rollback of Federation altogether, returning to Responsible Government and Ireland to full integration with the UK. By the end of the war, Courtenay would have turned the Conservatives into the Party of Federation.
In Canada, the First Ministers of the Canadian Commonwealths convened the inaugural Council of Canada. Meant to ensure that Canada could still speak as one voice in Westminster, even if parliamentary representation began to trend towards the Liberals and Conservatives as in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, the Council broke up with little agreement in August 1911. By 1918, the Chairman had become the unofficial Prime Minister of Canada.
Outside the question of Federation as well, debate on the settlements of the previous decade was still very much alive. On women’s rights, Christabel Pankhurst and the Women’s Club found they could influence Prime Ministers, and were very much prepared to build on the victories Lloyd George had given them in his attempt to shore up the women’s vote. Indeed, the reason he was so eager to secure it was that he intended to call an election to gain his own mandate. Only an outright revolt in an early 1911 Cabinet meeting convinced him a third election in as many years would see the Conservatives sweep into power. The Liberals would need to be seen as more than constant reformers to win an election outright; they had to prove they were a steady hand on the tiller, unsteadied only by the government’s reliance on the INP.
Labour too, had finally hit upon what they hoped was a long-term strategy for power under Ramsay MacDonald. It is often said that the war made Labour, but they did not enter it completely lost. They had begun to court the middle class, and the Trade Disputes & Unions Act had forced the trade unions to come to them, flipping the old power dynamic and solving the internal conflict that had consistently pulled Labour ‘too left to win.’ In the 1911 Manchester West by-election, they received their best result since 1891.
Steeplechase at the London Olympics, 1908
Culturally, there were finally signs of an end to the long conservative dominance that defined the era, which plays such a strong role in the public view of pre-Great War Britain. Artists who had come back from European tours were beginning to consider importing continental influences. Artists who had never been outside of England, but were showing early signs of innovative thinking, would have that instinct supercharged by the war. And yes, there are those for whom the war would prove a total break in mindset.
This book has not set out to say that the Great War did not create such breaks. Rather, it has set out to prove that the era before them mattered. Any understanding of the consequences of the Great War will be incomplete if it does not understand the world it was visited upon. To consider the late Victorian world a stagnant, unchanging Eden of innocents is to rob its inhabitants of their agency, agency which they had used before the war to create a vastly different world from that of the mid-Victorian Era
It also robs agency from everyone who fought the war. When it came in October 1911, millions took up arms, and millions more would continue to do so, even as the full brutality and terror of modern warfare had long become apparent. They did so not because the war was some ravenous monster that had come out of nowhere, devouring souls that had no choice, but because the world they had made, or wished to make, meant something to them.
The war itself, the hopes and dreams of its participants, and how they changed or came to be as a result of the war, are not for this work. We will leave you thus with a poem by John Francis-Scott, who enlisted the day of the declaration of war, and made it through almost the entire conflict before losing his life, months before the end, at Bastogne:
When I Come Home
When I come home,
On Whitehall we’ll be marching.
The flags will be unfurled,
The bugles will be sounding,
When I come home,
I will walk down our street,
The residents will cheer,
The cheers, graciously, I’ll meet.
When I come home,
I will wake you with a kiss,
I will tell you of the battle,
And you will tell me what I missed.
When I come home,
I will go up to the heath,
Lay me down beside still waters,
And then, I will sleep.
When I come home,
On Whitehall we’ll be marching.
The flags will be unfurled,
The bugles will be sounding,
When I come home,
I will walk down our street,
The residents will cheer,
The cheers, graciously, I’ll meet.
When I come home,
I will wake you with a kiss,
I will tell you of the battle,
And you will tell me what I missed.
When I come home,
I will go up to the heath,
Lay me down beside still waters,
And then, I will sleep.
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