In Time of ‘the Breaking of Nations’

Abstract

Although ‘Channel Firing’, written in April 1914, might appear premonitory, Hardy was quite unaware of German aggressive planning for imperial aggrandizement, and still believed that western civilization had reached the age of reason. This streak of evolutionary optimism was extraordinarily bold for one so usually guarded in outlook. When Galsworthy wrote to him in June 1911 on aeroplanes as a military menace, Hardy declared himself an extremist in thinking it ‘an insanity that people in the 20th Century should suppose force to be a moral argument’. The poet of The Sick Battle-God’ and of the ending of The Dynasts had not changed by July 1914, when few realized that the assassination of a prince at Sarajevo could be used by designing militarists to precipitate a war which, as a result of one alliance after another, would quickly involve most European powers and eventually the USA, last more than four years, and cost millions of lives. It was to make Hardy regret that he ended The Dynasts as he did, and have consequences that caused him to regard the future almost with despair. As a result of the invasion of Belgium (a neutral country) and France at the beginning of August, England, quite militarily off-guard, was obliged to declare war.