The Sound of Distant Drums

Abstract

By 1913, the idea of violent insurrection and war (both personal and national) would be the rhetorical position of almost all advanced thinkers, their imaginative metaphors filled with crusades, apocalyptic violence and images of heroic death. Paradoxically, the old world now had to be swept away in order to save it; blood would bring a cleaner future. Every branch of art and letters reeked of the charnel house: Emmeline Pankhurst in 1913 talked of an endless ‘woman’s war’ and during a period of unprecedented strike action, Lloyd George struck an even more apocalyptic note:

I should not be doing my duty here as Finance Minister if I did not utter this word of solemn warning — that the prospect of an equitable settlement of these dangerous disputes is complicated and darkened, undoubtedly, by the situation in Ireland. Should there be civil strife in that land, and Heaven avert it, in the course of the next few weeks, when that industrial trouble which I have referred to is maturing, the situation will be the gravest with which any Government in this country has had to deal for centuries.