Reconsidering Peace and Patriotism during the First World War by Justin Quinn Olmstead

Author:Justin Quinn Olmstead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

‘With Every Nerve in My Body I Stand for Peace’: Epilogue on the War

The trajectory of thinking about peace and social interaction became even more urgent for Harrison in her essay ‘War and the Reaction’, published as ‘Epilogue on the War: Peace with Patriotism’, and marked the fact that Harrison never revised her absolute pacifist position. With the outbreak of war during the summer of 1914, she was shocked and devastated by the speed with which her colleagues and her country embraced the war. She refuted and challenged Gilbert Murray’s assumption that ‘war has its good side’73 and was astounded that her friends—male, intellectual elites—were now focused on war. Rupert Brooke described many of Harrison’s colleagues, who had now turned soldiers: ‘it’s astonishing to see how the intellectuals have taken on new jobs […] Cornford is no longer the best Greek scholar in Cambridge, he is now Sergeant Instructor of Musketry […] Gilbert Murray and Walter Raleigh rise at 6 a.m. every day to line hedgerows in the dark and “advance in rushes” across the Oxford meadows.’74 In ‘Epilogue’, Harrison grapples with how it came to pass that ‘the don has turned soldier, and proudly, if a little shamefacedly, parades the uniform which, ten years ago, would have been to him anathema’.75

She wrote ‘Epilogue’ out of her disbelief and ‘sheer red-hot rage’ at the absurdity and monumental stupidity of war. Murray, who wrote ‘Herd Instinct and War’, thought Harrison’s essay was ‘foolishness’.76 Harrison, who agreed with Murray on the boredom and uselessness of the herd, preferred the politics outlined instead in Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson’s ‘The War and the Way Out’. In preparing her essay, she wrote of Dickinson’s essay: It seems to me so right. Just what you want said. I think he is one of the sanest and closest thinkers, and a peace lover wants a sane leader to educate the great body of peace opinion or the war-fever will grow and grow.77

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