Standing firm is the price of civilisation. Are we still ready to pay it?

Reading Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, as I have recently, you cannot help but be struck by what a perfectly idyllic place rural England must have been (at least for a young man of independent means) in the run-up to the first world war. Sassoon wrote it, of course, in middle age after he’d served his time in the trenches. But none of his wartime experiences are allowed to colour the innocent tone of his fictionalised memoir. As far as his narrator George Sherston is concerned, the bliss is going to last for ever.

Because the first world war is now very familiar history, the mistake I think we’re inclined to make with the benefit of hindsight is to assume that, for those who took part in it, it was all a fait accompli. That is, we imagine somehow that people were different back then — that they were tougher, less sentimental, more bovine and accepting of their lot. We picture them shrugging their shoulders as the call-up papers landed on the doorstep, casting a wistful glance at the wives and children they might now not see into old age and going: ‘Ah well. There was I with my life all nicely planned out. But now it seems old Kaiser Bill’s had other ideas.’

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It wasn’t quite like that, though, I reckon. While people in the Edwardian era had a stiffer attitude to duty, a stronger faith in God and lower expectations about their right to happiness, they were prey to just the same human feelings as we are. Siegfried Sassoon, for example, would I am sure have much preferred it had he been able to title the sequel to his semi-fictionalised fox-hunting autobiography Memoirs of a Portly Country Squire Quite Unencumbered by Hideous Nightmares of the Horror of the Trenches.