Essays in War-Time | Page 2

the non-combatants who
suffer most, the people build cities and the folly of their rulers destroys
them, the most righteous, the most victorious war brings more evil than
good, and even when a real issue is in dispute, it could better have been
settled by arbitration. The moral contagion of a war, moreover, lasts
long after the war is over, and Erasmus proceeds to express himself
freely on the crimes of fighters and fighting.
Erasmus was a cosmopolitan scholar who habitually dwelt in the world
of the spirit and in no wise expressed the general feelings either of his
own time or ours. It is interesting to turn to a very ordinary, it may be
typical, Englishman who lived a century later, again in a period of war
and also of quite ordinary and but moderately glorious war. John Rous,
a Cambridge graduate of old Suffolk family, was in 1623 appointed
incumbent of Santon Downham, then called a town, though now it has
dwindled away almost to nothing. Here, or rather at Weeting or at
Brandon where he lived, Rous began two years later, on the accession
of Charles I, a private diary which was printed by the Camden Society
sixty years ago, and has probably remained unread ever since, unless,
as in the present case, by some person of antiquarian tastes interested in
this remote corner of East Anglia. But to-day one detects a new streak
of interest in this ancient series of miscellaneous entries where we find
that war brought to the front the very same problems which confront us
to-day.
Santon Downham lies in a remote and desolate and salubrious region,

not without its attractions to-day, nor, for all its isolation, devoid of
ancient and modern associations. For here in Weeting parish we have
the great prehistoric centre of the flint implement industry, still
lingering on at Brandon after untold ages, a shrine of the archaeologist.
And here also, or at all events near by, at Lackenheath, doubtless a
shrine also for all men in khaki, the villager proudly points out the
unpretentious little house which is the ancestral home of the Kitcheners,
who lie in orderly rank in the churchyard beside the old church notable
for its rarely quaint mediaeval carvings.
Rous was an ordinary respectable type of country parson, a solid
Englishman, cautious and temperate in his opinions, even in the privacy
of his diary, something of a country gentleman as well as a scholar, and
interested in everything that went on, in the season's crops, in the rising
price of produce, in the execution of a youth for burglary or the burning
of a woman for murdering her husband. He frequently refers to the
outbreak of plague in various parts of the country, and notes, for
instance, that "Cambridge is wondrously reformed since the plague
there; scholars frequent not the streets and taverns as before; but," he
adds later on better information, "do worse." And at the same time he is
full of interest in the small incidents of Nature around him, and notes,
for instance, how a crow had built a nest and laid an egg in the poke of
the topsail of the windmill.
But Rous's Diary is not concerned only with matters of local interest.
All the rumours of the world reached the Vicar of Downham and were
by him faithfully set down from day to day. Europe was seething with
war; these were the days of that famous Thirty Years' War of which we
have so often heard of late, and from time to time England was joining
in the general disturbance, whether in France, Spain, or the Netherlands.
As usual the English attack was mostly from the basis of the Fleet, and
never before, Rous notes, had England possessed so great and powerful
a fleet. Soon after the Diary begins the English Expedition to Rochelle
took place, and a version of its history is here embodied. Rous was kept
in touch with the outside world not only by the proclamations
constantly set up at Thetford on the corner post of the Bell Inn--still the
centre of that ancient town--but by as numerous and as varied a crop of

reports as we find floating among us to-day, often indeed of very
similar character. The vicar sets them down, not committing himself to
belief but with a patient confidence that "time may tell us what we may
safely think." In the meanwhile measures with which we are familiar
to-day were actively in progress: recruits or "voluntaries" were being
"gathered up by the drum," many soldiers, mostly Irish, were billeted,
sometimes not without friction, all over East Anglia, the coasts were
being fortified, the price of corn was rising, and even the problem of
international exchange is discussed with precise data by Rous.
On