World War I

World War I is presented not through a battle scene but through its cultural afterlife: the trauma that helped send people walking into an idealized English past. In the account of T. H. White and Gos, the war’s significance lies in how it shaped a generation’s longing for solace, belonging, and national continuity while the prospect of another conflict gathered.

The War’s Cultural Afterlife

In the 1930s, long walks through the countryside were widely popular, including walks at night. White’s journeys with Gos therefore belonged to a broader practice, not merely to the eccentricity of carrying a hawk through rural lanes. Walkers sought what the narrative describes as mystical communion with the land. Their journeys moved imaginatively backwards in time, toward visions of Merrie England or a prehistoric, pre-industrial country that could offer comfort to troubled minds.

The account identifies the trauma of World War I as the movement’s underlying impetus, while also placing it in a decade marked by fear of the next war. The countryside walk thus offered more than recreation: it made an imagined past available as a refuge at a moment when the present seemed unstable.

Pastoralism and National Salvage

The movement’s historical setting included economic disaster, a contracting Empire, and totalitarian threats from abroad. As described through critic Jed Esty’s account, pastoral enthusiasm formed part of a wider project of national cultural salvage. Its adherents celebrated ancient sites, folk traditions, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Druids, and Arthurian legend, imagining that something essential to the nation had been lost and might be recovered, at least in the imagination.

White was caught up in this conservative, antiquarian mood. He walked with Gos through the Buckinghamshire landscape and wrote of ghosts, stars, and the lines people and time had drawn across the land. Beside the fire with his hawk, he brooded on the fate of nations. The war’s afterlife is therefore linked to both intimate rural practice and national reflection: walking could console, but the past it summoned was also a way of thinking about collective identity and danger.

An Imagined Past and a Worked Landscape

The narrative sets the pastoral ideal against a countryside shaped by successive human histories. In Breckland, Neolithic flint-working, rabbit farming, grazing, and the shifting sands of 1688 all complicate the idea of an untouched, timeless England. The landscape is described as a product of work, commerce, disaster, and ecological change, not simply as a surviving national inheritance.

That contrast sharpens the significance of World War I in the account. The pastoral response to its trauma offered an imagined route back to a lost national past, but the land itself bears histories that cannot be reduced to that consoling image. White’s walks with Gos inhabit both registers: the desire for refuge in an older England and the uneasy recognition that landscapes, like nations, are made and remade through time.