England is both a battlefield and a measure of the First Men’s uncertain capacity for solidarity. In the book’s history, it moves from a war whose aftermath briefly encourages cooperation with France to a later catastrophe in which London is devastated and England ceases to have a population. Its changing condition makes the broader argument tangible: international unity can emerge from disaster, but may remain fragile when fear and national allegiance return.

England in the First European Conflict

The European War, also called the War to End War, is presented as the first and least destructive of a series of world conflicts. Its causes include a real difference in temperament between France and Germany, rivalry involving Germany and England, and brutal gestures by the German government and military command. These pressures divide the world into opposing camps even though the book finds no clear difference of principle between them. Each side believes itself to defend civilization; both also commit acts of brutality and acts of exceptional courage or generosity.

As the war continues, the warring peoples develop a passionate desire for peace and a united world. This impulse is significant in England’s history because it suggests a loyalty wider than tribal affiliation, but it lacks firm direction and the courage of settled conviction. The peace that follows is therefore neither a secure reconciliation nor a simple return to the old order. It embodies both an emerging vision of shared humanity and the persistence of national divisions.

London’s Peace Message and the Anglo-French War

During a later crisis between England and France, an incident inflames suspicions that had survived efforts at disarmament. England’s old stereotypes of France and France’s distrust of England harden into mutual hostility. German attempts at mediation fail, as do threats from the League of Nations. Rumours that England is secretly building giant aircraft further sharpen the atmosphere, although the actual outbreak of war takes England by surprise.

Enemy aircraft arrive over London while newspapers are reporting that war has been declared. Within hours, a third of the city lies in ruins and half its population has been poisoned. A bomb near the British Museum destroys much of Bloomsbury, including historical and cultural remains as well as the city’s intellectual life. In the midst of the bombardment, the Cabinet meets in a cellar in Downing Street. An idealistic minister proposes that England send France a message renouncing further hostilities. His appeal insists that the two peoples are not merely English and French but civilized beings, and presents their distinct cultures as mutually sustaining rather than mutually exclusive.

The proposed message is a decisive gesture, but it does not stop the war. After an explosion in London, an enemy aircraft crashes and is destroyed. Although the incident could have been recognized as an accident involving a plane in distress, the public encounters it amid suffering and the death of a princess who functions as a potent emblem of tribal loyalty. The news is distorted into a deliberate atrocity. England’s mood turns from the possibility of reconciliation to an eruption of hatred, and its air force is ordered to Paris.

France is then devastated in turn. Its party of peace has taken power when the first bombs fall on Paris, but the English air force soon establishes overwhelming control of the air. England, however, is too crippled to exploit its advantage. Famine, disorder, looting, and the spread of disease disintegrate both countries and bring the fighting to a halt. The League of Nations temporarily takes over the management of each country, and the former enemies cooperate in reconstructing one another as well as themselves. Unlike the settlement after the European War, this period brings no reparations or new security alliances: national patriotism briefly recedes under the pressure of shared ruin.

A Reversal That Alters Europe

The book singles out the failed peace gesture and the accident that followed it as a small event with immense consequences. Had the aircraft not crashed in London after the message was sent, England and France might have avoided devastation. The internationalist impulse might then have gained enough confidence to become a durable policy, rather than appearing only in the terrified reaction to successive wars. In that counterfactual, the First Dark Age might never have occurred.

The actual outcome is more ambiguous. The destruction of the two countries compels cooperation, while the League of Nations’ investigation into the war’s origins exposes both sides to the consequences of their conduct. These conditions help produce a changed European mood, but the book does not present suffering as a guarantee of lasting peace. Instead, England’s alternating role—as the country that proposes brotherhood and the country swept into retaliatory war—shows how readily collective fear can overwhelm a political choice for restraint.

England in the Later Wars

In the conflict between the United States and Europe, England belongs to a wider European order already strained by dependence on finance from the United States. European resentment grows partly from the presence of American business interests in everyday life, while Germany remains comparatively less subject to that economic influence. After a chain of incidents involving a murder in South Italy, hostile press responses, violence in Rome, and the attempted occupation of Italy, war begins before it is formally declared. The eventual destruction of Europe leaves its cultural inheritance scattered among the Americans, Chinese, Indians, and other peoples.

The war also breaks up the English empire. Canada sides with the United States; South Africa and India declare neutrality; and Australia becomes neutral amid divided loyalties. The people of New Zealand resist for a year in the mountains and remain loyal, at least symbolically, to England and one aspect of European identity. These differing responses show that England’s former imperial connections do not produce a unified front: allegiance is divided by geography, political circumstance, and competing loyalties.

The Ruined Island

During the later war between East and West, England is devastated repeatedly after an American air base is established in Ireland. By the time the conflict has continued for years, England has neither schools nor a population. Aircraft passing over what was once London can still make out Oxford Street and the Strand, but only as lines among the green and grey ruins. Nature, once confined in part to protected scenic areas, has spread across the island.

This final image transforms England from an active political participant into an uninhabited landscape bearing faint marks of its former urban life. The recognizable street lines persist, but the institutions and people that gave them meaning are gone. Across the sequence of wars, England’s history thus contracts from a proposed act of international brotherhood to the remnants of a city seen from above—a material record of how fragile civilization proves when its impulses toward cooperation repeatedly yield to conflict.