Peace to End Peace

Abstract

Thus Conan Doyle ended his six-volume history of the Western Front. His fine prose already belonged to another age. He was an ‘old man’, a Victorian, believing in duty, work, the educative value of suffering, the reality of evil, and the ultimate goodness of the Creator. God was not dead for him. He viewed with satisfaction the destruction of German power; now ‘the Frenchman may look east without a tremor, and the mists of the North Sea can cloud no menace for our islands’. Doyle feared, though, that the Peace Treaty was ‘hasty and ill-considered’ and that further conflict could yet emerge from competing nationalisms and the strange new phenomenon of Bolshevism. The Allies would have to stand firm.