The twentieth was England’s militarist century. The wars of 1914 and 1939 were unique circumstances in the political and constitutional history of the British Isles: both of them achieved the singular combination of diminishing national expectations while raising national self-satisfaction; both wars rebounded on the notions and practice of conservatism. ‘An Englishman (or an American or a Frenchman or a Russian) who is thirty-five years of age to-day has spent nearly a third of his life at war’, wrote Lord Coleraine, son of Bonar Law, in 1950.

Civilian institutions were, from the 1920s until the 1980s, pervaded by soldierly influences. Parliament, the judiciary, the universities and other bodies were increasingly run by men (never by women) who had undergone military training and combat experience.

This chapter examines twentieth-century militarism through the career and writings of the historian Cyril Falls. We are all of us, he said, the heirs of many wars. The multiplicity of forms of warfare, the diversity of its impact upon societies and nations, the ubiquity of the phenomenon in every century, and the contiguity of Falls’s ideas on his subject to the notions and practice of conservatism, mean that his significance can best be seen by placing him in a broader context – both within society and within All Souls – than is needed in other essays in this book.

The peace-time rationing of 1945–54 has prompted some historians to call those ten years the Age of Austerity. The next dozen years, in which there was an exiguous amount of financial deregulation and a consumer boom, have been called the Age of Affluence. Both phases should rather be described as the Age of Uniformity. The national temper, parliamentary life, public affairs, and private manners were all stamped with a conscript homogeneity as never before or since. Fathers and uncles, schoolmasters, employers were all kindred in England’s militarist century. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that one of the privileges of being a British citizen is that the nation has had civilian rulers since the mid-seventeenth century, and a parliament free of militarist pressure. Yet militarist modernity provided a keynote for 70 years of the twentieth century.