A Farewell to Arms

Farewell to arms, or leaving the battlefield behind along with the glory of "pro patria mori"(dying for your fatherland), has a long history that can be traced to early modern England, if not earlier. This reflects the essentially peace-loving nature of the British, despite their reputation for being belligerent colonizers. The keynote of desolate melancholy the Anglo-Saxon "Wanderer" strikes is magnified in the jealousy-torn Othello's anguished repudiation of his military "occupation". In the sardonic remarks of Falstaff on the business of war mongering, a frontal attack is waged on militarism as such. Even in Paradise Lost, the revolutionary career of the author notwithstanding, the depiction of the heavenly civil war betrays a discomfort concerning the violent measures which God, as well as Satan, resorts to. From "The Wanderer" to Paradise Lost, English literature reveals its reluctance to praise military glory. This may not perhaps amount to an unbroken tradition of pacifism, but a certain negative attitude to war and arms does emerge in these classics, which represents a characteristic feature of English culture in general.