Just a few miles from Roger Conant’s birthplace of East Budleigh is the village of Otterton, home to one of Britain’s best known charities for helping the disabled.
Set up
in memory of the late Clare Milne, granddaughter of the writer A.A. Milne, it
seems only too appropriate that the charity includes helping injured armed
forces veterans.
A.A.
Milne himself, seen here, is celebrated today for his books about the teddy
bear Winnie-the-Pooh, along with his children’s poetry. Yet at a serious level
he is known as the pacifist, revolted by the slaughter of WW1.
‘Tell the innocent visitor from another world that two people were killed at Sarajevo, and that the best that Europe could do about it was to kill eleven million more,’ he wrote in his book Peace with Honour, published in 1934.
‘I want everybody to think (as I do) that war is poison, and not (as so
many think) an over-strong, extremely unpleasant medicine,’ he explained.
Written six years later, his book War with Honour seemed to be a retraction of that pacifist thinking, faced with the rise of fascism and its evils.
In one of his letters at this time, he declared himself a ‘practical pacifist’, writing: ‘I believe that war is a lesser evil than Hitlerism, I believe that Hitlerism must be killed before war can be killed.’
No comments:
Post a Comment