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  • ‘A Student in Arms’: Donald Hankey and Edwardian Society at Warby Ross Davies
  • Pieter Dhondt
D avies, Ross – ‘A Student in Arms’: Donald Hankey and Edwardian Society at War. Ashgate studies in First World War history. Surrey: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. 254.

From the first chapter, the richness and uniqueness of the source material for this biography of a ‘lost’ soldier-writer is striking. Through a large collection of letters to and from Hankey, diaries, drafts of articles and press cuttings, assembled by the author from different family members, Davies depicts an exceptionally rich and in-depth portrait of Donald Hankey (1884-1916). Instead of limiting the story to the bare facts, the private sources offer an insight into the thoughts and feelings of the subject, for instance, how his mother’s practical Christianity made a profound impression upon her youngest son or how Hankey as a young guy has been vacillating between engaging himself in the service of the army or the church. Pushed by his father, after school at Rugby he started at the prestigious Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, but a serious illness contracted on the subtropical fortified fuelling station of Mauritius brought him back to England and put an end to his military career, at least temporarily. During the following year, 1907, he passed the entrance examination at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in order to become a parson.

However, even though Oxford marked a fresh start, quickly it became clear that Hankey preferred a life of action and service, rather than a theoretical study of theology. In his perception, the Church of England was losing its authority mainly because of the increasing gap between the priests and their flock. In consequence, [End Page 323]he searched for Christ in the slums and engaged himself in the Oxford and Bermondsey Mission for working boys and men. About these experiences, Hankey wrote the never completed ‘Bermondsey novel’. Following the same conviction, in 1912 he sailed steerage to his mother’s country Australia “to live the life of the poor and experience the hard labour of the working men” (p. 89). Afterwards he reflected upon his Australian adventure in a series of anonymously published newspaper articles. His criticism on the Edwardian class society and more particularly on the position of the church resulted then in his first book publication, The Lord of All Good Life, subtitled ‘a study of the greatness of Jesus and the weakness of his Church’ (1914).

In the book, Hankey also supported the idea of a just war. Jesus has taught us that some things are worth dying for, he claimed. So when in August 1914 war was declared with Germany, Hankey immediately volunteered for the ‘Kitchener’s Army’, again enabling him to mix up with working men. After his first period of active service at the front, in the trenches close to Ypres in June-July 1915, he started writing the essays (from January 1916 on a weekly basis) which would eventually be collected and published in two volumes, with his pen-name as its title: A Student in Arms. Hankey’s reflections helped people to make sense of and so to fight or endure the Great War, by seeking “to set in a biblical perspective violence that otherwise would be meaningless or unimaginable” (p. 139), and by studying the (melting-pot) trench psychology or the figure of ‘The Beloved Captain’.

Very convincingly Davies explains the remarkable contrast between on the one hand the enormous popularity of (mainly the first series of) A Student in Arms, especially after Hankey’s death on the Somme in October 1916, and on the other hand how the books as well as its author gradually fell into oblivion from the interwar period. One of Hankey’s main literary qualities was his power of getting inside men’s minds. He was a soldier among the other soldiers. In March 1917, the government also contributed its mite by circulating 40,000 copies of the first volume in the US because according to the British propaganda officials “no book would show better the spirit in which we are waging the war, and so convince Americans that this is not...

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