The Appetite of Tyranny

In his book on William Blake, Chesterton says, “We all wake up on a battlefield.” In 1915, when he emerged from his coma-like state after his physical collapse several months earlier, Chesterton, in effect, did wake up on a battlefield. England was in the midst of the Great War with Germany. Though the English army had no use for Chesterton as a soldier, his pen was immediately enlisted to help the war effort. His first books after his recovery were three short works that are essentially war pamphlets, but with their combination of history, philosophy, religion, and even literary criticism, they are uniquely Chesterton.