The war made a slow start for H. G. Wells and Roger Fry. They could only sit and be fearful. Wells’s 1914 novel The World Set Free opens thus: ‘The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power.’¹ The novel goes on to imagine what would happen as a result of the latest discoveries about the internal energy of the atom and to express the terror arising when bombs were dropped from aeroplanes. It was inevitable in such times that Fry’s Omega project struggled to survive.

One of the first bombs of the First World War dropped on Bloomsbury, at the Dolphin pub in Lamb’s Conduit Passage. The clock above the bar stopped at 10.40, and several people were killed. From then until the war’s end, Zeppelin airships brought fear to the streets. Wells escaped London to a house on the Essex coast with his new lover, Rebecca West, only to find that they were living directly under the flight path of the airships on their way to bomb London. He stood on the balcony of their house, looking east and dreaming of the new utopia that many predicted would follow the war.

Lankester claimed that the war knocked him off his perch, for it brought an end to so much that he held dear: regular friendships, individual freedom and scientific contributions to human progress. More practically, it severely reduced the value of his pension and put an end to his weekly column in the Daily Telegraph. It made him feel lonely and depressed, or as he said, ‘It has laid me flat.’² With many of his old friends and colleagues busy with the conflict, it was hard for Lankester to know what to do with his time. Although there was still the Quarterly Journal of the Microscopical Society to edit, only a few manuscripts were being submitted, and he was getting a bit too old to command the full respect of the Society. Consequently, he spent more time with the Committee for the Neglect of Science, which helped get his ‘Easy Chair’ articles published as short books that soon became best-sellers despite the paper shortage. Just one of the many collected editions of his articles was reprinted four times during the war, but he continued to feel angry about losing his job at the museum and he found it difficult to settle into a quieter lifestyle. He must have been afraid of his own excesses.

As the war went on, Lankester became more and more anxious about its course. The air raids made it difficult for him to stay in London. First he stayed with Jane Wells, but the difficulty she was having with her husband made it inappropriate to remain for long, so he moved down to the Dorset coast. At least, there, Ray had a chance to collect specimens of marine animals from the tidal flats and to talk about them with local specialists, but he wasn’t suited to provincial life and easily tired of the locals: ‘Bournemouth is the dullest place in the British Isles. Rank respectability, pasty-faced and expressionless people roll along here in countless numbers and never smile. They are hideous and make one feel nausea.’³ The only project that Lankester completed during the war years was his work with prehistoric flints at Henry Stopes’ archaeological site in Kent, but the flints were inert objects and failed to excite him in the way that living creatures did. He continued to publicise as best he could the big ideas of evolution by natural selection, giving public talks and keeping an interest in the work of the British Museum. It was he who was responsible for keeping it open throughout the war. The prime minister, Herbert Asquith, wanted the museum closed but accepted the argument from Lankester’s lobby to keep it open.

In 1914, Karl Pearson took the new chair of eugenics at UCL that had been endowed by Francis Galton. Until the outbreak of the war Pearson had been preoccupied with the possibility that a higher state of civilisation could come about through a struggle between one race and another, leading to the survival of a physically and mentally fitter group, but he was now too old to continue with these projects and withdrew from political and scientific work to concentrate on writing his biography of Galton, volumes which he funded himself and published in 1914, 1924 and 1930.

***

Many young artists and scientists in Europe rose up to fight with enthusiasm. Henri Gaudier-Brezska left his studio in Great Ormond Street to join the French army, and, within a few weeks, he was writing from the front line for the Christmas number of Blast magazine:

Just as this hill, where the Germans are solidly entrenched, gives me a nasty feeling solely because its gentle slopes are broken up by earth-works, which throw long shadows at sunset … I shall derive my emotion solely from the arrangement of surfaces.⁴

He died in one of those trenches at Neuville-St-Vaast in June 1915.

The war stimulated interest in the practical application of chemistry and physics to methods of warfare. There were fewer obvious applications of biology apart from medicine and nursing. Some doctors and nurses were able to offer psychological help to soldiers, but there was so little knowledge of conditions such as shell shock that there was not much to be done other than give love and care. Often the patients they cured were sent back to fight. The unlucky ones might be shot for cowardice.

Many of the young generation that went to the front did not share the general melancholy. The war was an altogether different matter for one new graduate from Oxford, J. B. S. Haldane, known as Jack, who became a famous Bloomsbury scientist. He had studied maths and classics, was part of an aristocratic family of Scottish baronets, and had been brought up to relish fear. He enjoyed showing off his fearlessness to his uncle who was minister of war. He looked forward to using the real battlefield to try out some of the physiology experiments he had done with his father, J. S. Haldane, a professor of physiology at Oxford. He joined up as an officer with the Black Watch as soon as he graduated and went off to the front in Belgium, taking equipment to monitor respiration and other bodily functions affected by poisonous gas. Before the battle of Aubers Ridge in 1915, Haldane, or Rajah the Bomb, as he was known by his men, wrote to his father: ‘I am enjoying life here very much. I have got a most ripping job as a bomb officer.’⁵ Haldane said he had a good war and raided the German lines at night by throwing grenades into their trenches. The war seemed to make little difference to the way he lived and thought; working with dangerous chemicals was just the kind of thing that he was used to and only the accommodation was different. What most people thought to be uncomfortable and frightening did not seem to bother him. He saw the war as a controlled experiment in which the guinea pigs were men.

Unable to go to the front as a voluntary nurse, Jack Haldane’s sister, Naomi, worked at St Thomas’s Hospital. When she was eleven years old, in 1908, Naomi and her brother began breeding real guinea pigs in their Oxford garden. They spent a lot of thought monitoring the inheritance of particular features as a serious scientific experiment. It turned out to be some of the first work ever done on the genetics of gene linkage and crossing over, and it confirmed the concept of genes as measureable hereditary particles. They were writing up the results when Jack went off to the war and Naomi moved to London. Wanting to continue the experiments, she took some of the guinea pigs with her and kept them in hutches on the river terrace just opposite the Houses of Parliament. It was a very significant breakthrough, completely overshadowed by the war, and was never properly acknowledged.

Also threatened with obscurity were the young men of those years who wanted to fight but were prevented by bad health. One such was Ronald Fisher, the bright young Cambridge mathematician who was friendly with Leonard Darwin. He had left university in the summer of 1914 to work as a statistician in the City of London. Even his good record as a part-time officer in the Territorial Army could not prove to the Recruitment Board that his eyesight was good enough. Reluctantly he settled for teaching physics and mathematics to cadets. He rented a cottage out in the country with his seventeen-year-old wife Eileen, and also helped the war effort by farming. Living in the country gave him the opportunity to fulfil his own political ideals: if you believed strongly in eugenics, and if you and your partner were healthy and intelligent, you had a duty to society to have many children. Propagating might help make up for the high number of officers being killed, the other ranks being less of a concern.

The quiet country evenings allowed the Fishers to concentrate on their work and raise children. There, Eileen read to him at breakfast from The Times, worked as his typist, housekeeper and laboratory technician, cleaning out his experimental animals’ hutches. She had found her hero in Ronald and soon he went out to teach biology at Bradfield College, nearby. Eileen stayed at home with her sister to look after the pig and the cow. In the evenings, they read classical Greek, and Roman and Scandinavian literature, while all three kept fit by playing with a medicine ball every day before breakfast.

Through these war years, Fisher continued to try and solve the problem about heredity that had kept the scientists of Cambridge and London apart. The source of the problem, he recognised, was the difference between evidence for inheritance from single characters of mutating genes and evidence from questionnaires about things like height and intelligence. He wrote an article attempting to reconcile the differences between the Cambridge geneticists and the London statisticians, focusing on the use of new methods to analyse the data.

However, the plan backfired, only to proceed in an unexpected way. Fisher’s article was sent to be refereed by Bateson’s colleague Reginald Punnett in Cambridge and by Karl Pearson in London. The two enemies recommended separately that it should not be published. The angry author bemoaned a suspicion that ‘the rejection of my paper was the only point in the two long lives on which they were ever heartily at one’.⁶ It did get Punnett back on speaking terms with Pearson, and in 1916 Fisher sent his manuscript to be published in another journal. This was run by another group of young men who were focused on targets and who wanted measured results. To them it was sensible that mathematics should be involved in any scientific problem.

***

At the beginning of the war, the Bloomsbury ecologist Arthur Tansley was forty-three years old and worked at the Ministry of Munitions. He tried to keep tabs on the struggle between plants and their changing environment, and he continued to monitor his long-term experiments near the Cambridge fenland. He also went up to the Norfolk coast and continued his surveys of woodlands and heath in other parts of Britain. He was doing something more than making static descriptions of the morphology and compiling lists of species. He was also comparing these data to the physiological, pathological and genetic features of the organisms he studied, integrating as much as he could from all these disciplines.

At times, the struggle of daily life depressed him. Worse, as the war went on, it was becoming more difficult to escape to the countryside. He was traumatised by what had happened to so many young men in the war and he began to have restless nights haunted by vivid dreams. One of these influenced him so deeply that his mind became deeply troubled.

I dreamed that I was in a sub-tropical country, separated from my friends, standing alone in a small shack or shed which was open on one side so that I looked out on a wide-open space surrounded by bush or scrub. In the edge of the bush I could see a number of savages armed with spears and the long pointed shields used by some South African native tribes. They occupied the whole extent of the bush-edge abutting on the open space, but they showed no sign of active hostility. I myself had a loaded rifle, but realized that I was quite unable to escape in face of the number of armed savages who blocked the way.

Then my wife appeared in the open space, dressed entirely in white, and advanced towards me quite unhindered by the savages, of whom she seemed unaware. Before she reached me the dream, which up to then had been singularly clear and vivid, became confused, and though there was some suggestion that I fired the rifle, but with no knowledge of who or what I fired at, I awoke.⁷

This dream encouraged Tansley to read the new medical journals and identify the most important work being done in the emerging field of psychology. On the basis of this research, he wrote about the effects of war on the human mind in New Psychology and Its Relation to Life, and it was published in 1920. Wounded soldiers suffered great psychological distress, a fact that was usually not recognised or understood. There was plenty of public interest in possible explanations for soldiers’ mental trauma, which made Tansley’s book a best-seller and one of the standard introductions to the subject. The book’s success caused Tansley to draw comparisons between psychology and ecology, but he soon became aware that the former was attracting much more attention and praise than the latter. Only a few specialist scientists read his ecological work with as much enthusiasm. Their reactions to this contributed to his turning attention towards psychology. The very implausibility of Tansley’s involvement in psychology made him representative.

Tansley was intrigued by the new theories in psychopathology. By his own account, however, his knowledge owed more to personal experience than study or research. In 1916, aged forty-five, married with three daughters, secure in his profession and having recently attained as good a reputation as any scientist could wish for, he had that haunting dream. It impressed him very deeply and led to a resolve to read Freud’s work, including Freud’s sexual theories. Tansley was looking for his next move.

The conflict in Tansley’s mind between ecology and psychology became more difficult with the news that he had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society for his work in Norfolk. The new confidence this gave led him to follow Lankester’s example of twenty-five years earlier and reform the teaching of biology at Cambridge by introducing experiment and analysis of results, as well as more physiology and cellular work. These reforms did not go down well with traditional observers who saw any process that needed timing, weighing or measuring as threatening. The 1917 ‘encyclical’ in The New Phytologist, signed by Arthur Tansley and Francis Oliver, pleaded for a vitalised and practical curriculum based on plant physiology and ecology alongside morphology rather than subordinate to it.

Tansley’s reforms were denounced by some as ‘Botanical Bolshevism’. His zeal was a significant factor in his not being elected to the Sherardian Chair of Botany at Oxford, for which he was a candidate in the autumn of 1918, a professional setback that he later regretted: ‘I’ve been getting some experience in the “Gentle art of making enemies” lately … Reactionary forces are pretty strong here, and it will be a hard struggle to get anything progressive done. But I am going to have a good try.’⁸ Even with war, the old male establishment did not admit that its values were under threat or that they would have to change. People like Tansley were trying hard to change the academic system, yet their Oxbridge counterparts were resisting.

***

Julian Huxley was a much more relaxed and rounded character than most of his wartime contemporaries. Following in the footsteps of his Ray Lankester, he studied zoology at Oxford and then stayed on to research the migration patterns of water birds. In 1910, when Julian was twenty-three years old, he began a series of experiments monitoring the great crested grebe. His careful observations showed that the bird’s mating behaviour had been shaped by evolution: the male and female, having similar plumage, had evolved to perform an elaborate dance. The resulting publication in 1914 became a classic in the genetics of animal behaviour.

With his pedigree and background, he was soon invited to set up the first biology department at Rice University in Texas. When he arrived in America in 1912, Huxley went to Harvard to meet Sewall Wright, a modest mathematician looking for evolutionary trends in guinea-pig data. Looking together at some baffling evidence, they proposed that certain characteristics might be controlled by genes on the same chromosome. The concept of genes as particles that coded for biological chemicals such as enzymes, in turn leading to structural characters, offered a workable approach to this work on families of experimental guinea pigs. The young Huxley knew, however, that to find evidence for such genetic control would be difficult. Wright, too, was cautious. He delayed an announcement of their ideas until they were more sure.

Huxley’s work in Texas meant that he did not join the war at first. The call to arms was strong, however, and he returned to join the intelligence corps. During his training, he wrote of being pleased to feel physically fit, and then the reality took over: ‘In the spring we were sent to a camp at Upstreet, near Canterbury. I remember riding about the peaceful Kentish lanes, lined with white May bushes and pink-flowering horse-chestnuts, in strange contrast to the distant boom of heavy artillery from across the Channel.’⁹ In general, the effect of the war on the Bloomsbury scientists was to focus minds on work and to seek clearer and more objective targets. The pain of their friends’ deaths was intense, as was their own guilt and loneliness as survivors. Haldane, the toughest of the group before the war, retained his need for action and his eccentric determination. Fisher became even more committed to eugenics, which helped him build even closer links to fascism. They were all hardened by the war and developed strong political aims that were to influence their work for the rest of their lives. The scientists were not alone in being forced to re-examine their place in society as a result of the war. Bloomsbury artists and writers struggled even more to find a social role and a future.

Full of the catastrophe of the war, a group of Bloomsbury artists produced the magazine, Blast. The first edition was published in July 1914, two months before the war began. Blast was edited by Wyndham Lewis, who wanted it to be seen as a reference for English creativity. The magazine celebrated the new age of mechanised printing by including illustrations, wood-cut prints and other kinds of graphic illustration, but the war meant that Blast only lasted for one more edition, a so-called ‘War Number’ published in July 1915. The project had hit its target, the young artists had identified their enemy to be the bureaucrats and their war was also what killed it.

A month after this final publication of Blast, Philip Morrell gave one of the bravest speeches ever made to the Westminster Parliament. In his speech, Morrell set out the case against Britain joining France in war with Germany. Ottoline wrote in her diary, ‘I can never forget seeing him standing alone, with nearly all the House against him, shouting at him to “Sit down!”’ He was one of the few establishment figures courageous enough to speak out publicly against his country’s decision to go to war.

Some young men who could not face the war were welcomed as the Morrells’ guests to enjoy thoughtful weekends at Garsington, their Elizabethan country house near Oxford. Ottoline Morrell’s French teacher, Juliette, described the house:

Six miles from Oxford, on top of a steep hill, stood the little village of Garsington, with its old Manor House. This was an unspoilt Elizabethan stone house with three gables, approached by a court flanked by two immense yew hedges. Bought by Philip and Ottoline Morrell in 1915, the house was woken from its Tudor sleep and became alive, personal and loved. The dark Tudor panelling of the large sitting-room was painted a glowing Chinese red and the narrow grooves gilt; the tall gothic windows were framed with yellow and flame-coloured curtains, the floors covered with gold and salmon-pink Samarakand rugs. Chinese lacquer cabinets created a symmetry of black and gold, and logs burnt in the stone fireplaces.¹⁰

In the same piece, she went on to describe Julian Huxley, soon to become her husband, and his brother Aldous: ‘I was amazed at their difference – Julian ebullient, forthcoming, putting himself out to entertain; Aldous reticent, gentle, often remote, but both with innate gifts of high-powered intellect and imagination.’¹¹

Aldous Huxley was born in 1894, went to Eton, and nearly became blind when he was sixteen. After Oxford, he was invited by Ottoline Morrell to Garsington, and there he met D. H. Lawrence, whom he knew to be a genius, championing individuals from his own working-class background. Science and objectivity were of no importance to Lawrence, and instead he stressed the love between individuals and kindness within families. Julian and Aldous were not so sure: their brother Trevelyan had committed suicide in 1914 after a period of depression. With setbacks like that, and the war, they were pleased to be in a family of peaceful people.

During the war, science was enabling production to be centralised, and this undermined individualism in farming, industry and the army. This fitted the new ideology of socialism where camaraderie was forging groups of like-minded young people, what some thought were comparable to family groups. The writers, Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, however, were wary of each other. Lawrence was concerned about how people felt about themselves and one another; Huxley remained distant from those he knew and from the characters he wrote about.

When Aldous Huxley fought with others, he did so bitterly, and his writing upset some of his subjects. His satirical novel Crome Yellow, published in 1921, shared some of the dilemmas posed by the clashes of science, social class and war: ‘Simultaneously the same person is a mass of atoms, a mind, an object with a shape that can be painted, a cog in the economic machine, a voter, a lover.’¹² Lawrence was irritated by this kind of endless speculation, arguing that it served no purpose and raised false anxiety. It was the same argument he told in his earlier 1913 book, Sons and Lovers: ‘Science makes sex something to be serious about’ though ‘amour is more fun.’¹³

Aldous clearly enjoyed taking swipes at those who clung to Victorian habits of mind. His next book, Antic Hay, published in 1923, savaged many of the people he had known at Garsington and other members of the chattering classes. He was one of the first of the Bloomsbury group to notice that the new scientists were looking to the intelligentsia for recognition, preparing to be accepted by them as essential driving forces in the new world. Wells was doing the same thing, but he was more of an outsider and appeared to be thick-skinned enough not to care what people thought of him. Huxley was more sensitive and looked towards the new civilisation in California for escape from the society he criticised.

Aldous did not get on with H. G. Wells. In his 1915 novel Boon, Wells made a cheeky reference to the Garsington group, especially those who were Cambridge Apostles. He said their philosopher-leader, George Moore, had ‘played uncle to so many movements and had been so uniformly disappointed with his nephews’.¹⁴ This was the most powerful group at Garsington: bright, eager and creative intellects not believing in war but used to protection from a hard life. Most of those who visited Garsington were strongly committed to pacifism, especially Bertrand Russell, James Strachey and his brother Lytton. One day all three met and fell into one another’s arms as co-workers in a great cause. With his confidence wounded, Russell said then that he thought all philosophers were failures. At least he was ready to admit it. More than that, Russell said his career was a threefold failure: he abandoned religion and objective ethical knowledge, he accepted that mathematical knowledge was tautological, and his defence of scientific knowledge was limited.

While at Garsington, Russell decided to leave mathematics. He wanted to be more active in promoting his views about pacifism and how it involved eugenics. Being a conscientious objector convinced him that humanity was on the road to the socialist utopia. Some compared this to the belligerence of those Bloomsbury artists known as the Vorticists, suggesting that its popularity would encourage an exodus of other young men from science. It was for more materialist reasons that Lytton Strachey had left his early interest in science for history and Fry had left botany for art. Meanwhile, H. G. Wells left zoology for failing his exams and Aldous Huxley left biology with bad eyesight.

There was some relief for the few who remained in the scientific world, especially now that its scope had widened to include psychology. The war was to inflict sufficient damage on people’s minds to open new treatments for those fortunate enough to have access to the limited psychological services on offer. From the Bloomsbury group, Adrian Stephen trained to be a psychiatrist, James Strachey a psychoanalyst, and Arthur Tansley hovered between applied psychology and plant ecology.

Julian and Aldous Huxley appeared to be well-rounded people like their grandfather, one becoming a successful scientist in his own right and the other a successful writer. They were an important example of the concept of ‘the two cultures’ during the 1910s and 1920s. Although they had reacted differently to the death of their middle brother, Trevelyan, they were both interested to know how those strong reactions could be explained. They knew how important their grandfather had been as a scientist and how he dealt with his own periods of depression. Many of the characters in Aldous’s novels were scientists who discussed how that made them feel. Similarly, Julian’s holistic approach to evolutionary biology was as much a masterful stroke of the artist’s brush as it was an interpretation from all the scientific evidence.

The war forced many people to think about what it meant to be human. In this conception, art and science worked together and could be understood as part of a whole system. James Strachey’s best friend and fellow Apostle, Rupert Brooke, talked of a dialectic between the real and the ideal. Objectively, the Haldanes researched theories about genes, Tansley tested theories about ecosystems, and Julian Huxley looked for a grand law encompassing all of these pieces of information into one modern synthesis. Ray Lankester had done the same with his grand idea of degeneration, and, before that, Charles Darwin had given the idea of a single tree of life. Virginia Woolf said it was truth that war left behind in an individual, after feeling and thought were taken away. Like war, evolution was a game to these scientists and artists alike, using particular rules that kept changing and developing and in which the winner was the relentless opportunist.