Looming Shadows

Hetty Jane Owen -
wife of Charles Albert Eldridge

By the time the twentieth century arrived, the old families of Kent  had scattered far and wide. Industrialization was the driving force. And as the British Empire expanded, rural folk whose families had lived in the same areas for generations, were all of a sudden offered new opportunities that spanned almost the entire surface of the planet. Yet, as the great powers of Europe competed relentlessly for prime shares of global resources, they set in motion a train of events that would lead to a terrible implosion, one that would suck in Charles Albert Eldridge and most of his generation into a conflict of a scope and scale never witnessed before. For all the invention, creativity, and brilliance of the nineteenth century Europeans, they had succeeded finally only in bringing ruination down upon themselves. They sleepwalked into catastrophe, their technological and scientific prowess having advanced way beyond their capacity or willingness to use their immense knowledge and skills for the betterment of future generations. Blinded by the twin abstractions of God and Country, and harbouring delusional concepts of higher destinies, the protagonists swept an entire generation of young people into their new paradigm, and then complacently dispatched them to the slaughter-house.

You were lucky indeed if you were able to survive this holocaust, as Charles Albert Eldridge somehow managed to do. It is thanks only to this stroke of good fortune that this story exists at all. One well-directed bullet, and none of us would ever have existed.

As it stands, it is thus a tale of transition from one era to the next, from the harsh but largely predictable lives of earlier generations into the fluid, dynamic, and volatile world of the twentieth century and beyond, with the Great War an ever present shadow looming over events as they unfold.