By Kerry Bolton
Henry Williamson was of the First World War generation from whose experiences emerged a new but eternal world-view. Williamson, like Knut Hamsun in Norway, saw mans’ place in Nature as the ultimate source of ones being, an idealisation of nature as a reaction against the machine and the bank. The hope was of a new Springtime for the West, in Spenglerian terms: the rural against the urban, the rootedness of the soil and of working the land, against the nebulous city masses. It was what Spengler had called the final battle in Civilisation of Blood Against Money.
Williamson’s outlook was shaped by both his experiences in the trenches and by his attachment to nature. This unsurprisingly led him to an appreciation of National Socialism, with its concept of Blood and Soil, and to the Fascism of Sir Oswald Mosley.