World War One has been jogged back into the UK’s collective consciousness once more with the Third Battle of Ypres,aka Passchendaele getting its own Royal Command Performance on British TV. Two thoughts; one pretty much universal and the other pretty much local. The local first. There is a tiny village in Suffolk named Bildeston. A… Continue reading At the going down of the sun
Tag: first world war
“Useful present for a soldier”
Napoleon called the British a nation of shopkeepers. As the first Christmas of the 1914-18 war neared, those shopkeepers of Britain were concerned the country might be distracted from being a nation of customers. To remedy it for that year and throughout the war, much marketing effort was put into keeping the home tills ringing.… Continue reading “Useful present for a soldier”
“War is no sport”
Inevitably there will be many more words written over Christmas about that unofficial truce during the first year of the First World War, when, to the dismay of their senior officers, British and German soldiers left their trenches swapped cigarettes and played football on Christmas Eve. It has entered the pantheon of sentimental mythology and… Continue reading “War is no sport”
“The Fiends We Are Fighting”
Now that the handwringing over the millions killed in the First World War has momentarily quietened, here’s a story that in all probability will not get told again, as it does not play the tidy vision of civilised nations fighting like gentlemen. This was behaviour of medieval barbarity — the kind that ISIL would exact,… Continue reading “The Fiends We Are Fighting”
A million men died — and it wasn’t in World War One
A cynic could play cliché bingo in Britain today. “Ultimate sacrifice”, “pals’ battalion”, “over the top”, “the mud”, “No Man’s Land”, “over by Christmas”, “lions led by donkeys”, “four years of trench warfare.” We are treating 100 years’ tick tock like a sentimentalist Victorian treated the deserving poor. It’s like one of those signs as… Continue reading A million men died — and it wasn’t in World War One