Dead Poets’ Society

IT HAS BEEN claimed that a famous Hollywood mogul once said that the story of the Western Front would never have made a decent film. Plenty of horror, sure — but the tension went on too long.

Oh Tiber! Father Tiber!

For the British — or rather for its architects of grand strategy — this week marked the first time since the retreat from Mons began in August that there lay a chance of victory. If the campaign succeeded, Constantinople would have been captured, and Turkey knocked out of the war. Vital…

Was it so hard, Achilles, to die?

COLLECTIVE NOUNS CANNOT suffice. Sometimes it is the pity of war which overwhelms, and sometimes the stoicism or the loneliness. This week, it is its randomness and folly.

The biter bit

TO PATRONISE THE Italians and Austrians for fighting wars marked out by ineptitude and failure has long been a staple — the stuff of after-dinner jokes. As this week revealed, such light-heartedness ill repays the endeavour of the men of both armies, and ignores completely the scale of terror and…

Unfavourable comparisons with the French

THE NOVELTIES OF war had long been exhausted. All members of the fighting forces, save perhaps the most impressionable ingenu, had absorbed the brutal truths of war. The cold awakening was something which had also disseminated itself widely among civilians.

Whistleblower

EGOISM MAY BE last to die. In a world in which there were not ruffled feathers to be smoothed, Commanders in the Dardanelles might have welcomed a patriotic journalist with the social and professional skills which gave him access to the top brass in London. Tell those stuffed shirts, one might imagine…

Your old Papa

NEVER MIND VICTORY. No way out presented itself — not in any of the great theatres of war. In its absence, the instinct to go for broke proved irresistible.

German naval policy was a grandiose term to characterise its recent desperation and recklessness. Following the recent…

Smile, boys, that’s the smile

BROKEN DOWN into individual lives and single moments, the intensity was unspeakable.

At Cuinchy in France on 1 February, a Lance Corporal in the Irish Guards named Michael O’Leary took part in an action to recapture trenches lost the previous day…

Our Hearts Together

THE BRUTAL AWAKENING had begun. In this week, as perhaps never before, it is possible to see a cool, resigned pragmatism on the part of the British.

This was hardly a novelty among most fighting soldiers, nor indeed among civilians. But for many months, layers of…

The single life

THE RUMOUR MILL was in overdrive this week. The Daily Express claimed to have found conclusive evidence that letters sent home by British prisoners of war were being devilishly altered by so-called ‘censors’ in an effort to sow distrust and despondency.