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…

The tears of things

NOTHING OUT OF the ordinary, according to the archives. No great offensives and certainly no breakthroughs, east or west. But war made a mockery of any notion of ordinariness. Everything was abnormal and everywhere the exceptional and the unnatural held sway. Yet none of it could be subsumed…

A very good bloke indeed

WHAT HAVE we done? There is no evidence that any of the architects of war demanded of themselves, during the week, an answer to that question. For all armies and peoples, it was a time of attrition, of nothing better than hard-won minor advances which proved invariably short-lived…

Dear God: the flies

THE NEW COALITION was only days old, but still the carping continued.

To some ears, the squabbling may have seemed a tiresome irrelevance, parish plimp politics of the worst sort — diverting attention while men died in their hundreds and thousands. To others, the two…