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…

Pantomime dame

SOMETIMES WAR WAS pantomime. Played for high stakes, without doubt, but still Ruritanian and ridiculous. Everyone knew the war was fought with rifles, bayonets and artillery, waged in Flanders and Galicia and across the Hellespont. But at every turn, virtually, the diplomats still sought to impose…

Invoking the deity

THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY of the war elicited a predictable melange of high-mindedness, maudlin sentiment and guff. Germany and Russia had gone to war on 1 August 1914 and the Kaiser’s manifesto to his people to mark this occasion was redolent of his legendary inability to convince all but his most…

Never out of my thoughts

COUCHED IN COOL, classical prose, a letter on 30 June to the American Ambassador in Turkey from his colleague, the Consul at Harput in Eastern Turkey, makes for sobering reading:

Sir: I have the honor to report to the Embassy about one of the severest measures…