first world war Archives

Tuesday

August 30, 2022

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at 100

In the United States a century ago, a single poet dominated the literary sphere. He was not only the recipient of the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Poetry — which he would win twice more during the course of an internationally distinguished career — but would be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature on four separate occasions. He was beloved by presidents, described by one admirer as “more artful than Hardy and more coy than Frost” and found himself one of the bestselling writers in America. His reputation seemed assured forever.

Friday

November 23, 2018

James Pinkerton

One hundred years after ‘A Nation Fit for Heroes’

The centennial of the armistice ending World War One has received much attention, and deservedly so, and yet there’s another centennial, closely related, that also deserves to be remembered. On November 23, 1918, Prime Minister David Lloyd George, campaigning in Wolverhampton, declared, ‘What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.’ Lloyd George thus put forth a vision of post-war solidarity, in keeping with the sacrifices made in wartime. National solidarity was made inevitable by mass-mobilization. That is, since the success of the levée en masse in revolutionary France, nations had come to understand that they needed the whole of their population motivated enough — and robust enough — to support the fight.

Monday

November 12, 2018

John R. Schindler

Trump had an opportunity to redefine American foreign policy. He blew it

Donald J. Trump is home from his whirlwind weekend trip to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the First World War’s end. Even by The Donald’s formidable china-breaking standards, this was a doozy which will be discussed with opprobrium by the Transatlantic smart set for some time. President Trump seemed to go out of his way to upset his French counterpart and host Emmanuel Macron, who’s hit a political rough patch and needed some brotherly love. That bromance is dead and buried, however, and Trump fired off a mocking tweet at Macron as he boarded Air Force One for Paris that denounced the French president’s backing of a European army as ‘very insulting.

Sunday

November 11, 2018

Glenn Skwerer

Hitler, a hundred years ago

When World War One ended at 11 in the morning of November 11, 1918, Winston Churchill was in his ministerial office near Trafalgar Square. At the first stroke of the chime, ‘from all sides men and women came scurrying into the street’ as the bells of London pealed. ‘Around me, in our very headquarters, disorder had broken out – doors banged; feet clattered down corridors; everyone rose from the desk; all bounds were broken. The tumult grew, it grew like a gale, but from all sides simultaneously. The street was now a seething mass of humanity. Flags appeared as if by magic, streams of men and women flowed from the embankment. They mingled with torrents pouring down the Strand.