Published by Times Books
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First edition 2018
© This compilation Times Newspapers Ltd 2018
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eBook Edition © November 2018
ISBN 9780008318536
Version: 2018-11-19
CONTENTS
In memory of the dead of the Great War, among them
John Anstruther (1888-1914), Reggie Wyndham (1876-1914)
and Ian Chrystal (1888-1917).
“The correspondence column of The Times may be regarded as the Forum of our modern world,” wrote the evangelist Frederick Meyer to the newspaper in 1915, “in which the individual may deliver his soul.”
The paper has published letters since its establishment in 1785, but in the nineteenth century these had often been lengthy political tracts rather than brief observations on current events. As Meyer noted, however, by the time what became known as the Great War began, the Letters Page had started to assume a form we would recognise today.
This was partly because they were, for the first time, at least on occasion, being grouped together rather than distributed throughout the paper. This greater focus arguably increased their impact, cementing in turn the page’s status as Meyer’s contemporary Roman forum – a meeting place-cum-soap box, albeit principally for the ruling class.
These developments were to be accelerated by the war that dominated everyone’s thoughts between 1914 and 1918. The letters in this selection track its progress, albeit with the proviso that strict government censorship meant that the public was unaware for much of the conflict about the true state of events, and the conflict’s real horrors.
Even so, these letters offer the most direct of routes back into the mentality of a society that was on the cusp of changing forever. And, besides delivering their soul and having their say, in a perhaps surprising way correspondents bare it, too. Set among letters from familiar names – David Lloyd George on the danger of drink, Edith Cavell on nursing before she was executed by the Germans – and ones from the pseudonyms then permitted, there are those from grieving parents still (within the conventions of the day) raw from their loss.
Many of the letters speak for themselves but it may be of help to have an outline of their increasingly distant context. The war did not come as a surprise. Conflict between the great European powers had been long feared, and expected, particularly given Germany’s desire in the preceding decades to challenge Britain’s naval, and hence imperial, supremacy.
Nonetheless, it was with some reluctance that the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, whose party had strong pacifist traditions, committed his Liberal government to war at the start of August 1914. This was technically in response to Germany’s violation of Belgium’s neutrality in entering its territory to get around France’s defences; but in reality, it was the inevitable outcome of a complex system of international alliances and dynastic ambitions.
The assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne at Sarajevo by Serbian-backed terrorists had given the Austrians a pretext to declare war on Serbia, egged on by their German cousins under Kaiser Wilhelm II. This in turn brought to the fray Russia, ruled by Tsar Nicholas II, as Serbia’s pan-Slavic protector. Germany, which had built up a huge army and navy, had long planned to fight at the same time Russia and France, who were both allied with Britain.
Other nations eventually became involved. Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire sided with the Central Powers, while Japan and Italy came in with the Allies, the latter in 1915 after being promised historically Austrian territory on its then frontiers. The war spread through European colonies across much of the globe, although the