Deeds of a Great Railway

Deeds of a Great Railway - A record of the enterprise and achievements of the London and North-Western Railway company during the Great War

The British cannot be accused, even by their bitterest critics, of blowing their own trumpet. Indeed, they fail in the opposite direction, and, as a general rule, carry their modesty to a point when it positively ceases to be a virtue, because it causes credit to go where it is not due. If we are unpopular as a nationof which we are continually assured, though whether we are more disliked than other nations may be doubtedit is certainly not on account of boasting by our men of action and achievement. Occasionally, it is true, we suffer under the extravagant claims of Talking Menchiefly politicianswho are possibly inspired by the apprehension that unless they were their own advertisers mankind would remain oblivious and therefore ungrateful as regards the services they are supposed to have rendered. The events of the Great War will gradually emerge in proper perspective, and things will then seem somewhat different to what they do to-day, when there is a certain and inevitable reaction which both enables pretenders to pose as saviours of Society, and encourages us to [x] overlook much of which we may be legitimately proud because it has demonstrated afresh to a world that was forgetting it that the British are essentially a great people with a genius for everything appertaining to war, however lacking in the supreme art of making durable peace. In that day we shall want to know a great deal more than we do at present concerning the origin of a conflict which has been to some extent obscured by interested parties on both sides of the North Sea who have enveloped the palpitating pre-war crisis in a curtain of misrepresentation. It is common ground that Germany willed the war for which she was super-abundantly prepared, while Great Britain willed peace for which she was no less eager. Not for the first time in our history were we taken completely unawaresneither Government nor public having the faintest inkling of any impending storm, still less that civilisation was on the eve of a cataclysm of which it would feel the effects for more than one century. As we look back on the Dark Ages of 1914, so graphically recalled by the author of this book, we can only marvel at our blindness and wonder how it could be that so many highly trained observers and experts on current events could entirely ignore a danger that, in the familiar French phrase, "leapt to the eyes." Of this strange phenomenon there has so far been no attempt at any explanation, no amende from those "great wise and eminent men"not confined to any particular political partywhose [xi] business it should have been to see what stared them in the face, altogether apart from the fact that the Government of the day commanded that abundance of accurate inside information concerning international affairs, which, from generation to generation, is at the service of His Majesty's Ministers. It would be some consolation and compensation for all we have endured during this portentous period were there any guarantee that no such catastrophe could recur because the terrible lesson of 1914 to 1918 had been assimilated by Responsible Statesmen who ask so much from the Community that we are entitled to expect something from them in return. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 45563
Author: Darroch, G. R. S.
Release Date: May 2, 2014
Format: eBook
Language: English