A History of the First World War by B. H. Liddell Hart

Author:B. H. Liddell Hart [Hart, B. H. Liddell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447281856
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Twenty-three thousand men were expended in these efforts for the ultimate gain, after six weeks, of a tiny tongue of ground just over a mile deep. And what of the moral effect?

Although most Australian soldiers were optimists, and many were opposed on principle to voicing – or even harbouring – grievances, it is not surprising if the effect on some intelligent men was a bitter conviction that they were being uselessly sacrificed. ‘For Christ’s sake, write a book on the life of an infantryman (said one of them . . .), and by doing so you will quickly prevent these shocking tragedies.’ That an officer who had fought so nobly as Lieutenant J. A. Raws, should, in the last letter before his death, speak of the ‘murder’ of many of his friends ‘through the incompetence, callousness, and personal vanity of those high in authority’, is evidence not indeed of the literal truth of his words, but of something much amiss in the higher leadership . . . ‘We have just come out of a place so terrible (wrote ——, one of the most level-headed officers in the force) that . . . a raving lunatic could never imagine the horror of the last thirteen days.’

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