July 1 of this year marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme in World War I, one of the most horrific military engagements in the history of man. The occasion caused me to retrieve from my bookshelf Peter Hart’s definitive history, The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front (2008). In the preface, Hart makes this statement:
The political imperatives of defending the bloated empire, the endemic racism and all-embracing casual assumption of moral superiority of the age, the overwhelming reliance on blunt threats ro achieve what might have been achieved by subtle diplomacy—these were all part of the British heritage in 1914.
Ring any bells? That was Britain a hundred years ago. Think United States today.
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