What comes around...
Eerily prescient words from the past
I’m continuing my work on my major project about Rowena Cade who created The Minack Theatre, and I can see that I’m going to busy on it for a while yet, hence the absence of posts. I’m now developing a section set during the Second World War. But I’ve just come across a remarkable article in The Cornishman of Thursday, July 11th 1940, just after the start of the Battle of Britain and a month after Dunkirk, written by its editor, Herbert Thomas. I think it is well worth sharing with you. Any similarities between then and now may have common causes…
Thomas writes under the sub-heading WHAT THE LAST WAR COST (referring to the First World War, 1914-18) as follows:
‘In terms of monetary losses it was reckoned that “The First Great War” (which is the title of the book1) cost the colossal sum of nearlv £70,000,000,000 (seventy thousand millions!) Even those financial figures are both “incomprehensible and appalling”; but the statistics of the destruction of life are even more stupefying. Fifteen countries had known dead totalling 9,998,771. The seriously wounded were 6,295,512; otherwise wounded 14,002,093; prisoners or missing 5,983,600. These figures, although not exact, are approximately correct. I can imagine the full figure will never be known, for at Verdun in the Ossuary at Douamont I saw collections of innumerable bones found on the battlefield, which had to be placed in one great monument and last resting-place of the Unknown Dead. But it is surely enough to think of ten millions killed and other losses totalling twenty-seven millions, with seventy thousand million pounds worth of property destroyed, to make us wonder whether the Second Great World War, now spreading to many other countries will present the future historian with still further astronomical figures, and make the world, as William Cullen Bryant called it, “the great tomb of man”.
VILLAGES NO LONGER EXISTING. From this memorable but terrible war book nothing is omitted. You see deeds of heroism, destruction and grief; the hanging and shooting of spies, the stark carnage of the battlefield, the countryside turned into anthills. forests reduced to charred stumps, villages where homeless people once lived reported to them by the military officials as “no longer existing”; all the excitement of marching to battle and the silence and solitude of the blasted regions and the graveyards containing thousands of white crosses of the recognised dead—recognised by their identity discs, if by nothing else. You see the murders which started the war, the ex-Kaiser going into exile, the blinded soldiers and the famished children, the triumphal processions and the railway carriage in which the Armistice was signed by the beaten Germans in 1918 and in which it was signed by the humiliated French representative in 1940. It may be that a few weeks or a few months will disclose whether Nazism will crash a s the victorious German edifice crashed in the last yea r of the Great War, to the amazement of the world. It may be that it will need the ro'ling-up of the full resources of the British Empire, the re-birth of the French Erroire, and the whole-hearted entrance of the United States in the interest of humanity and civilisation to prevent the permanent breakdown of the economic and cultural basis of the world.
WILL GROUPS OF STATES COMBINE? This hasty glance, however, at the course of events from 1914 down to the challenge of the Hitler-Mussolini combination —with Russia. Japan, Spain, and other countries as perturbed and in some case menacing onlookers, should help us to get a clearer view of what may confront Britain. Europe and the rest of the world. Let us hope that dire necessity, if nothing higher, will induce th e leading countries of the world to form Groups of States to cooperate in curing disastrous Unemployment, easing impossible Debts, end the rivalry and covetousness of neighbouring countries, and bring about Cooperation if not Brotherhood in a tortured and devastated world. But we have long way to travel before anything like Federal Union will be possible; and there may be middle period of huge groups, European, Asiastic, and American co-operating for peaceful trading but trying to preserve some racial unity and independence. The first aim must be to fetter the Dictators, get the people back to employment, and negotiate frontier problems without recourse to recurring and murderous wars.2
Herbert Thomas, edited The Cornishman for almost half a century and died aged 85 in 1951.
He notably covered the funeral of King Edward VII for the newspaper in 1910 – even stowing away aboard the Royal Train at Paddington after the service to report on the monarch’s final journey to his resting place at Windsor Castle… During his career Herbert also worked in the United States on the San Francisco Examiner. A staunch anti-war activist, he event sent a telegram to Mussolini appealing to him to stop his conflicts and had another great scoop when he wrote on the assassination of Czar Nicholas of Russia and his family by the Bolsheviks.He was told this story by a man from Penzance who was in Yekaterinburg when it happened, months before the rest of the world knew.3
Thomas talks of his own experience and how at the end of that ‘Great War’,
It then seemed unthinkable that in one's lifetime there could be such another unheaval as is decimating and devastating the world to day. Tyrants pass or sink into obscurity, but others, even more ambitious and callous take their place. Time will tell whether War on the great scale will be a recurring decimal, or whether world-wide suffering and loss will at last bring together the wise to fashion a durable and endurable Peace.
Thanks for reading. Looking forward to getting back to more regular posting in 2025. In the meantime look out for occasional posts and Notes. Enjoy December! Look out, here comes Christmas…!
Thomas is referring to a documentary history of the First World War published by The Daily Express.
Acknowledgements to The British Newspaper Archive, REACH plc and The British Library