Category Archives: History

Arts, Books, First World War, History

Book Review – The Searches: The Quest for The Lost of The First World War

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Half a million families were left with the agony of not knowing where their loved ones lay under the battlefields of World War I – among them Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son John – but their devotion unearthed amazing tales

HIS MOTHER’S recollection was vividly clear. The young lieutenant stood tall and straight in the doorway, immaculately smart in his Irish Guards uniform. He was just 17 – two days away from his 18th birthday – but duty was calling, and so proudly he was off to the Western Front in France, in September 1915.

As John Kipling left the family home in Sussex, he called out: “Send my love to Daddo.”

“Daddo” – Rudyard Kipling, one of Britain’s foremost men of letters, poet, novelist, holder of the Nobel Prize for Literature – did not see his only son off because he was already in northern France, a journalist and foreign correspondent sending back despatches.

Six weeks later, John was dead. He had just written a letter home, telling his parents the assault he was about to take part in would end the war. (It didn’t.)

He had signed off: “Well so long, old dears, love John.” That was the last they ever heard from him.

On the third day of the Battle of Loos, he was leading his platoon over open ground when machine guns opened- up from the German line. No one knew for sure how he died. His body could not be found. Officially he was not dead but “missing”.

For “Rud” and Carrie Kipling, it was a special sort of torture – hoping against hope John was still alive, a prisoner perhaps, or lying in some remote hospital. Their pain never really ended. There was no grave they could visit, no focal point for their grief, no closure.

The trauma left Rud a broken man, dried up and drained, his vigour completely gone; he wrote no more novels but devoted his immense skills and talents to the mission of the War Graves Commission, to find and honour the missing.

It was he who chose the biblical words that became the national language of remembrance: “Their name liveth for evermore.” And for the headstones of graves whose occupants were unidentified, the simple “Known unto God”.

The story of the Kiplings is at the heart of Robert Sackville-West’s deeply moving and emotive book on the quest for those soldiers who went missing and were never found.

There were some 500,000 heart-broken families in the same position as Rud and Carrie, bereaved but cast adrift.

Of those half-million who died in this way – nearly half of all British Empire war dead – about 180,000 were buried as unknown British soldiers. A greater number, however, like John Kipling, had simply disappeared, blown to pieces, or drowned in the mud of no man’s land.

Desperate for any information, men of influence such as Rudyard Kipling were able to use their high-level contacts in the military to try to find out what had happened to a lost loved one. He even had leaflets printed in German asking for the whereabouts of his son, which were dropped by the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) behind enemy lines.

Others, such as the distraught but determined Lady Violet Cecil, whose 18-year-old son George was last seen lying in a ditch during the retreat from Mons in 1914, travelled to the battlefield while the war was still raging to search for her boy.

DESPERATION

GEORGE’S remains were eventually uncovered in a mass grave of 94 British soldiers, their faces and features brutally beaten and disfigured beyond recognition. George was identified by his initials on his vest and by the exceptional size of his feet. Three buttons from his tunic were sent home to his mother.

For most mothers there was no such consolation. Whenever trainloads of wounded men arrived home, there would be lines of women holding up photographs and pleading: Have you seen my son, husband, brother?

Documenting all these grim and sad stories with compassion, Sackville-West writes of relatives “tormented by knowing so little about their loved one’s last moments. How had they been killed? Had they suffered?”

He rightly lauds the Graves Registration Commission and its successor, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, for acknowledging this desperate desire to know, for their recognition that each of the dead was an individual and that relatives needed the reassurance that the graves were tended and properly cared for.

Photographs of headstones were taken and sent to those who could not get there in person – “consolations of death at a distance,” as the author movingly puts it.

Thousands, however, did make it to the now quiet battlefields, paying their respects at a graveside. “I came all the way from home for this,” one little old lady in a black bonnet said at her son’s grave. “Now I can die in peace.” There were tears in her eyes as she spoke, and likely in others too as they read her story.

The persistence of relatives was astonishing.

Lieutenant Eric Hayter died, shot through the head, in March 1918, and his father was told there was no sign of his body. A year later, Hayter senior received a letter from a German soldier who enclosed a map showing where Eric had been buried by the Germans. A search followed, which was unsuccessful. But Hayter continued to visit the battlefield in France, digging up land owned by a local farmer where he believed Eric had fallen.

He then tried to buy the land to erect a memorial, but the farmer said no. So, in 1924 – more than six years after his son’s death – he purchased a nearby plot for a nominal sum from a sympathetic local countess and was digging the foundations there when, amazingly, 3 feet down, he came across a body.

Regimental buttons, badges of rank and five gold teeth confirmed who it was. Father and son were reunited.

The Kiplings had no such reunion. John’s body was eventually found, though not for another 70 years, long after his father’s death in 1936.

A diligent researcher at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission spotted an entry in the register of an unknown soldier dug up in no man’s land near Loos. The body had been reburied as “an unknown lieutenant of the Irish Guards”. The coincidence was too great.

John Kipling’s name could now be taken off the Menin Gate memorial to the missing. He had been found.

If Rudyard had been alive, he might have pointed to the final words of perhaps his most famous poem, If:

“Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!”

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Arts, History, Philosophy

(Philosophy): Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

1770–1831

GEORG HEGEL was born on 27 August 1770, in Stuttgart, Germany. He studied philosophy and classics at Tübingen, and, after graduation, he became a tutor and explored theology. Hegel taught at Heidelberg and Berlin, where he wrote and explored philosophical and theological concepts.

Hegel was a major figure in German idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality was revolutionary at the time and a major factor in the development of some radical threads of left-wing political thought. His major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit (or mind), was published in 1807. Many of his ideas were developed in other deeply complex works until his death, from cholera, in 1831.

Almost everything that Hegel was to develop over the rest of his life is prefigured in the Phenomenology. The book and text is far from systematic and is generally accepted as difficult to read. The Phenomenology attempts to present human history, with all its revolutions, wars, and scientific discoveries, as an objective and idealistic self-developing Spirit or Mind.  

Hegel is a notoriously difficult philosopher to understand. For a beginner with next to no grounding in the Greek logic of Aristotle and the later works of Descartes, Hume and Locke it is probably a forlorn task best left until the fundamentals of philosophy are mastered. Being able to comprehend what he writes requires a grasp of at least the basics. Hegel still causes frustration among academics and one of the philosophers that give the discipline its forbidding reputation.

For example, in his book Hegel, Edward Caird writes: “But the height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel… and became the instrument of the most bare-faced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument to German stupidity.”

To have any chance of understanding Hegel one must first come to terms with the principle of the dialectic method. This is a type of argument or discussion between two or more opposing viewpoints whereupon the outcome or truth can be distilled. As the mechanism for this process Hegel proposed variations on the three “classical laws of thought” – that is, the law of identity (essentially “truths” that are taken to be self-evident), and the laws of [non]contradiction and the law of the excluded middle. Paraphrasing these last two suggests respectively that contradictory statements cannot both be true but that either proposition must be true. This is the kind of difficulty that any student of philosophy will be faced with.

Hegelian dialectics is based upon four concepts:

. Everything is transient and finite, existing in the medium of time.

. Everything is composed of contradictions (opposing forces).

. Gradual changes lead to crisis or turning points when one force overcomes its opposing force (quantitative change leads to qualitative change).

. Change is helical (spiral), not circular.

In summary, Hegel believed that when our minds become fully conscious, awakened, or enlightened, we will have a perfect understanding of reality. In short, our thoughts about reality, and reality itself, will be the same. He argues this by showing that the mind goes through an evolution on its way to what he calls “absolute spirit”.

Because Hegel’s philosophy requires a journey it can be seen that it is the process and not just the result that is important. A struggle exists between one viewpoint (or thesis) to which there might exist one or more opposing viewpoints (or antithesis). A process of debate or connected dispute such as revolution or war might lead to a higher level of understanding (or synthesis) to which another antithesis might emerge and thus the process towards truth will continue. This is a Hegelian description of all history as an inevitable progression towards truth. It is complex and a difficult area of study.

Hegel’s mark on history has been profound, in that his influence has spread throughout both left- and right-wing political thought. Marx drew influence from Hegel by developing the idea that history and reality should be viewed dialectically and that the process of change – the struggle – should be seen as a transition from the fragmentary towards the complete. Yet, this is a skewed development of what Hegel tried to suggest in Phenomenology. However, in practical terms it is likely that Hegel may have approved of Marx’s revolutionary interpretation, as he was witness at close hand to revolutionary Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century.

. Hegel on Reason and Experience

“Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.”

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Arts, Books, History, Literature

Book Review: The Turning Point

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: A tale of one city . . . and the year that changed not just Charles Dickens but London, too

IN 1851, London was a city of dense and persistent fog, of foul acrid smells and, for a large swathe of the population, of extreme poverty and deprivation.

The capital was also a place of vibrant energy and opportunity and a growing sense of its own importance.

One topic dominated conversation that year: the opening of the Great Exhibition, masterminded by Prince Albert to highlight Britain’s dominant position in the industrial world.

Through this pulsing, crowded and malodorous city strode Charles Dickens, the most famous writer in the English-speaking world. By the age of 38, he had already written eight hugely successful novels including The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, and yet, for all his professional success, his private life was about to enter choppy waters.

This engrossing book subtitled The Year That Changed Dickens And The World, shows how, by 1851, Dickens was more than just a novelist. He was also “one of the busiest men in London… playwright, actor, social campaigner, journalist, editor, philanthropist.”

Much of Dickens’s boundless energy was inspired by the city. Although he called it “vile” and would sometimes go to quieter places like Broadstairs in Kent to write, he couldn’t bear to be away too long either, saying: “A day in London sets me up again and starts me.”

TWO

DICKENS was a father of nine in 1851, apparently a rather semi-detached one. His relationship with his shy and sweet-natured wife, Kate, was increasingly shaky. After giving birth to so many children in the space of 13 years she was, hardly surprisingly, permanently exhausted, and often depressed.

That spring, the family suffered a double blow. Two weeks after the death of Dickens’s father John, their youngest child, eight-month-old Dora, died suddenly after suffering convulsions. Dickens was overwhelmed with grief and deeply anxious about breaking the news to his fragile wife, who was undergoing a rest cure in Malvern.

Whilst he wrote sympathetically and lovingly to Kate, he remarked to a friend that this shock might even do her good: a chilling foreshadowing of his later attempt, when their marriage broke down, to have Kate sent to a mental asylum.

The death of Dora did nothing to slow down Dickens’s prodigious work output and, like most Londoners, he was intrigued by the “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” which opened in May in Hyde Park. The huge glass building itself was a source of wonder, the brainchild of Joseph Paxton.

The atmosphere before the opening of the Great Exhibition sounds like that of London before the 2012 Olympics – intense excitement, and dread that it would go horribly wrong.

When it was finally opened by Queen Victoria, the Crystal Palace was revealed to be crammed with 133,000 exhibits including the enormous Koh-i-Noor diamond, a steam-powered envelope-making machine, collapsible pianos, and a can of boiled mutton, designed to be taken on a polar exhibition.

Dickens’s work was also represented, with statues of two of his most famous characters: Oliver Twist and Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop. However, they couldn’t compete with the popularity of the exciting new flushing toilets in the “retiring rooms”. Eager visitors paid a penny to use them, giving rise to the adage “to spend a penny”.

Not everyone was entranced by it, including Dickens. He grumbled that “I don’t say ‘there’s nothing in it’ – there’s too much.” The future textile designer, 17-year-old William Morris, was so appalled by the vulgarity of it all that he staggered from the building and was sick in the bushes.

But the Great Exhibition was a triumph and crowds poured in from all over Britain. The profits from it went towards the purchase of 87 acres of land in South Kensington. It was here where the Victoria and Albert, the Natural History and Science Museums, Imperial College and the Royal Albert Hall were built. Above all, it was the event that cemented Britain’s position as the world’s leading industrial economy.

THREE

AS IT wound down, Dickens was edging towards writing a new book, Bleak House.

With its twisty plot, pointed social commentary and not one but two unreliable narrators, Bleak House was, says Douglas-Fairhurst, “the greatest fictional experiment of his career.” It was one of the earliest examples of a detective story.

The book is full of nuggets. 1851 was the first-time young women were recorded wearing trousers (or “bloomers”) – in Harrogate of all places. It was also the first-time terms such as “carbohydrate”, “police state” and “science fiction” were widely used.

Although the author focuses on just one year of the writer’s life, Charles Dickens comes over as a deeply complex character: warm, generous, and compassionate yet also overbearing, pompous and selfish. His life was so crammed with incident that you could argue that almost any year was some sort of turning point for him. But that is a very minor quibble about a splendidly enjoyable book.

– The Turning Point by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is published by Cape, 368pp

. Appendage

– Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s title begs several questions, for there were many turning points in Dickens’s life. The first came in 1824 when his father was incarcerated in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. Dickens’s mother and younger siblings moved in with his father, but Dickens, aged 12, was sent to work among, as he recalled, “common labouring boys” in Warren’s blacking warehouse. It was a humiliation he never forgot or forgave, and the dilapidated, rat-infested warehouse came back to him in nightmares all his life. As a junior clerk in a law firm he was crazy about the theatre and yearned to be an actor.
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