The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
A German soldier stopped the Great War so he could ask Captain Hulse to post a letter for him.
The Christmas Truce of 1914 was one of the most poignant events in the Great War of 1914-18. The British had poured into Belgium to help drive the German invaders out, and in Flanders the two armies faced each other from trenches only a few hundred yards apart. In a letter to his mother on December 28th that year, Captain Hulse of the Scots Guards told how the spontaneous truce began.
Malacca became a refuge from the overbearing empires of the Far East, thanks to a celebrated Chinese admiral.
Bustling trade hub Malacca, on the Malaysian Peninsula, was a British possession from 1825 to 1957. It was founded in about 1400 by Parameswara, ex-king of Singapura, as a refuge from the empire of Majapahit based in Java. That Malacca held out for more than a century was largely owing to Zheng He, the most celebrated admiral in Chinese history.
St Mark wrote his Gospel as a summary of the preaching of St Peter.
Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea from about 313, tells us here how St Mark’s Gospel came to be written. Drawing on testimony going back to the Apostles themselves, he explains that the Gospel should be heard as an echo of the living voice of St Peter, as he preached the good news in Rome.
In 1941, with much of the West subdued, Adolf Hitler bent the full force of his hatred on Moscow.
The British Empire held out against the Nazis almost alone for two years. The arrival of the Americans in 1942 was a blessed relief, but it was the Russians (also somewhat late to the party) who bore the brunt of the Nazis’ hatred, and whose sacrifices and determination finally broke the vast German military machine.
On May 8th, 1945, Winston Churchill took to the radio to tell the British public that almost six years of war were ended.
VE Day is Victory in Europe Day, the commemoration of Germany’s surrender at the end of the Second World War. It is kept to this day (though with less and less pomp as each year goes by) on May 8th. The passage below collects a few of the more significant dates in the months that led up to the unconditional surrender signed at Berlin on that day (more or less) in 1945.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge holds on to those precious moments when loneliness is a problem for tomorrow.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge visited Germany in September 1798 in company with the Wordsworths, staying until the following July. He would later remember Germany as ‘a bright spot of sunshine’ in his life, but at the time he was lonely and homesick, and the death of his little son Berkeley on February 10th added to his griefs. These verses were included in a letter home to his wife Sarah on April 23rd.