The First World War
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘The First World War’
Richard Hannay tracks a German spy down to a French château, but Hannay’s sense of fair play gives his enemy a chance.
Richard Hannay and Mary Lamington are on the tail of a German spy, who has been posing as an English gentleman named Moxon Ivery during the Great War. The chase has led to a French château, where Mary has uncovered a cache of biological weapons, and now Hannay has surprised the man himself.
A civilian ferry captain was court-martialled by the Germans for thumbing his nose at their U-Boats.
Captain Fryatt was a civilian, in command of passenger ferries in the perilous waters between Britain and the Netherlands during the Great War. With U-Boats patrolling the Channel and regarding civilian shipping as fair game, it was no longer clear what the rules of engagement were, but unlike the enemy, Captain Fryatt conducted himself with courage and honour to the end.
Richard Hannay reflects on the innocent lives lost, when the lust for power or the desire for revenge makes us less than human.
It is Christmas 1915, and on a secret mission during the Great War, Richard Hannay has found refuge in a remote cottage in southern Germany. The house is kept by a desperately poor woman with three children, whose husband is away fighting the Russians. Hannay comes to realise that, unlike the German government, he does care about collateral damage.
Max fully deserves his reputation as England’s greatest all-round sportsman.
Maxwell (Max) Woosnam was born in Liverpool, but brought up in Aberhafesp, Mid Wales. His father, a senior clergyman in the Church of England, sent him to the prestigious school Winchester College, where young Max embarked on an extraordinary sporting career.
John Buchan’s dashing adventurer Sandy Arbuthnot didn’t think much of foreign policy after the Great War.
John Buchan was not only a writer of entertaining adventure tales, but a Governor General of Canada and a first-rate military historian. Here, he gives his take on the break-up of the Ottoman Empire after the Great War through his dashing hero Sandy Arbuthnot.
Germany felt she had a right to an empire like Britain’s, and she was willing to get it at the expense of her neighbours.
In 1871, Otto von Bismarck hammered Prussia and other small princedoms of the region into a new united Germany. The new Union greedily coveted British industrial progress and colonial expansion, but as John Buchan wrote, ‘she began too late in the day, and could succeed only at the expense of her neighbours’.