Last Saturday we had a trip round Fife and stopped off in Newburgh.

This is the War Memorial. There are only First World War names on it; I saw no sign of a World War 2 Memorial. It is just possible no-one from Newburgh died in the second conflict.

Down by the River Tay there is a nice grassed area which can be used for picnics etc. There was an unusual sculpture showing leaping salmon (I suppose) in the middle of it. And some nice yachts on the river. The reed beds in the background are apparently the biggest in Europe.

On the way back home we went via Cupar. This is the former Woolies there. It had been turned into an Allworth’s but that was having its closing down sale’s final day! Looks like replacing a Woolies with something very similar isn’t viable either.

For what it’s worth I’ll be voting for a change to the alternative vote in the referendum tomorrow.

Not that I think it’s a perfect system, there isn’t one – and there’s not a snowball’s chance that anyone but Labour will win in my parliamentary constituency, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, anyway, under any system – but simply that it’s a (tiny) bit fairer than the so-called first past the post method which I have blogged about before.

[To see just how perverse the FPTP system can be see doctorvee's excellent post on the subject here.]

I also see AV as an essential first step towards a more fully proportional election procedure. Consider: the coming of universal suffrage in the UK took nearly 100 years from the Great Reform Act of 1832 till women finally got the vote on the same terms as men – and one person one vote was not achieved (with the abolition of university seats) till after the Second World War!

If the AV referendum posts a no vote it will be taken to mean that, or represented as, there is not a wide desire to see a fairer system in place and the chances of any sort of PR system for UK parliamentary elections will thereby be lost for perhaps a generation, maybe even for my lifetime. Anyone who votes against it on the grounds that it isn’t the PR system they prefer is letting the worst (FPTP) take the place of the acceptable-for-now.

Hutchinson, 1964. 231p.

This is a book I got at a library sale years ago and have only just got round to reading. Rather than an overview of the Western Front as a whole it turns out to be a series of essays Terraine wrote between 1957 and 1962 which were finally collected in book form in 1964.

In the introduction Terraine is at pains to emphasise that the casualty rate in World War 1 was by no means unprecedented. Starting with Waterloo and taking in the Crimea, The American Civil War and the Boer War he illustrates that, for those with eyes to see, in a time of increasingly industrialised warfare high casualties were inevitable once the fighting started. This was a theme he developed fully in his later book The Smoke And The Fire.

World War 1 was unique, though, in the prolonged timescale of the battles and the static nature of the Western Front. (Other fronts had movement but sustained equally high, or even higher, percentage casualties.) The carnage of the Second World War eclipsed even that of the First, but Britain escaped most of it.

The focus of the book is, however, more on the personalities on the British side than the battles themselves; in particular in the antipathy between Lloyd George and his top commanders. Now, Terraine is a military historian and it is not surprising that his sympathies should lie with the generals but the evidence he presents for Lloyd George’s unhelpfulness is convincing.

His assessment of Douglas Haig as being far from the stolid and hidebound figure of the popular imagination is well argued. His highest praise, though, is reserved for the all but forgotten British general Herbert Plumer.

There is also a discursion into the baneful effect the cult of Napoleon had on the French military mind – and on others. In Terraine’s view Napoleon was anything but the tactical and strategic genius he is usually taken for and, moreover, was exceedingly careless with the lives of his men. The yearning for “something else,” the strategic or tactical genius who might have been able to circumvent the Western Front’s defences was always a chimera. None of the generals, on either side, had a quick and easy solution. In the end, by applying the lessons learned throughout and the integration of new tactics and weapons like the tank, it should not be forgotten that the war was won, and it was won on the Western Front. And that within the three months of late summer and early autumn of 1918.

While Terraine mentions it briefly, the most important assessment of the implications of the war is outwith the scope of this book. Britain was unable to wield sea power effectively (with the launch of the first modern battleship, Dreadnought, and the subsequent naval arms race its dominance had in essence been lost.) The development of the mine and torpedo and the advent of the submarine made a surface fleet almost useless in any case. As a result Britain was sucked in by force of events to becoming a land power; from 1917 onwards – arguably from the Battle of the Somme a year earlier – the major contributor to the Allies’ fighting strength and the instrument of final victory.

Had the navy been able to ensure safe passage across the North Sea (rather than keep secure the shorter distance to France) an amphibious landing might have been attempted in Northern Belgium and the Western Front’s flank turned. Whether that would actually have led to an earlier German defeat is another matter.

In the gardens surrounding the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, inside a hedged enclosure just behind where I took the picture in the post linked to above there is a memorial to the Cameronians Regiment, also known as the Scottish Rifles, which has a long association with Glasgow.

The statuary is not, like some, a mawkish example of the form, representing as it does members of the regiment in action during the Great War. Indeed it is unusual in that it seems to depict one of the fallen – which such memorials tend to shy away from.

Front view

Side view

Wording on plinth

Dunfermline’s First World War Memorial is just over the road from Dunfermline Abbey, or more accurately from the ruins of Dunfermline Palace. Being 1920s in origin there is a touch of Deco about it.

The Second World War memorial is in a smaller garden location adjacent to the Abbey grounds.

This is the Palace ruin. The WW1 memorial is behind to the left here.

Dunfermline was once Scotland’s capital, hence the lines from the poem/ballad Sir Patrick Spens,

Here’s my photo of the Abbey, which lies to the right and above the Palace. You can see its pointed turret in the Palace picture above.

The tower’s rim has King Robert The Bruce carved out in stone on its four sides.

In Great Britain there are War Memorials – mainly to the Great War and the Second World War – in even the smallest towns and villages. Sometimes when you’re driving along in the countryside there will be one at the edge of a field; covered in names even though there appears to be no habitation worthy of the name round about.

I’ve also come across them on walls in churches, police and railway stations (does anyone know what happened to the memorial at Dumbarton East when they demolished the old buildings?) and Post Offices commemorating the former workers who “gave their lives.”

It’s always striking that the number of dead for World War 1 outstrips that of World War 2 – perhaps a reflection of the fact that, after 1916 till late 1918, the greater burden of the Allies in the Great War lay on Britain and its Empire, while in WW2 most of the fighting after 1941 was done by the USSR and the US.

I spent a fortnight in Germany 30 years ago and was tremendously saddened by the war memorial in the town where I was staying. The sacrifice seemed even more poignant because they lost (and, of course, in WW2 had no shred of excuse nor reason to fight.)

I have already posted pictures of Kirkcaldy’s War Memorial.

There is another war memorial in Kirkcaldy, though, one which is fairly unusual.

It is to the local dead of the Spanish Civil War; members of the International Brigade who came from Fife or the Lothians. That conflict preceded and presaged the greater anti-fascist fight of WW2. Arguably had France and Great Britain taken the government side in that war then the later, bigger war might have been averted. But Britain at least was in no mood to fight (think of all those names on the WW1 memorials) and was also unprepared (no Spitfires for example.) This was still more or less true by the time of the Munich crisis in 1938. But failure to stand up to him on both those occasions and also during the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936 and the 1938 Anschluss encouraged Hitler to believe we never would.

Here is the memorial in situ. It stands just off Forth Avenue, quite near Kirkcaldy railway station.

The main plaque is inscribed as below.

These are the names just above the plaque.

There are more on the plinth below the shield.

This is the shield. The mounted knight is an old emblem representing Fife.

It’s strange to think that had the Western European powers fought in Spain and helped the Spanish Republic to victory, a Nazi Germany would, paradoxically, likely have survived long past 1945.

“This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11.00 a.m. that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.

I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”

- Neville Chamberlain, 3rd September, 1939.
(The above link also leads on to the BBC audio file of the speech.)

Don’t you just love that use of the word “note?” (Chamberlain’s pronunciation made it sound more like “nit.”)

Not demand, not insistence.

Note.

How British, how understated, how public school. How ineffectual.

That note certainly put the wind right up the buggers, and no mistake.

Today is the anniversary of the main triggering of the calamity that overshadowed the second half of the Twentieth Century and hence loomed large in the childhoods of people, like me, born years after the events it precipitated.

Germany attacked Poland.

Though the war in Asia had been going on for some time following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria it was this European outbreak that signalled catastrophe would be a global affair.

Chou En-Lai (Zhou Enlai) is reported to have said when he was asked what he thought were the implications of the French revolution that, “It is too early to say.”

The same is true of World War 2.