A Son of the Rock

Sorry about the gratuitous bit of national stereotyping in the title of this post but I couldn’t resist it. It felt like a staple piece of dialogue from the war films which constantly seemed to be on TV when I was young and became something of a joke. But it wasn’t necessarily so.

It was occasioned in this instance by the news that the reparations Germany was due to pay to the Allies as a result of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War 1 are finally to be paid off.

It’s only taken 92 years. (It was strung out a bit by the repudiation of the Versailles Treaty in the 1930s by a certain regime and a subsequent contretemps which engulfed all Europe, most of North Africa and the Atlantic shipping lanes and also had its counterpart in the Pacific.)

Mind you, it was only a few years ago that Britain finally paid off its Lend-Lease debts to the US which arose from that second encounter. A nice piece of business for the US as it ensured Britain would be crippled by debt and wouldn’t present much of a post-war industrial rival.