Not A Patch

Our warmongering Political Class, ever happy to harvest the young men of classes other than its own in Britain or of regions and ethnic groups other than its own in America, is not fit to lick the boots of the late, great Harry Patch.

Just as we should never have involved ourselves in the dispute between Hitler and Stalin (or all manner of unsavoury characters in the Far East), so, while Germany and Russia could not really have stayed out of a dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia (German recognition of the UDIs of two old Habsburg provinces caused the Yugoslav War in the Nineties), neither we nor France, never mind America, should ever have become embroiled.

Rather, at the very least, we should have heeded, in the stalemate preceding the American intervention, the call by the Republican Party and by Pope Benedict XV (circulated in this country by the heroic Guild of the Pope’s Peace) for an end to the matter by means of a return to the pre-War borders. There would then have been neither any Soviet Union nor, since there would have been no Treaty of Versailles, any Nazi Germany.