England, Canada and the Great WarDesjardins, L. G. (Louis Georges)
History
England, Canada and the Great War
Desjardins, L. G. (Louis Georges)
Great Britain -- Colonies -- Canada; Imperialism; World War, 1914-1918; World War, 1914-1918 -- Canada
If England had been able to send 500,000 men in a few days to the very
heart of France, incessantly followed by another half million, it is
almost certain that the Prussian army would not have entered Paris. But
England had not that million of trained men. It would have taken at
least a year to organize such a large army.
I will speak my mind openly. After Sedan, any attempt at saving France
by force would have been vain and useless. Even Russia and Austria were
unprepared for such a task. Their intervention, coming too late, would
most likely have given Prussia a chance to win a much greater victory.
France out of the struggle, Prussia would then have had the opportunity
to achieve, as early as 1870, what she has ever since prepared for, and
tried to accomplish by the war she has brought on in 1914.
What then becomes of the "Nationalist" pretention that Great Britain has
ever been aiming at dominating the world, when it is so easy to
understand that without a very large territorial army, which she
persistingly refused to organize, she was unable to take an important
part in any continental war. The days were passed, after the
extraordinary development of Prussian militarism, when she could
brilliantly hold her own on the continent with a small standing army
backed by generous subsidies to the European powers. The present war is
surely proof evident of it, since England, instead of the two hundred
thousand men she was expected to send over to France, as her man-power
contribution, has had to raise a total army, with all the auxiliary
services, of 6,000,000 officers and men, exclusive of the 2,000,000
contributed by the whole British Colonial Empire.
The Nationalists accusing England to have abandoned France to her sad
fate, in 1870, was only another instance of their campaign to arouse the
feelings of the French Canadians against Great Britain.
OTHER "NATIONALIST" ERRONEOUS ASSERTIONS.
Mr. Bourassa has had his own peculiar way of explaining the real
determining cause of the war. Some men are--by nature it is to be
supposed--always disposed to judge great historical events from
considerations inspired by the lowest sentiments of the human heart. In
the "Nationalist" leader's view, the great war was brought about by the
treacherous alliance of British and German capitalists speculating
together, in actual partnership or otherwise, in the production of war
material: cannons, rifles, munitions, war shipbuilding, &c.
In my humble opinion, such views are lowering to a very vulgar and
lamentably repulsive cause--if it could be true--events of immense
significance, the result, on the one side, of criminal aspirations
which, however guilty they may be, have not yet been degraded to the
profound depth of abjection they suppose; on the other, by the most
noble sentiments which can inspire nations to make the greatest
sacrifices to avenge outraged Justice and Right.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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