postcards from Verdun

[Surpmil]

Incalculable and irreparable harm was done Britain and the Commonwealth by the idiotic policy of voluntary enlistment. A policy designed to ensure that the best were killed while the morally and physically unfit survived to reproduce. That hardly anyone in leadership grasped this fact which was well known thousands of years before merely shows what donkeys we were led by. We have as an early example the idiotic comment of Kitchener after Loos that he could easily replace the 7500 odd men killed etc. etc.

Ataturk "great" Cinders? I suppose some people consider Hitler "great", but I ain't one of them. Certainly Hitler said at least once that no one would remember the Jews as hardly anyone remembered the Armenians and what was done to them. Had the Nazis won, no doubt he would have been right.

As for the Gallipoli venture, there were groups more anxious that the Russians not have access to the Med. etc. than that the Turks be defeated. The idea of the Russians restoring Constantinople to Christian hands was utter anathema to some as well. I expect the expedition was betrayed long before it got under way.