Continuing my occasional practice of dipping into Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse and surrounding matters for interesting posts, here’s a column that ran in the Times of London on June 13, 1941. It comes on the heels of the fall of Crete to the Nazis in World War II, a crushing defeat that saw the first major victory for an airborne infantry as well as the fierce guerilla resistance of the civilian population against those who would try to conquer them. Many thousands of Allied troops were also taken prisoner.
And so, with all of that in mind, this column ran:
You’ll have to forgive the highlighting on the title; that’s one of the side effects of the search engine used to locate such things. I’ve got a number of other interesting clips I intend to post at a later date, but this one shall do for now.
There are reports of a similar column being run after the victory at El-Alamein in November of 1942, only this time it was not a note of hardship and despair that was cited, but rather one of exultation: “‘The high tide!’ King Alfred cried, / ‘The high tide and the turn!’” There are reports, anyway, but if it really did run in the Times as has been said, I’ve been unable to locate it. The closest I’ve been able to find is a column recounting Churchill’s famous “end of the beginning” speech and concluding with some lines from Byron. Further updates on this one as they become possible.
If any of you happen to know which issue/date/page/anything the latter citation of the Ballad comes from, I’d very much like to hear about it. The Chesterton biographies have occasionally mentioned that it happened (always in conjunction with the first instance concerning Crete), but have not, that I’ve noticed, provided any useful citation to back it up.
