We're not so old in the Army List,
But we're not so young at our trade.
For we had the honour at Fontenoy
Of meeting the Guards' Brigade.
'Twas Lally, Dillon, Bulkeley, Clare,
And Lee that led us then,
And after a hundred and seventy years
We're fighting for France again!
From The Irish Guards by Rudyard Kipling
Coalition is the way of things in modern conflicts. It’s been 29 years since Britain fought a war alone, and more than a century to the one before that.
But fighting a war as part of a coalition can throw up some strange alliances. People traditionally thought of as “the enemy” can suddenly become allies and vice versa. Britain’s traditional enemy was always France, and yet in the two great wars of the 20th Century France was our ally. Similarly we generally regarded Germany as an ally and yet …
For example :
The author JRR Tolkien (Lord of the Rings etc.) served as an officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1916 and with his language skills he was often called on to question prisoners. He told of a conversation with a German soldier from the Hanoverian Regiment. The soldier pointed out the irony of how at the battle of Minden on 1759 his Hanoverians fought shoulder to shoulder with Tolkien’s Lancashires against the French.
And lets not forget that while British losses between 1914 and 1918 were 704,803 some of our allies (and enemies) losses were beyond comprehension.
Russia 1,811,000
France 1,397,800
Italy 651,000
Serbia 275,000
British Empire 251,900
Romania 250,000
USA 126,000
Belgium 58,637
Greece 26,000
Portugal 7,222
Japan 415
And from the Central Powers
Germany 2,050,697
Austria 1,100,000
Turkey 771,844
Bulgaria 87,500
I was reminded of this many years ago when I came across this war memorial in Venice. It commemorates the Italian soldiers who lost their lives fighting against the Austrians and Germans between 1915 and 1918. Note that Italy (and Japan too) fought with us in that conflict.
