Remember Brave Achilles

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Historians will tell you – sometimes in good faith although not always, that the last days of peace are often the final flowering of ages of innocence. That had people known what they were about to get involved in, the if we knew now what we knew then argument, that they might have drawn back at the very brink and not, subsequently, fallen over the edge into the abyss yawning before them.

In 1978 none of the parties could honestly claim not to have known that the outbreak of war was going to plunge an awful lot of people into a world of pain.

Ignore the siren calls of New Englanders who had convinced themselves that they were in some way ‘special’, that the normal rules did not apply to them and that somebody else would always pick up the tab in terms of blood and treasure. They had been sheltered too long beneath the imperial umbrella and besides, all that was soon to change. That it had not been appreciated that 1978 was not 1878 was not the Old Country’s or the rest of the Empire’s fault, it was a thing that was deeply embedded, canker-like in the psyches of the elites of the First Thirteen.

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