Fighting on God's side?

Fighting on God's side?

THE BATTLEFIELD PREACHER

Another young man who died tragically young at Passchendaele was Albert Penn. Penn was not long married, and his wife Florence had just given birth to their daughter when he signed up. Devout and sincere Christians, they’d met at the Wesleyan Methodist chapel in their village, where he ran the boys’ Bible class and she ran the equivalent for girls.  

Penn was refused when he first volunteered because Florence was pregnant. ‘Come back when the baby is three months old,’ he was told. He did. Eight months later, when baby Mary Estelle was just 11 months old, he was dead.  

Penn died on 30 October 1917; he was just 28 years old. His body was never found, but his name is listed among the missing soldiers on the memorial at Tyne Cot, near Ypres in Belgium.  

Businessman sets up private toll road just 340 yards long charging motorists £2 a time to bypass closed section of main road. Daily Mail.

  The A431 Kelston Road between Bath and Bristol was shut in February following a landslip and won;t be repaired until the end of the year

  Local resident Mike Watts put up £150,000 of his own money to build bypass

  The route which opened yesterday is first privately run toll road to be built since cars became a familiar sight more than 100 years ago

  The toll road is just 340 yards in length but avoids a 10-mile detour

  Local council about road unhappy citing health and safety concerns 

A savvy grandfather who was sick of roadworks near his home has defied his council and built his own bypass toll road - the first for more than 100 years.

Businessman Mike Watts decided to open the thoroughfare - made of a mix of asphalt and chippings - to bypass a closed section of the A431 between Bath and Bristol.

The Kelston Road was shut in February following a landslip and officials say that it will not be repaired until the end of the year.

But a new makeshift road, which costs £2 a time to use, re-opens the important 'back road' - which is used by commuters going between the two cities.

Local villagers in nearby Kelston have repeatedly criticised Bath & North East Somerset Council for not re-opening the main road sooner and say it has caused major traffic problems in the area.

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PETER HITCHENS: These vainglorious fools will march us into another inferno. Daily Mail

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 century ago, stupid and vainglorious politicians dragged us into war. We started it as a great, rich empire and ended it as an indebted husk. 

Soon afterwards, America’s President Woodrow Wilson told aides he would wipe Britain ‘off the face of the map’ in another ‘terrible and bloody war’ unless we ceded our naval supremacy.

And US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes raged and shouted at Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Auckland Geddes, that America had saved Britain’s bacon and we had better be grateful from now on.

In a voice rising to a scream, Mr Hughes declared: ‘You would not be here to speak for Britain – you would not be speaking anywhere, England would not be able to speak at all! 

'It is the Kaiser who would be heard, if America – seeking nothing for herself but to save England – had not plunged into the war and won it!’

These little-known but important facts should be borne in mind as we look back on this dreadful episode. I for one have had enough of war poets and trench memoirs. Let’s have some proper history – who did what to whom and what it cost. 

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Dark shadow of the Great War: Tomorrow marks 100 years since Europe plunged into the war to end all wars. But as this brilliant analysis argues, we are still living with its appalling legacy in Ukraine and Gaza . Daily Mail Simon Heffer

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xactly 100 years ago tomorrow, Britain stumbled into a war that would change the face not just of this country but of the whole of Europe, for ever.

Its consequences would spread far beyond the continent where it was fought, initiating almost a century of upheaval, revolution, bloodshed and conflict unimaginable to the Britons who cheered when we decided to fight the Kaiser on August 4, 1914.

It is no exaggeration to say that the effects of the Great War are still being felt. It isn’t just that so many families remember great uncles or grandparents or great-grandparents who lie in what Rupert Brooke called ‘some corner of a foreign field’.

The conflict in Ukraine and the bloody wars in Syria, Iraq and Gaza all have their roots in a war that destroyed the empires that constituted the old world order, and which began a century ago almost to the day.

Ukraine’s troubles were born from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, and the horrors of the Middle East from the fall of the Ottoman Empire. These two conflicts have conspired to make the world more dangerous than since the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s, and are direct legacies of the bloodbath which the nation commemorates the centenary of tomorrow.

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