Word: britishers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Just before 2 o'clock, one hour after the siege began, word came from the British embassy, which could observe the outside of our building, that "they" were moving demonstrators off the compound. But "they" were not. We began to smell smoke. There was fire somewhere...
...sumptuous lunch (smoked trout, veal, cheese, fruit salad and wine) by the Times, Blunt candidly admitted that he had been a "talent spotter" for Soviet intelligence at Cambridge University during the 1930s, and that he had provided secret information to Moscow while he worked for M15, the British counterintelligence agency, during World War II. Blunt said that he had been converted to Marxism at Cambridge by his close friend Guy Burgess. "I was persuaded that I could best serve the cause of antifascism by joining him in his work for the Russians." It seemed to him at the time, Blunt...
...stopped spying for the Soviets in 1945, shortly before he was named surveyor of the King's pictures. Six years later, however, he got in touch with a Soviet contact "on behalf of Burgess, a few days before his friend and Donald Maclean escaped to Moscow, just as British agents were closing in on them. But the man who actually tipped them off, Blunt insisted, was the so-called third man in the spy network, H.A.R. ("Kim") Philby. At week's end, Blunt confirmed that, at a later date, he had also contacted the Soviets on Philby...
Britain was ill prepared for conflict. Despite its burgeoning Empire, its army was small-fewer than 320,000 men, most of them already tied down in colonial duties. (France had an army of 4 million.) War was, in fact, totally unnecessary. The British wanted political representation in the Transvaal for the Outlanders. Kruger was willing to bargain, but South African High Commissioner Alfred Milner, unfortunately, was the go-between. He was a dedicated warmonger, secretly backed by millionaire gold entrepreneurs. Troops were sent. They marched into the first 20th century war ready to fight with 19th century tactics...
There were a few initial victories, but the mounted, mobile Boers with their magazine-loading Mausers and their devastating "Long Tom" artillery soon drove the British forces into siege positions at Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. The lessons of preparedness were not lost on one of the Boers' early captives: young War Correspondent Winston Churchill...