Word: wars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
...suggesting a pretty girl, sunlight on English countryside and happy endings, possibly during the Battle of Britain. But no modern writer casts a colder eye on life, on death and all the angst and eccentricity in between. A Canadian, Mrs. Gallant has lived in France since World War II. There she produces her lapidary long stories and an occasional dazzling short novel, usually set in Europe. Her work appears regularly in The New Yorker. Canada seems about to give her the Governor General's Literary Award. But she is not well known in the U.S., or as celebrated...
Gallant's characters have been in trouble. They are exiles and émigrés, always from the provinces of the heart, often from some place in Europe tossed by convulsions of war or politics. One story follows the sad, late return (1950) to Berlin of a German prisoner of war in France. Another recounts the trials of an Italian servant girl on the Riviera, working for a neurotic English couple just before Mussolini declared war on France...
...Moslem Wife is the life story of a woman hotel owner who survives the Occupation and then is importuned by her charming husband, who turns up after running off to America with another woman during the war. "Memory is what ought to prevent you from buying a dog after the first dog dies," she reflects. "It should at least keep you from saying yes twice to the same person." But she takes him back...