Leftism’s characteristically vile hubris manifests itself most clearly perhaps in downright silly attempts to undertake posthumous revisions of the outcomes and meanings of out-of-reach historical events.

The Telegraph reported this week that the British Ministry of Defense has decided to surrender to an insignificant protest group made up of a few superannuated whingeing relatives, their prevaricating lawyer, and one retired lachrymose school teacher with time on his hands, and intends to “pardon” all British deserters and cowards executed during WWI.

Much good will it do them.

All 306 soldiers of the First World War who were shot at dawn for cowardice or desertion will be granted posthumous pardons, the Ministry of Defence said last night.

Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, has decided to cut short a review that had been prompted by campaigns to exonerate the men, and emergency legislation will be put before the House of Commons soon after it resumes sitting in the autumn. The news was greeted with joy by the family of Pte Harry Farr, who was executed during the Battle of the Somme in 1916 for cowardice in the face of the enemy.

His daughter, Gertrude Harris, 93, and granddaughter Janet Booth, 63, had fought a legal battle to overturn the ruling in 2000 by Geoff Hoon, the former defence secretary, that there was no case for a posthumous pardon.

Mrs Harris, from Harrow, north-west London, said: “I am so relieved that this ordeal is now over and I can be content knowing that my father’s memory is intact.

“I have always argued that my father’s refusal to rejoin the front line, described in the court martial as resulting from cowardice, was in fact the result of shell-shock. And I believe that many other soldiers suffered from this too, not just my father.

“I hope that others who had brave relatives who were shot by their own side will now get the pardons they equally deserve.”

In a statement, Mr Browne said: “Although this is a historical matter, I am conscious of how the families of these men feel today. “They have had to endure a stigma for decades. That makes this a moral issue too, and having reviewed it, I believe it is appropriate to seek a statutory pardon. “I hope we can take the earliest opportunity to achieve this by introducing a suitable amendment to the current Armed Forces Bill.

“I believe a group pardon, approved by Parliament, is the best way to deal with this. After 90 years, the evidence just doesn’t exist to assess all the cases individually.

“I do not want to second guess the decisions made by commanders in the field, who were doing their best to apply the rules and standards of the time. “But the circumstances were terrible, and I believe it is better to acknowledge that injustices were clearly done in some cases, even if we cannot say which – and to acknowledge that all these men were victims of war.”

Mr Browne has waived the review announced somewhat reluctantly by the MoD when Mrs Harris won the right to challenge a refusal to reconsider the case by John Reid when he was defence secretary.

John Dickinson, the lawyer representing Mrs Harris, said: “This is complete common sense and acknowledges that Pte Farr was not a coward but an extremely brave man.

“Having fought for two years practically without respite in the trenches, he was very obviously suffering from a condition we now would have no problem in diagnosing as post traumatic stress disorder, or shell-shock, as it was known in 1916.”

By this reasoning, the convicted murderer may plead that he is really an extremely law-abiding chap, as he never killed anyone for years and years.

The Blair government may be relied upon always to surrender on issues of this kind, as this species of surrender, from its utilitarian and materialist point of view, costs nothing real, only honor, on which it agrees philosophically with the rogue and villain Falstaff:

Honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? how then? Can honour set to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is honour? a word. What is in that word honour? what is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. ‘Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon: and so ends my catechism.

–Henry IV, Act V, Scene 1.

The same, of course, could be said of posthumous pardons 90 years after the fact.

The British Campaign For Cowardice

Cowards’ Memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum

June 6 is not only the anniversary of the Normandy Invasion of WWII. It is also the anniversary of the Marine attack on Belleau Wood.

At the beginning of June 1918, the spearhead of the German Army’s offensive had captured Belleau Wood on the Paris-Metz road, only 50 miles from Paris. The American Expeditionary Force launched a counter-attack to stop the German advance.

The Marine 4th Brigade, comprising the 5th and 6th Marine Regiments, was ordered to take the woods. The Brigade began its advance across an open field of wheat, swept by murderous fire from German machine guns and artillery. Urged to turn back by retreating French forces, Marine Captain Lloyd Williams of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines uttered the now-famous retort: “Retreat, hell. We just got here.”

His platoon wavered momentarily under heavy fire at the entrance to the wood, but Sergeant Major Dan Daly charged forward, shouting “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?” for which, among other actions, Daly received the Navy Cross. (He had, previous to WWI, been twice awarded the Medal of Honor.)

The woods were taken, and retaken six times, by the Marine Brigade against the resistance of more than four German Divisions, including the crack 5th German Guards Divison.

Josephus Daniels, US Secretary of the Navy, wrote:

The marines fought strictly according to American methods – a rush, a halt, a rush again, in four-wave formation, the rear waves taking over the work of those who had fallen before them, passing over the bodies of their dead comrades and plunging ahead, until they, too, should be torn to bits. But behind those waves were more waves, and the attack went on.

“Men fell like flies,” the expression is that of an officer writing from the field. Companies that had entered the battle 250 strong dwindled to 50 and 60, with a Sergeant in command; but the attack did not falter. At 9.45 o’clock that night Bouresches was taken by Lieutenant James F. Robertson and twenty-odd men of his platoon; these soon were joined by two reinforcing platoons.

Then came the enemy counter-attacks, but the marines held…

Belleau Wood was a jungle, its every rocky formation containing a German machine-gun nest, almost impossible to reach by artillery or grenade fire. There was only one way to wipe out these nests – by the bayonet. And by this method were they wiped out, for United States marines, bare-chested, shouting their battle cry of “E-e-e-e-e y-a-a-hh-h yip!” charged straight into the murderous fire from those guns, and won!

Out of the number that charged, in more than one instance, only one would reach the stronghold. There, with his bayonet as his only weapon, he would either kill or capture the defenders of the nest, and then swinging the gun about in its position, turn it against the remaining German positions in the forest.

After the battle, the French renamed the wood “Le Bois de la Brigade de Marine” (“The Wood of the Marine Brigade”) in honor of the Marines’ tenacity. The French government also later awarded the 4th Brigade the Croix de Guerre, entitling members of those Marine regiments to wear the fouragere.

Belleau Wood is also where the Marines got their German nickname of “Teufelshunde” or “Devil Dogs” because of the ferocity of their attack on the German lines. An official German report described the American Marines as “vigorous, self-confident, and remarkable marksmen.”

General John J. Pershing, Commander of the AEF, at the time, said, “The Battle of Belleau Wood was for the U.S. the biggest battle since Appomattox and the most considerable engagement American troops had ever had with a foreign enemy.”

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One of our commenters asked about US press coverage back then. There is an account from the New York Times, June 20, 1918 on the web, which gets the date of the attack wrong, but has some good comments from the Germans:

The prisoners said they were glad of the chance to surrender and get out of the woods, because the American artillery fire for three days had cut off their food and other supplies and they had lived in a hell on earth. The Germans seemed deeply impressed by the fury of the American attack. One of the captured officers, when asked what he thought of the Americans as fighters, answered that the artillery was crazy and the infantry drunk. A little German private, taking up his master’s thought, pointed to three tousled but smiling marines, and said: “Vin rouge, vin blanc, beaucoup vin.” He meant he thought the Americans must be intoxicated, to fight as they did for that wood.

The Millionaires’ Unit makes for ironic reading in an era when elite universities like Yale won’t even allow ROTC units on campus, dining hall offerings include vegan, and pampered students are tutored by a corps of bolshie profs in fashionable poses of anti-American sophistication and smug Pacifist moral superiority.

Publisher’s Weekly describes Marc Wortman’s new book on the history of the Yale Flying Club, an aviation unit formed by Yale undergraduates even before America’s entry into into WWI to train to fight, as harkening

back to a bygone era when campus regattas were the place to be seen, Harvard-Yale football games drew crowds 80,000 strong and, perhaps most jarringly, American isolationism placed the country’s air command not just behind Germany’s fearsome air service, but behind British and French forces as well. Preparing themselves for fire fights and bombing missions that generated harrowing casualty figures, these wealthy, elite Yale students saw it as their responsibility to fight on the front lines, and in the first wave. In a brief but important epilogue, Wortman spells out just how profoundly the times, and in particular the Yale campus, has changed in the past 90 years.

Poor Louis Auchincloss Y ’39, in the Wall Street Journal, makes a gallant attempt to stand up for his own class:

I seemed to sense at the end of Mr. Wortman’s narrative — I may have been wrong — an implication that the heroic spirit of the Millionaires’ Unit has somewhat departed from our land. But that spirit, which existed in World War II as well, was inspired in both conflicts by the barbarous attacks on our nation by dangerous and mighty foes. The sons of the rich have not seemed tempted to leave Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley to enlist in wars in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq, where a good half of our youth, if not more, saw no real threat to the country. But if attacked, I believe, we would find the same spirit that the old unit so splendidly showed. I know some of the descendants of those men, and I am sure we could count on them.

But, unless you count the British-flagged Lusitania, whose sinking cost the lives of 128 Americans, Germany did not, in fact, attack the US prior to US entry into WWI. And if we substituted today’s American elites for the WWI-era’s, Ivy League undergraduates would have obviously been found demonstrating against the Wilson Administration and the War, not training to fly combat missions. Pace Mr. Auchincloss and his WSJ editor, some of us do actually think America was attacked this time.

On April 25, 1915, soldiers of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

Australia: 18.500 wounded and missing – 7,594 killed.
New Zealand : 5,150 wounded and missing – 2,431 killed.

Lest we forget.

George Lambert, Anzac the Landing, 1915