MEDAL NEWS NOVEMBER IS NOW ON SALE! The November issue of Medal News is now on sales at newsagents, through our website www.tokenpublishing.com or from the Token Publishing office. See below for the many interesting articles this month!
From defeat to victory
A new “attribution” for a Peninsular War medal
Balaclava mystery
The mystery of two names but one man
Only a pair — Lieutenant C. T. Lofthouse
A common pair with an interesting musical twist
The Royal Navy and the Boer War
Backing up the armies afloat and ashore
“Like True British Soldiers” — Part II
Concluding the story of the mass grave at Villers-Cotterets
“Syder”
Heroism of the 2nd Battalion at Neuve Chapelle
A Shropshire lad’s Military Cross
A past shrouded in uncertainty
Readers survey
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Regular Features:
THE EDITORIAL
NEWS AND VIEWS
MARKET SCENE
BOOKSHELF
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
ON PARADE
DEALERS’ LISTS
MEDAL TRACKER
CLASSIFIED ADVERTISING
DIARY
Medal News
November 2008
Volume 46 No. 10
Lest we forget
We must remember
There can be few in our hobby, indeed one hopes few in the country, who do not realise that this November marks 90 years since the end of World War I. It has been nine decades since the guns fell silent at eleven o’clock on the eleventh of the eleventh and "the war to end wars" came to a close. As we all know, the fond hope that hostilities between all peoples would end for all time was in vain. Barely 20 years later the same protagonists were fighting each other in another global conflict and only the advent of nuclear weaponry stopped a third world war—smaller wars, of course, did not end. Incredibly only one year of the 20th century-1968-saw no British servicemen killed on active duty and, as we know, the early years of the 21st century have had more than their fair share of tragedies in Iraq and Afghanistan. On reflection the hope that the "Great War" really would be the final conflict was an impossible dream: aggression is a human trait, just as it is in so many other members of the animal kingdom and whilst it is true that we seem to have added other elements like religion, greed and politics to add fuel to the fire and make that aggression worse, there can be little doubt that even were we all to become apolitical atheists somebody would still find something to fight about. For thousands of years wars have been fought-from the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Greece and Rome, through the medieval conflicts in Western Europe and the Crusades to the Holy Land onto the Empire Building of the 19th century and beyond-ever since mankind could think rational thoughts (and probably before), there has been conflict. The world is an imperfect place, the people who live on it are imperfect people and such imperfection inevitably leads to disharmony and conflict... even millions of men living and dying in the trenches of France and Flanders wasn’t going to stop that.
War then is a human failing and the television pictures we sit down to every
