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[[File:raphael-tuck-1915-12-glorious-battles-of-english-history.jpg|thumb|200px|right|Glorious Battles of English History (december 1915)]]
[[File:raphael-tuck-1915-12-glorious-battles-of-english-history-titlepage.jpg|thumb|200px|right|Glorious Battles of English History (december 1915)]]

''Glorious Battles of English History'' is a book written by [[C.H. Wylly]] published by [[Raphael Tuck & Sons]] in december 1915 and including a foreword by [[Arthur Conan Doyle]].

== Foreword by Arthur Conan Doyle ==
[[File:raphael-tuck-1915-12-p7-glorious-battles-of-english-history.jpg|thumb|200px|right|Glorious Battles of English History (december 1915, p. 7)]]
[[File:raphael-tuck-1915-12-p8-glorious-battles-of-english-history.jpg|thumb|200px|right|Glorious Battles of English History (december 1915, p. 8)]]
[[File:raphael-tuck-1915-12-p9-glorious-battles-of-english-history.jpg|thumb|200px|right|Glorious Battles of English History (december 1915, p. 9)]]

Only a year or so ago, had one been honoured by the request to write a few introductory words to such a work as this, one would have had to speculate whether the case of modern life and the softening influence of general education have still left men of the British race with the qualities which are here commemorated. Every nation needs from time to time to be reassured as to its virility. We have had our reassurance. One short year has sufficed to show that the military history of Great Britain is not a dead thing, but one so quick with life that there is not a deed which adorns these pages but has been equalled or even exceeded by our brothers and our sons. Every lesson of old has been renewed and confirmed. Corunna showed that a British Army, retreating and outnumbered, was still as dangerous as a wounded tiger to its pursuer. But did Sir John Moore and his men prove it more clearly than Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien's second corps when it faced round its feeble batteries to the fire of four German Anny Corps and held up Von Kluck during that long showery August morning? Wellington was immovable at Torres Vedras which covered Lisbon, but was he more steadfast than French in those iron lines which barred the road to Calais ? Waterloo has been the classical example of the steadiness of the British infantryman, but did he not stand as firmly, and against far greater odds, when the Prussians reeled back beaten and exhausted from the salient of Ypres? We have set up new records and new examples for the future.

And yet all that has been done has grown out of the past. It is the final fruit of these very deeds which are set forth in Major Wylly's fascinating pages. The British Army is small, but it has some very great assets, and of these the greatest of all is its tremendous tradition. The ''esprit de corps'' of the regiments is the growth of two hundred years, and who can shake that which is so rooted in the past? It was but the other day that the Guards and the 1st Kings, as they fell back with the second division in Belgium, passed over the graves of their own comrades who fell at Malplacquet. One step takes us from French to Marlborough. Could they be anything but heroes when they thought of the ancestors whose place they filled? At every crisis the war cry of the dead sounds clear in the ear of the living. How often, for example, have the Middlesex Regiment, every battalion of which has done such work in the war, strengthened its courage at the thought of the historic name, the Die-hards, which has so long been the proud title of the old 57th! How often, too, has the memory of Albuera stiffened the line of the Fusiliers, or that of Inkermann reminded the Guards that no odds can dismay them! Sometimes the military situation is exactly repeated. It was the 52nd Regiment which broke Napoleon's Guard at Waterloo. It was the same 52nd (now changed into the 2nd Ox and Bucks Light Infantry) which broke the Prussian Guard in the Polygon Wood. So one great deed inspires another.

The military history of Rome or of Sparta is glorious, but it is dead. That of Britain is glorious, but it still lives and works in the minds and hearts of our soldiers. Good luck, then, to the man and God-speed to the book which carry on its traditions to strengthen those unborn in the days that are to come.

:: ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE.
: CROWBOROUGH,
: 1915.

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* [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:Complete Works|Back to Complete Works]]
* [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|Back to Conan Doyle]]

Glorious Battles of English History - Revision history

TCDE-Team at 14:48, 1 June 2025