The Hokitika Guardian THERSDAY JUNE 22nd 1922 MARLBOROUGH.

Hokitika Guardian, 22 June 1922, Page 2

The Hokitika Guardian THERSDAY JUNE 22nd 1922 MARLBOROUGH.

| A reviewer in referring to two recent publications affecting the life and wars of the Duke of Marlborough, including his association with the rise of the British Army and the wars he engaged >». goes on to say that few great .Englishmen have gained so little applause for their virtues and so much discredit lor their vices as John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. Macaulay rewards him for quarrelling with William 111 by insisting on all the worst stories Marlborough’s enemies could invent about him in a notoriously partisan and libelloving nge ; Thackeray depends on Switt and Foi e, two of his most virulent detractors, for the portrait in “Esmondo” Southey chose Blenheim as the typical example of a useless battle, and no one until very recently has troubled to dispute the choice. No one, that is to say. in England. Turn to Frnnce--where for a hundred years “Marbrouk was the most dreaded of bogeys—and we find Napoleon devoting special study to Marlborough’s campaigns, and one of Napoleon’s best generals finding bis highest expression of praise for Wellington’ s victory at Salamanca in the phrase. “It classes Lord Wellington almost on the level of MnrlhorVmgh.” And now at last in England sober historians, neither intoxicated with the bootleggors’ whiskey of Swift and Macaulay,, nor sodden with the emotional pacifism of the Soutlieyitos, have begun to construct from a mass of contemporary material (English and and French) « truer picture of the man t

who saved Europe from a worse tyranny than Napoleon’s or that projected hv the Hohenzollerns: The two bulky lull entirely readable and trustworthy volumes compiled by Frank Taylor in 1905-13, delayed by the war and only published last year, have been independently confirmed by the researches and conclusions of another Oxford historian. 0. T. Atkinson, whose more condensed story has only just reached Australia, it would he impossible to review here the arguments—based on persistent enquiry into even- atom of evidence attainable on practically every important event in the Duke’s life—with which both Taylor and Atkinson establish their hero as the saviour of Europe and probably the greatest military genius Britain lias ever produced: the facts are set forth, and readers may form their own conclusions. Suffice it- to say that the indeeisiveness of tiis campaigns was due to continuous and deliberate interference by his Dutch and Austrian allies, compared to which the troubles (real u r alleged) of Joffre and French and Fooh an<t Idovd George were pleasantries among lovers; and that he mis not only a master of'mTlitnry ruse and stratagem, a lighting general compact ( f foresight, level-headed ness and vigour. and a diplomatist far beyond the ordinary, hut a leader more trusted an | loved hv his men than any of whom we have i,-(■<,l-J except perhaps Napoleon at his host. “7t is quite itnj>ossiT>lc,” wrote one of his subordinates, “to express the jov which the sight of the man gave me at this critic-1 moment . . and indeed we had all the icnson in the world for it, for lie neve led us to any one action that We did not succeed in,”