Posted on 05/29/2023 8:10:28 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1916, Private Robert Digby was shot by a German firing squad in the tiny northern France village of Villeret.
Digby was the last of a quartet of English soldiers who had been part of the British Expeditionary Force who met the Hun’s first foray into France in 1914.
Digby and his mates, Thomas Donohoe, David Martin and William Thorpe, were stranded behind lines.
Villeret took them in and changed their uniforms for peasant clothes while they worked the fields and tried to keep their heads down.
“Every inhabitant of Villeret knew of the British soldiers in their midst but none breathed a word, although the Germans had threatened to execute anyone harbouring enemy fugitives,” writes Ben McIntyre, who wrote the book on these men. “Even when food ran low and German troops were billeted on every house, the secret was kept safe. It was an astonishing act of collective bravery.”
To the west, in trenches the men could not pass, the war ground uncounted souls into horsemeat.
Digby became the lover of a village girl, and fathered a daughter by her....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
It’s a travesty that crazy old Adolf Hitler wasn’t killed in WW1 in place of this private!
The dragon would merely have given the power to another.
We never know what we would do in that situation.
The thing is - Hitler was the guy at the right time, but there was going to be a WWII.
Why?
Because the German generals realized the war was lost in 1918 when German troops were outside Germany’s borders. By doing so they prevented war coming to the German people but they left the German people with the impression “hey, our soldiers were on enemy soil, so why are we surrendering?” - and that led to the “stab in the back theory” blaming Jews etc. for Germany’s surrender.
Germany had to be destroyed to the core for the German people to see that they had actually been defeated.
This is a parallel to today’s Russia - Russia “lost” its empire with the fall of the USSR, but the fall was not a military crushing defeat, war taken to the Kremlin. Instead it was a gentler defeat.
The people should have seen that this was a loss and focused away from military adventures. But they still believe that a military victory is possible. If instead the country had been focused on improving its human capital, then it would be a stronger power than it is now.
it’s like the Taoist story
There was a great physician and the emperor wanted to award him for curing people.
But the physician said “no, the better awardee is my older brother who treats people while they get a slight cold and it never gets worse. So he never leaves our county and is not known outside it”
“or better is my oldest brother who prevents what can cause disease and hence no one knows the great things he does”
People want the big flashy things - the big flashy win rather than a Sun Tzu defeat by the enemy surrendering with no loss of blood. They want the big flashy loss to know they really lost etc.
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