"... a world of turmoil, bitterness, betrayal, scheming, and distrust, with nations standing not as brothers, but with the hand on the trigger. Again we ask whether the significance of Armistice-day is really understood?" Pertinent comments from the Western Morning News in November ...er... 1923

Overlooking his wonderful prose, as usual 😉

Yes, and people also saw a contrast between old England and the ‘young’ countries like Canada and New Zealand (indigenous were always overlooked) whose men were coming to Salisbury Plain in such numbers

Remember this thread?! bsky.app/profile/john...

PS on the postcard: I think 'Renz’ is William Lorenzo Martin of the New Zealand Field Artillery, who enlisted in Dec 1915, arrived in England in May 1916 & left for France in Jan 1917. The good news is he survived the war (albeit deaf in one ear) and in 1920 married Ethel Maude Nixon, his 'Ett'...

Singing broke out and “so the morning concert proceeded until the hour of sunrise was at hand, when the soldiers, prompted probably by the thought that they might not all be able to again assemble at Stonehenge on midsummer morning, joined hands and awoke the echoes with ‘Auld Lang Syne’.”

“In the darkness the stones partook of an appearance in keeping with the sinister legend attaching to them, black & forbidding… A new feature in the night’s watch was the steady gleam of the lights of Larkhill Camp upon the eastern horizon… Parties of officers and men from the camps began to arrive…

Popular understanding still focussed on tales of human sacrifice, and wasn't that just what the Empire was asking of its citizens? Who knows how many of the men writing postcards home made those connections, but reports on the 1915 solstice hint at the relationship between Stonehenge & the military:

It reads: "Dear Ett, There isn’t a photo of the camp we are in here, but it is at Bulford Camp but in a different part. Best love from Renz xxxxxxxx"
Stonehenge seems incongruous amidst the wartime development, but maybe that wasn't quite the case at a time when the stones had a more sinister edge…

Cracking cover!

Fair enough, but in Surrey there’s a lot of noisy leaf blowing for individualistic aesthetic purposes!

All you really need are a rake, a broom and a plan for where to put them 😊

"What a history has yet to be written of those strange times! The chapters are being slowly spelt out word by word, in caves, in tumuli, by stones and flints, and shell mounds, and carved horn and ivory; just as the cuneiform inscriptions were deciphered by patient ingenuity."

"Off the eastern coast of England the trawl and dredger… brings up to the surface from the silence of the deep… just such tools and weapons, adding to the accumulated evidence of the enormous changes which have taken place since the Stone peoples hunted over what is now the home of the mackerel…