“The Battle of Dorking

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Author: George Tomkyns Chesney

Number of Pages: 204

The Battle of Dorking (1871) is a vivid account of a German invasion of the United Kingdom, well calculated to inflame British anxieties about the future of Europe and the emergence of Germany as a great military power. `There, across the narrow Straits, was the writing on the wall; but we would not choose to read it.’ Appearing anonymously for the first time in Blackwood’s Magazine, it sparked instant controversy, artfully concealing an argument for universal military service in an old man’s story of too little and too late: the German invaders conquer because they are better trained, better equipped and have a vast conscript army. Saki’s bitter story, When William Came (1913), written when a great European war seemed almost unavoidable, depicts life in Britain under the Hohenzollerns’ rule from Buckingham Palace, and a nation of indolent and self-interested time-servers, deaf to all calls for patriotic action. This book is intended for both the general public & undergraduate/postgraduate students of popular fiction and the First World War Fiction.