Germany’s Secret Weapon
As a last, desperate throw of the dice in the Great War, the Germans detonated an unusual kind of weapon in St Petersburg.
1917
King George V 1910-1936
As a last, desperate throw of the dice in the Great War, the Germans detonated an unusual kind of weapon in St Petersburg.
1917
King George V 1910-1936
At the height of the Great War, beleaguered Britain’s trusty ally Tsar Nicholas II of Russia was forced from his throne. Would the new Russian Government support the Allies? Some were naive enough to think so, but as Winston Churchill explained, the Germans had yet another deadly weapon in their arsenal.
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THE Czar had abdicated on March 15, 1917. The statesmen of the Allied nations affected to believe that all was for the best and that the Russian revolution constituted a notable advantage for the common cause.
In the middle of April the Germans took a sombre decision. Full allowance must be made for the desperate stakes to which the German war leaders were already committed. They were in the mood which had opened unlimited submarine warfare with the certainty of bringing the United States into the war against them. Upon the Western front they had from the beginning used the most terrible means of offence at their disposal. They had employed poison gas on the largest scale and had invented the ‘Flammenwerfer.’*
Nevertheless it was with a sense of awe that they turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.*
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The flamethrower. In fact flamethrowers were invented by the ancient Greeks, and used by the Byzantine Emperors to see off at least two Arab attacks in the 7th century; hence they have been dubbed ‘Greek fire’. The German version was first deployed in 1915, at Verdun against the French and at Hooge against the British.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870-1924), better known as Lenin, arrived in St Petersburg on April 16th, following the ‘February Revolution’ in what was then the capital city. He saw to the cold-hearted, execution-style murder of the Tsar and his entire family, and inspired the bloodthirsty revolution of November (named the ‘October Revolution’ because it was still October on Russia’s traditional calendar) which ultimately brought about the USSR.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.