2024-07-26
1 小时 9 分钟Thank you for listening to the rest is history.
For weekly bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much loved chat community, go to thererestishistory.com and join the club that is thereestishory.com dot.
For some time we did not speak.
I left the window and stood behind his chair.
So is it all up?
I said.
He answered without looking at me.
Yes, it's all up.
I sat down beside him with a feeling of numbness in my limbs and absently watched through the half open door the backs of moving men.
A secretary came in with foreign office boxes.
He put them down and went out of the room.
Henry sat at his writing table, leaning back with a pen in his hand.
What was he thinking of his sons?
Would they all have to fight?
I got up and leant my head against his.
We could not speak for tears.
So that was Margot Asquith, the wife of Herbert Henry Asquith, the prime minister of Britain, writing in her autobiography.
And she was remembering the evening of Tuesday, the 4 August 1914, which was the night that Britain entered the great War, the first World War, probably the greatest calamity in modern history from which so much else flowed, so many of the great horrors that scarred the history of the 20th century.
And for the Asquiths themselves, it was devastating.
It destroyed the prime minister's premiership.