Turning the Tide: Erskine Childers and The Riddle of the Sands

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Posted on 12/29/2024 6:22:20 AM PST by Twotone

Early on in The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers' 1903 novel about espionage and conflict between the Great Powers, there's a moment that's either wildly prescient or a statement of simple, brutal facts. Carruthers, a minor employee in the British Foreign Office, has sought to escape London's late summer doldrums by accepting an invitation to join Davies, an old friend from Oxford, on a sailing expedition around the Frisian Islands, where the coasts of Germany and Denmark meet.

Used to wearing white flannel and blue blazers on luxurious pleasure yachts, Carruthers is shocked to discover that the Dulcibella, Davies' boat, is cramped and well-used, and that his eccentric friend expects him to put in some hard graft helping him crew it around the vast tidal mud flats behind the islands of Juist, Norderney and Borkum. They sail past Dybbøl, the scene of the climactic battle of the Second Schleswig War in 1864, where Prussia defeated Denmark and annexed a whole new stretch of coastline.

The war unified the German states into a single country that was now demanding respect from the rest of the world, and Davies for one is impressed.

"Germany's a thundering great nation," he tells Carruthers. "I wonder if we shall ever fight her." In just over a decade Davies would get his answer, after Childers' own novel had helped stoke the simmering geopolitical tension that would explode into global war in August of 1914.

Back in the distant days of 2019 when Mark undertook a serialization of Childers' only novel here, he wrote that "there was a sense in the air that sooner or later Europe would come to war. Did Britain appreciate the threat from Imperial Germany? No, thought Childers..."

(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...

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1 posted on 12/29/2024 6:22:20 AM PST by Twotone

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