Turning the Flank at Reval: We Are Men of Desperation. And Desperate Men Scrap Until They Are Dead or Win.

Soldiers!

This is the last hour. And this is judgement day.

We have fought backwards grimly, trading space for time, boxing the Hun’s square ears round both sides of his square head, and whittling him away. But now there is nothing left to men of desperation but to fight and to win.

We are men of desperation. And desperate men scrap until they are dead or win.

I need not paint too black the picture that sits before us. The enemy stands upon the precipice- if he falls forwards, he falls on our women and children and our country burns in the black fire of pillage and foreign conquest. If he falls backwards, he falls into the blacker smoke and wrack and ruin of his own fall, and he will lie on his belly and eat the dust of the earth, a ruin among armies and a marvel among the nations. It falls to us to see he falls backwards.

All his victories have lain neither in muscle nor in spirit nor in strategy, but in numbers and mechanised might. And through good fortune and good fighting, we now wield the mechanised might he left by the mountain track. Now every advantage he has ever held of brook, of tree, of motor-car and cannon-gun, sits with us, at the edge of the world and the judgement of the earth.

And we will make him pay.