FEATURED WEB SITE: WAR MEDALS

This week's Featured Web Site is Project Gutenberg's War Medals and Their History, by W. Augustus Steward. It is suggested by Paul Horner, who writes:

My collection of medals enables me to cover over a hundred years of history; takes me back to the stirring times when men yet met face to face in the Peninsula and at Waterloo; to the men who founded our Indian Empire. It enables me to keep in touch with sailors who fought in the battle of the Nile, at Trafalgar, and at Navarino, that last of all naval battles in which we British took part—our allies were then the French and Russians—until our battleships met those of the Germans in the great war now waging.

It reminds me of the horsemen who made the world wonder ere, with deathless glory, they passed their little day, and of that "thin red line" of Scots, whose cool daring at Balaklava has only been bedimmed by the gallantry of the Light Brigade. It enables me to think more intimately of the men I know who faced the Russians in that terrible winter, and then, like heroes, plodded through the inferno of the Mutiny. It brings back vividly to my mind the days of the Zulu War and the heroism of Rorke's Drift. It reminds me of the daring march to Kandahar and the frontier wars so necessary to hold back the turbulent human surf which beats on the shores of our great Eastern Empire.

It enables me to keep closely in touch with those who so quickly dealt with Arabi Pasha and later faced the fanatical hordes of the Mahdi; the young men of this generation who fought so stubbornly at the Modder River, and who stormed the Tugela Heights. It enables me to keep in touch with those "handymen" and scouts on the fringe of Empire who in Somaliland, Gambia, Benin, Matabeleland, and Bechuanaland uphold the dignity of Britain.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/49986/49986-h/49986-h.htm#

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