The Kaiser’s war deprived Britain of her centenary celebrations of the victory at Waterloo. It also set the propagandists something of a challenge, for the Kaiser himself had sent an aide-de-camp to the British embassy the day after the declaration of war deploring ‘the action of Great Britain in joining with other nations against her old allies at Waterloo’. A hundred years and all that had passed therein evidently counted for nothing to the imperial mind, though the emperor appeared to have forgotten that Belgian troops had also stood with the allies at Waterloo.
The Times’s leader writer on 18 June 1915 made a good fist of it, however:
A year back we little thought that the centenary of Waterloo would find us again in arms for the cause they [‘our fathers’] so signally vindicated. England fought then for the liberty of Europe and for the safety of these islands, of which that liberty has ever been the necessary bulwark.
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