A Prediction that Proved to be True

The Experience of History victory, that is, a victory in which the victor’s losses are as great as or even greater than those of the defeated. The phrase Pyrrhic victory is named after Greek King Pyrrhus of Epirus (318 – 272 BC), whose army suffered an enormous number of casualties in defeating the Romans at Heraclea in 280 BC and Asculum in 279 BC during the Pyrrhic War. History repeated itself in the twentieth century in the case of the Second World War in which Great Britain was one of the major participants. When the war began, the British Empire was spread over so vast an area that, as the Scottish newspaper Caledonian Mercury once wrote, ‘On her dominions the sun never sets.’2 The example of war is like a plant with thorns, which will produce nothing but thorns when it grows into a tree. One who expects flowers from a thorn tree is living in a fool’s paradise. But towards the end of the Second World War, Britain’s strength became greatly diminished and, because of its inability to retain its control over the empire, it had no option but to set free all its colonies, including India, whose independence was announced by the British Viceroy Lord Mountbatten on August 15, 1947. The greatest disadvantage of war is that its result is generally unforeseeable. In history no war has ever been fought whose consequence turned out to be exactly as expected. War is an entirely unpredictable game, one which causes