“The Lamps are Going Out…”
Britain declares war on Germany
It was dusk when the British Foreign Secretary, Edward, Viscount Grey of Fallodon, stood beside his wife at his window in the Foreign Office in London on the evening of the 3rd of August, 1914. They were watching a lamplighter turning on lamps in St. James’s Park. During the two weeks just past, the news from the Continent had grown ever more ominous; the talk of war was now constant.
As, one by one, the lamps in the park below his window were illuminated, Grey murmured the irony that pressed in upon him at that moment: “The lamps are going out all over Europe and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” Britain declared war on Germany the next evening.
The lamps did come back on again in his lifetime, but the world they illuminated had died with the declarations of war. The long shadows cast by the evening sunlight seem a presage of the catastrophe that began in August with those several declarations of war.
