Faramir on the Throne: the Rise of the Knight King
The Last Real Man in Europe, 1914
The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 is often narrated through great power politics and grand military strategies. Many accounts focus on Germany’s Schlieffen Plan and its consequences for British entry into the war, treating Belgium as mere geography—a convenient route for German armies. That framing obscures a fundamental truth: Belgium resisted, because it had a man for a king. A man who showed a last glimmer of the masculine light of the kings of old Europe.
