Worse and Worse

24. August 2023 · 2 comments · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, History, Politics

The trickle of news regarding the Maui wildfires which incinerated an entire town and likely over a thousand of its residents just gets worse and even more distressing with every tidbit reluctantly disgorged by the local authorities. 1,100 are still listed as missing. After a week, it is most likely that they are dead. Many of the missing are presumed to be children, as local schools were closed because of high winds and power outages – and children at home alone because their parents were at work. Others might be senior citizens trapped in a local retirement home, unable to move without assistance, and visiting tourists unfamiliar with the area, whom no one has thought to report missing as yet. That so many are still unaccounted for – especially the children — that is an aspect that is difficult to contemplate. No wonder that local authorities are reluctant to admit the degree of carnage.

The very same national news media who pounded on the failures after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans over and over and over again, with the precision of trip-hammers are relatively silent, since there is not a Republican anywhere in sight to be assigned blame, credibly or otherwise. This brings to mind Iowahawk’s much-quoted quip about covering a story … with a pillow, until it stops moving.

Will the story of the Maui wildfire stop moving soon? It certainly seems to have dropped off the headlines of the major media; although bloggers like Neo are still posting about it, and inviting comments from a handful of people with direct personal knowledge. The whole thing is a farrago of civic fail, from not clearing away flammable brush, to a fire department apparently not equipped with tanker or brush trucks to fight off-road conflagrations, not having access to water to quash the fire after it started, to delayed and/or no warning to residents and holidaymakers, and finally blocking the few exit roads from Lahaina. Perhaps there was a good a good reason for this, because of downed live electric lines – but it doesn’t speak very well of local emergency services, bottling up people in town, leaving most with no choice but to jump into the turbulent ocean or burn alive in their cars or homes. Some reports compare the Lahaina fire to that which destroyed the hill town of Paradise, California, but it seems to me more like the conflagrations of the Hinckley and Peshtigo fires of the 19th century, which burned out whole districts and towns, to the tune of hundreds of deaths – in the case of Peshtigo, thousands. The only people who emerge with any credit from the disaster are that handful who disregarded official orders, drove around the barricades, removing themselves and families from the danger area, or who found a safe refuge and went back over and over again to help others. There are, apparently, a great many good citizens doing their quiet best to assist their friends and neighbors on Maui – unlike Oprah Winfrey, without a camera crew in tow, or like the FEMA operatives, holing up at a luxury beachside resort as the first order of business.

The bald truth about what happened in this disaster will come trickling out, bit by bit, I expect – as survivors talk to each other and to their friends, as much as the national establishment media and the political powers that be try to keep the pillow pressed down. Discuss as you wish.

History Friday: The Infatigable Mother Bickerdyke

21. July 2023 · Comments Off on History Friday: The Infatigable Mother Bickerdyke · Categories: History

Mary Ann Bickerdyke, who really ought to be at least as well-known as Florence Nightingale for superhumanly heroic efforts on behalf of nursing wounded soldiers, was born in 1817 in Ohio to a family with the surname of Ball. At the time, Ohio was the just-over-the-mountains-western frontier. She was supposed to have been one of the first women to attend Oberlin College, but never graduated. The two post-Civil War biographies that I have read say that she was called home to attend family members during an epidemic. She is supposed to have studied herbal/botanical medicine – which given the parlous state of medical education and practice in the United States at the time – probably put her as being as effective a medic as most. She married Robert Bickerdyke and settled in Galesburg, Illinois, where she bore two sons and established a reputation for being a quietly formidable woman.

When Robert Bickerdyke died in 1859 after a long decline in health, in which he was cared for by his wife, the widow Bickerdyke supported herself and sons as a practitioner of herbal medicine, until the summer of 1861, when the Civil War turned deadly earnest in the West. An Army surgeon friend of the Bickerdyke family wrote a letter describing the desperate and chaotic conditions in the Army camp hospital at Cairo, Illinois. Cairo was in a strategic position at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers – a dagger pointed at the heart of the Confederacy, from which the Army of the West would soon being fighting their way down the Mississippi. The letter was read aloud on a Sunday morning in the Congregational church that the Bickerdyke family attended, and the community immediately rallied. Some reports put the quantity of supplies collected to the value of $500, others say that the goods filled four boxcars. And Mary Bickerdyke placed her sons in the care of friends and went to see that the supplies collected with such enthusiasm and care were delivered to the military camp at Cairo and put to good use when they arrived. Too many shipments of goods and home comforts intended for Army units had gone astray or spoiled en route.
The general level of care for the expanded Army called to the colors with the outbreak of war had quite overwhelmed the regular Army, and it fell to individual volunteers like Mary Bickerdyke, and the combined resources of a newly established national organization, the US Sanitary Commission, to remedy matters. In the case of Mary Bickerdyke and the hospital at Cairo, she hit the ground running. The sick lay on dirty linen, clad in shirt fouled by sickness … and in practically no time to speak of, and with the aid of whomever she could press into service – the hospital was transformed. Reportedly, one of the first things that she demanded of the soldiers was to saw a number of hogshead barrels in half, to make bathtubs to bathe patients in. Clean bedlinen and blankets, clean clothing, remedies and all kinds of delicacies to tempt the appetite of invalids appeared as if by a miracle. Mary Bickerdyke so impressed the western department of the Sanitary Commission that she was designated as one of their agents, and so could call on their almost limitless resources.
More importantly, as she widened her scope of activities in providing care to battlefield casualties after she impressed the higher levels of Army command in the west, General Grant, who endorsed her presence and actions as Union forces advanced down the Mississippi. It was the peppery-tempered General Sherman who responded one of his subordinates complaining about her, demanding that he do something about that ‘damned bossy woman’ by saying, “I can’t – she ranks me.” Both Grant and General Sherman appreciated organizational competence and a can-do attitude. Mary Bickerdyke was, for all intents and purposes, the head of the Western Army’s medical command.
She did more than just field nursing – essentially, she was an administrator and organizer, establishing or reorganizing at least 300 hospitals, many in the field as the armies advanced, all the length of the campaigns in the West. She hired escaped slaves to run the hospital laundry, to bake bread in an oven made of numbered bricks, which could be disassembled and moved as the Army advanced, the bread to rise covered in blankets in wagons which she organized. She was responsible also for seeing that some incompetent Army surgeons were sacked. She organized donations from midwestern farms of milk cows and laying hens – all to provide fresh milk and eggs for preparing invalid meals for her patients. At the end of the war, those cows and hens were given to those freed slaves who had worked for her, in hospital kitchens and laundries. It must have been an astonishing sight, Mary Bickerdyke’s mobile hospital on the move, what with wagons of supplies, the portable brick oven, the laundry kettles and mangles, the livestock and all. Eventually she cared for casualties after nineteen battles, including action at Missionary Ridge, outside Chattanooga, where she was the only woman at the field hospital there for nearly a month.
At the end of the war, she rode in the two-day long victory celebration, the Grand Review of the Armies in Washington, DC, with General Sherman’s Army of Tennessee and Army of Georgia. She worked as an advocate for veterans, and other charitable enterprises, was awarded a special government pension, and died in 1901, at the home of her son in Kansas.

History Friday – The Care of an Army

14. July 2023 · Comments Off on History Friday – The Care of an Army · Categories: AARRRMY TRAINING SIR!!!, Ain't That America?, History, War, Working In A Salt Mine...

I’ve been going deep in the weeds in research for the current work in progress, the long-put-aside Civil War novel, concerning the experiences of a spinster of independent means, who is active as an abolitionist lecturer in the 1840-1850 time frame, and a battlefield nurse during the war years. Frankly, the research is fascinating in and of itself; the matter of the existence of slavery in the United States was a contentious and hard-fought-over issue in the antebellum years. It’s been quite the antidote to the current 1619 historical fantasy, reading through memoirs and accounts of and by notable abolitionist crusaders of the time. Not only did the existence of the ‘peculiar institution’ in the pre-war South retard economic progress there (as industry and immigration favored the North) but the fight against it was sustained and uncompromising. The first half of the book is just about complete – it’s the second half, concerning the war and most particularly the operation of field hospitals that has me deep in another field of weeds now, discovering some extraordinary stories and some extraordinary women.
One of the reasons that I love writing historical fiction – I very rarely need to create anything of whole cloth and imagination; generally, the honest-n-truth version of events often surpasses anything I could possibly make up. So it is with the epic of a little-recalled national volunteer relief organization called, most prosaically, the United States Sanitary Commission, which mobilized women for the war effort to an extraordinary degree – as nurses, administrators, counselors and organizers of countless benefits to raise funds for military support, the care and healing of the wounded, and later, for the welfare of veterans.

The existing pre-Civil War US Army was a small one as national armies of the times counted, with a correspondingly tiny medical corps. Hospitals at various forts and camps were minimal, usually no more than thirty or forty beds. There was no large centralized military general hospital; medical care of the sick or injured normally fell to orderlies or those soldiers who themselves were convalescent. All of that went out the window when recruiting surged, upon secession of Confederate states and the fall of Fort Sumter. Almost the moment that the newly-formed companies and regiments marched away, the wives, sisters and mothers of those new soldiers went home and ransacked their cupboards and pantries for home comforts – food, clothing, blankets, bits of this or that, writing materials, bandages and medicines for the lads recruited for a regional unit. Some of these first efforts were either ridiculously useless or went astray in transit – inexpertly canned items rotted, jars broke, and the contents of such ruined whatever else they had been packed with. It was all a muddle, at first – but in the middle of June, 1861 Congress authorized the creation of the Sanitary Commission, and it took off with a roar, mostly because many smaller regional and local relief groups eagerly joined their considerable efforts to the national Commission.

Although the national leadership of the Commission at the upper levels were male, women made up an extraordinarily large number of mid-level workers, fund-raisers, administrators, nurses and general support personnel. Being also proud of their contribution, many of those women contributed memoirs written after the war, and those accounts make for stirring reading. (There was a lot of overlap between abolitionists, temperance activists and women’s rights advocates during that period, and many of the best-known women campaigners were active on all three fronts, as well as being friends and associates.)
One of the best and most readable accounts that I am exploring was by Mary Ashton Livermore, who also served as reporter and editor for a newspaper which her Universalist husband owned. Mary Livermore was co-head of the Chicago branch of the Sanitary Commission and penned a particularly vivid description of what a day at work at “the office” involved – the sounds, the bustle of draymen delivering and dispatching boxes, the sights, the and the smells. (An account almost unique for a lack of florid Victorian purple prose, thickets of which must be metaphorically hacked through in other contemporary accounts.) Donations and items of all sorts arrived from all over the state and the mid-west, to be unpacked, sorted, inventoried, re-packed according to commodity, and sent out to those hospitals which had urgently requested them. That was on the first floor of the building housing the Chicago branch -the second floor was given over to sewing machines and volunteer seamstresses producing shirts, necessary linens, and hospital garments. The Commission office also served as a communications hub – for families wanting news of their soldiers, and for dispatching parties of nurses to hospitals where they were needed – especially following on a battle or a military advance.

One of those notable nurses was the formidable widow Mary Jane Bickerdyke. A curious thing that perhaps we do not consider today was how large a porportion of a woman’s domestic duties then involved caring for the sick and invalid. Mary Bickerdyke had cared for her invalid husband for years before he passed away. It must have been much the same for other women volunteer nurses – they had already done a lot of practical nursing, without the benefit of any formal medical training as such. And so, they followed the armies, to tend their boys, their sons and brothers.

(To be continued – the adventures of Mary Jane Bickerdyke in the Union Army of the West. The story is that one of General Grant’s juniors fumed to the General about ‘that damned bossy woman, and couldn’t the General do something about her?’ To which General Grant is supposed to have replied long the lines of, ‘I can’t – she ranks me.)

History Friday – The Murder of a Very Modern Major General

29. June 2023 · Comments Off on History Friday – The Murder of a Very Modern Major General · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, War

This post was inspired by a terse note next to a picture of the gentleman in question, on a page in one of my reference books – a note that the Confederate commander, one Major General Earl Van Dorn was murdered in mid-campaign, in his HQ in Spring Hill, Tennessee by an outraged husband. A personal thing, not an arranged assassination … or was it? Intrigued, for such is my butterfly interest in such matters, I went snorkeling around in the various sources, searching for more details.

Like the character in Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical Pinafore, Earl Van Dorn was a very modern major general for the 19th century; a handsome cavalryman, the very beau ideal of a certain breed of Victorian male. He was accounted to be very handsome, by the standards of the time, although my personal reaction is meh; the enormous bushy soup-strainer mustache in contemporary photographs is off-putting to me, but photographic portraiture of the time really doesn’t do much in establishing the raw sexual appeal of anyone. But Van Dorn was also a charismatic and flamboyant personality, so that may account for it. He was a gallant officer in service to the Noble Cause, cutting a splendid figure in the gray and gold-hung uniform of the Confederacy … he wrote poetry, painted, was a consummate horseman … and notoriously, loved the ladies, who loved him right back. He loved them so much that he had long been known as the terror of ugly husbands and nervous papas everywhere.

He was a Regular Army officer, a heroic veteran of the war with Mexico, who had thereafter served a somewhat rewarding and satisfactory career on the Texas frontier. He was accounted to be a master of cavalry command; fearless, able, competent. He was also a great grandnephew of Andrew Jackson, being born to one of Jackson’s nieces; a place at West Point was thereby assured, although he successfully graduated 52 out of 68 places, due to use of tobacco, failure to salute superiors and extravagant use of profanity. He had several sisters who adored him, a wife whom he married after graduating from West Point – and sired two children with her, although never quite being able to establish a permanent home for his family. Whether this was due to disinclination and lack of enthusiasm on either part, or the brutal requirements of service in the military in those decades is a matter of speculation. He had mixed success as a commander in the first few years of the Civil War – a loss at Pea Ridge in a Confederate attempt to take St. Louis, another in the Second Battle of Corinth, but slashing success as a cavalry commander in fights at Holly Springs, Thompson’s Station, and the first battle at Franklin.

In the spring of 1863, Van Dorn was stationed in Spring Hill, Tennessee, thirty miles south of Nashville and almost in the dead center of the state. According to some accounts, Van Dorn and his staff were first billeted in home of local magnate Aaron White and his wife and family, but that didn’t last long. Accounts vary – some have it that Mrs. White was unhappy at having most of her home taken over as a military HQ, leaving her family with a just couple of bedrooms and access to the kitchen. She was even more unhappy – scandalized, even – when rumors began to fly about General Van Dorn’s romance with a married woman in Spring Hill. Jessie Peters was the very pretty, flirtatious, and much younger third wife of Dr. George Peters, who very openly came to visit the General at the White residence – a considerable breach of Victorian etiquette. Mr. and Mrs. White were not pleased at this scandalous turn of events. At about this time, Van Dorn moved his headquarters to another residence in Spring Hill, the mansion owned by one Martin Cheairs, about half a mile distant. (Both houses still stand, apparently.)

George Peters was a wealthy landowner and politician, a doctor, and often gone on business for long periods of time, leaving his young wife to find her own amusements, domestic and otherwise. It was also rumored that he was of Union sympathies, but nevertheless, upon his return to Spring Hill in early April, 1863 Dr. Peters became aware of the rumors concerning his wife and General Van Dorn, the long unchaperoned carriage rides they went on together, and the General’s many visits to the Peters home. To say the very least, Dr. Peters was not pleased, especially after he caught his wife and the General in a passionate embrace. Angry words were exchanged; George Peters threatened to shoot Van Dorn then and there. Supposedly Van Dorn asked for forgiveness and took the blame for the affair all to himself … and the matter seemed to be smoothed over.

But two or three weeks later, Dr. Peters appeared at the Cheairs house, asking to speak to General Van Dorn. Assuming that he wanted another permit allowing him to pass through the Confederate lines, he was directed into the study where Van Dorn sat at his writing desk, hard at work. Dr. Peters pulled out a pistol and shot Van Dorn in the back of the head. No one among the general’s staff took notice of Dr. Peters’ swift departure – not until the young daughter of the Cheairs family ran out of the house, exclaiming that the General had been shot. Of course, everyone rushed into the study, where they found Van Dorn unconscious, but still breathing. He died hours later, much mourned across the South, although there seemed to have been many who considered that he had brought it upon himself with his reckless pursuit of women captivated by his personal appeal.
Eventually, Dr. Peters was apprehended and arrested for the murder, but curiously, never tried. He insisted that Van Dorn had, in his words, “violated the sanctity of his home.” Most everyone then and since assumed that it meant Van Dorn’s affair with Jessie Peters. But was it? A novel by another indy author, also fascinated by the conundrum and possessed of certain local-specific resources, suggests that the motive for murder was not simply Van Dorn’s affair with Jessie Peters but his seduction of Clara Peters, Dr. Peter’s unmarried teenage daughter from an earlier marriage … a doubly scandalous matter which resulted in Clara Peters being pregnant.

Just another rabbit-hole in the pursuit of writing engaging historical fiction – additional evidence that our 19th century forbearers were at least as horny as humans anywhere else. They just … didn’t do it in the road and frighten the horses. Comment as you wish.

6 June 1944

06. June 2023 · Comments Off on 6 June 1944 · Categories: History

So this is one of those historic dates that seems to be slipping faster and faster out of sight, receding into a past at such a rate that we who were born afterwards, or long afterwards, can just barely see. But it was such an enormous, monumental enterprise – so longed looked for, so carefully planned and involved so many soldiers, sailors and airmen – of course the memory would linger long afterwards.

Think of looking down from the air, at that great metal armada, spilling out from every harbor, every estuary along England’s coast. Think of the sound of marching footsteps in a thousand encampments, and the silence left as the men marched away, counted out by squad, company and battalion, think of those great parks of tanks and vehicles, slowly emptying out, loaded into the holds of ships and onto the open decks of LSTs. Think of the roar of a thousand airplane engines, the sound of it rattling the china on the shelf, of white contrails scratching straight furrows across the moonless sky.

Think of the planners and architects of this enormous undertaking, the briefers and the specialists in all sorts of arcane specialties, most of whom would never set foot on Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha or Utah Beach. Many of those in the know would spend the last few days or hours before D-day in guarded lock-down, to preserve security. Think of them pacing up and down, looking out of windows or at blank walls, wondering if there might be one more thing they might have done, or considered, knowing that lives depended upon every tiny minutiae, hoping that they had accounted for everything possible.

Think of the people in country villages, and port towns, seeing the marching soldiers, the grey ships sliding away from quays and wharves, hearing the airplanes, with their wings boldly striped with black and white paint – and knowing that something was up – But only knowing for a certainty that those men, those ships and those planes were heading towards France, and also knowing just as surely that many of them would not return.

Think of the commanders, of Eisenhower and his subordinates, as the minutes ticked slowly down to H-Hour, considering all that was at stake, all the lives that they were putting into this grand effort, this gamble that Europe could be liberated through a force landing from the West. Think of all the diversions and practices, the secrecy and the responsibility, the burden of lives which they carried along with the rank on their shoulders. Eisenhower had in his pocket the draft of an announcement, just in case the invasion failed and he had to break off the grand enterprise; a soldier and commander hoping for the best, but already prepared for the worst.

Think on this day, and how the might of the Nazi Reich was cast down. June 6th was for Hitler the crack of doom, although he would not know for sure for many more months. After this day, his armies only advanced once – everywhere else and at every other time, they fell back upon a Reich in ruins. Think on this while there are still those alive who remember it at first hand.

A Visit To Fort Sam

05. June 2023 · Comments Off on A Visit To Fort Sam · Categories: AARRRMY TRAINING SIR!!!, History, Local

I had reason to visit Fort Sam Houston last Friday – to pick up a set of prescriptions, at the new and vastly expanded BX mall, going through that one back gate where Harry Wurzbach dead-ends, after wandering past the military cemetery, the golf course and the Towers at Park Lane. It’s been a familiar haunt to me for years, even if I was never assigned there, or had reason to go to any offices when I was active duty. It was an open post back then – so wide-open that it was only embarrassment that kept the Fort Sam EM/NCO club from being listed as off-limits to Air Force personnel. (There was, according to scuttlebutt, a dissolute and faintly dangerous element which used to hang out at that club.) I used to take a short-cut through the post on North New Braunfels to circumvent traffic jams on the Pan-Am Highway, when I had to drive through to Lackland AFB from where I lived on the north-east side of town. I was basically familiar with the older part; the stately red-brick Victorian senior officer-housing mansions along the northern and western side of the monumental, L-shaped parade ground, and the series of enormous three-story neo-Spanish Colonial style tile-roofed administration buildings and barracks which lined the opposite side. The mansions along “colonel’s row” always looked well kept, but in the few years after I retired, some of the older buildings began looking pretty ragged, decrepit even. I sometimes wondered if the Army had given up on painting them altogether, trimming shrubbery and pulling up weeds in the lawns around. Part of the peace dividend, I guessed.

 

Fort Sam Houston – familiarly known as “Fort Sam” is itself a pretty historic place – nearly as historic as the Presidio of the Alamo, the military post that it replaced, late in the 1870s. The Alamo, first established as the Spanish military HQ in Texas, went right on being used as a military post, through possession by Mexican soldiers, Texian volunteers, the US Army, and the Confederate States Army. The US Army took possession again, following the Civil War, when it was headquarters and logistical supply base for the US Army in the trans-Mississippi West, in the days of the Indian wars. But by the mid-1870s, the Army had outgrown the crumbling adobe and stone structures around Alamo Plaza. The city had also spread far enough to surround the old Presidio and considerably cramp military operations. The Army suggested closing the post to save money. The city fathers, probably horrified at the thought of losing the custom of the Army post, as well as the presence of a relatively free-spending garrison, immediately donated 92 acres of land on the low hills north of town and well outside the-then city limits.

 

For the Army it was a chance to start afresh, building exactly what they needed; generous warehouse space to store Army supplies brought up from Galveston and other coastal ports, offices for the supply sergeants and officers to work in, facilities to care for the horses, and the soldiers, and their families. A birds-eye map of San Antonio done in the 1880s clearly shows the original Fort Sam establishment; a single structure called the Quadrangle, a range of two-story buildings around an open courtyard adorned at one end with an ornate clock tower. The Quadrangle also served as an open-air prison in 1886. Geronimo, the last of the fighting Apache chiefs and some of his warrior band were held in the quadrangle for 40 days, while the federal government decided what to do with him. It’s only a legend that the small herd of tame deer currently living in the Quadrangle are those descended from a herd provided to Geronimo’s band as part of their ration issue.

By the turn of the last century, Fort Sam was the second largest military post in the United States. Practically every Army officer serving between the 1880s through World War II passed through Fort Sam at one time or another. Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” rendezvoused and trained there before shipping to Cuba to charge up San Juan Hill. Whenever I pass by the open stretch of the parade ground, I am reminded that it was on that patch of level, open ground that then-Lieutenant Benjamin Foulois of the Signal Corps took off in a 1909 Wright Flyer, dubbed “Army Airplane #1” for a series of demonstration flights in 1910 – four takeoffs, three successful landings, the series concluded with a crash. Lt. Foulois was, for an interesting early period in military aviation, the entire Air Corps/Air Force. Fort Sam also supplied the men and material for General John “Black Jack” Pershing’s expedition into Mexico, chasing after Pancho Villa in 1916. At the very far end of the parade ground is the old Brooke Army Medical Center (built in 1936), formerly the Station Hospital, replaced in the 1990s with an even larger and more splendid complex to the east of Fort Sam. Dwight Eisenhower met and married his wife, Mamie Dowd, while stationed at Fort Sam as a young lieutenant. General Billy Mitchell was assigned to Fort Sam after being court-martialed and demoted. At the end of WWII training of Army medical personnel was consolidated there, and military medical training for all the other armed services was moved to Fort Sam more than a decade ago. This makes it a very busy training facility; it is a showplace for military medicine, which is the reason that I go there for regular visits like today.

I have read that if the post is ever closed, and all facilities revert to the city of San Antonio (like the Presidio in San Francisco) that the stock of historic buildings in the city inventory would double right then and there. Most of those buildings are still in use, though – at present, only the Quadrangle is open to the general public. But there are two museums, also open to the public, that between them give a very good idea of the scope of Fort Sam’s history and present missions: The Fort Sam Houston Museum, and the US Army Medical Department Museum.

The Hard “Nope”

28. February 2023 · Comments Off on The Hard “Nope” · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, General, History, Stupidity, World

It was a post at Bookroom Room that led me to jump aboard this particular train of thought – that most of us have certain concepts embedded in us so firmly that absolutely nothing will ever get us to violate them. As Bookworm put it, “Because as I’ve contended for years, every person has one absolute truth. It’s the one thing they know to their bones is true and the world must align with that truth … For my mother, who would have been a fashionista if she’d had the money, style and beauty were her truths. She sucked up all the lies about Barack and Michelle Obama until the media talking heads said that Michelle was the most beautiful, stylish first lady ever, above and beyond even Jackie Kennedy. That ran headlong into Mom’s truth and, after that, she never again believed what the media had to say about the Obamas.”
It’s a concept worth considering – our own truths, which we will stubbornly hold on to, refusing any threats or blandishments. It varies from person to person, of course. Some have only small and irrelevant truths, which are never seriously threatened, and there are those who have no real truths at all, save perhaps self-aggrandizement – but even so, for some keeping to their truth is a hard struggle, deciding to hold to that truth against everything – especially if they have status or a living to make, in denying that truth.

Sam Houston, as governor of Texas on the eve of the Civil War, refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy, required by a newly-passed law upon secession from the United States. Twice elected president of an independent Texas, and the general who had secured freedom from the Centralist dictator, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna nearly fifteen years before, Houston had labored mightily to secure annexation of Texas to the US. Secession from the Union must have nearly broken the old man’s heart. Most accounts have it that he paced the floor of his office for an entire night, considering whether he would take the oath … or not. He did not; he resigned all office and retired to his home in Huntsville, where he died several years later. When all was said and done, Houston was a believer in the Union, and devoted to Texas. When it came to secession and swearing an oath of fealty to the Confederates – a hard “nope” for the hero of San Jacinto.

My own personal biggest hard “nope” has to do with so-called anthropogenic global warming/global cooling/climate change concept alleged to be caused by human activity and industry. I don’t care how much the autistic Swedish teenager scowls at us all, or Al Gore flies from his many lavish mansions, to one important conference after another, to lecture us all about our carbon footprint. Earth’s temperatures and conditions have swung wildly over millennia, without any help from human beings at all. Canada and the north-central US were once covered by a mile of ice. The Sahara desert was once a grassland interspersed with marshes, rivers and lakes. In Roman times, it was temperate enough in England to grow wine grapes, while around 1000 AD it was warm enough for subsistence farming in Greenland … and then the climate turned colder all across Europe, until the River Thames froze solid enough between the 14th and 18th centuries to host so-called Frost Fairs on the solid ice. Avenues of shops opened on the ice, racing events, puppet shows and all manner of entertainments took place. The massive explosion of an Indonesian volcano in early 1815, on the other hand, led to a so-called year without summer in the northern hemisphere in 1816. The climate of earth has changed drastically, without any human input over conditions – even before humans existed, so what the heck have gas stoves or gasoline engines – or even coal-fired power plants have to do with it?

Reprise Post; At the Tomb of Couperin – Thoughts on a Centenary

11. November 2022 · Comments Off on Reprise Post; At the Tomb of Couperin – Thoughts on a Centenary · Categories: History, Military, Veteran's Affairs, War

(For Veteran’s Day – a reprise post from 2018)

There is a lovely little classical piece by Maurice Ravel – Le Tombeau de Couperin, composed shortly after the end of the war, five of the six movements dedicated to the memory of an individual, and one for a pair of brothers, all close friends of the composer, every one of them fallen in a war of such ghastliness that it not only put paid to a century of optimistic progress, but barely twenty years later it birthed another and hardly less ghastly war. Maurice Ravel himself was over-age, under-tall and not in the most robust of health, but such was the sense of national emergency that he volunteered for the military anyway, eventually serving as a driver – frequently under fire and in danger. Not the usual place to find one of France’s contemporarily-famous composers, but they did things differently at the end of the 19th Century and heading all wide-eyed and optimistic into the 20th. Citizens of the intellectual and artistic ilk were not ashamed of their country, or feel obliged to apologize for a patriotic attachment, or make a show of sullen ingratitude for having been favored by the public in displaying their talents.

The war whose casualties Ravel memorialized in that way ended exactly a hundred years ago today; the eleventh month, eleventh day, eleventh hour. It seems now to have been unimaginably distant at this point. The soldiers who fought in it for every nation and yet managed by pluck and luck to survive are all gone now … but like a long-healed wound, that war left horrific scars both physical and psychic. Woodlands and meadows the length of the Western Front across Belgium and France to this day are still marked by trenchworks, crumbling fortifications, the soil still poisoned by chemicals. All across Europe, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany, what remained of Austria-Hungary – and the US, to a lesser extent – the smallest villages and the largest cities alike have memorials. Sometimes they are in odd corners, most often in a prominent place, with engraved tablets of names; the most notable were usually designed by the architectural great and good, standing on or near the battlefields themselves. The smallest memorials are sometimes the most moving – especially when the same handful of names appear. Everyone in this tiny village would have known this man or that, not just the immediate family and friends. This man, his neighbor, the boy who polished boots or delivered the mail; this and this, a hundred and a thousand times over. When those memorial monuments were first put up, the loss of the men – and sometimes of women – was a raw and savage grief. The observer picks up immediately on the sense of loss, the grief, the futile attempt to make a sense out of the cruelty visited on that community; they were here, they were of value, and now they are gone! The only thing we can do is to remember them.

The political and psychic scars from the First World War, I think, have proved to be the deepest, and the longest-lasting. We are still dealing politically with the fall-out and the razor-edged shards of broken empires. The Austro-Hungarian empire splintered into component nations; Russia replaced the Romanovs and old ruling nobility with an even more vicious ruling class, the Ottoman Empire both splintered geographically, replacing the old inefficient Sultanate with an equally inefficient and/or vicious assortment of local ruling talent. Germany, wracked in defeat, replaced their supreme ruler serially with inefficient democracy and then crowned that debacle with Hitler, suffering another round of defeat and division. France – gutted of a generation of able, healthy and patriotic young men, required for the continuance of a stable society, those friends whom Ravel honored and mourned in his composition. Great Britain and her far-flung Empire, also gutted of men and the supreme societal self-confidence required to maintain that Empire, fell apart on a slower timetable. Documented in small and large ways in western literature and in even popular contemporary genre novels, the war marked a turning, a vast gulf, a shattering of the old, 19th Century optimism, and the certainty that things were bound – with the aid of science and industry – to only get better and better for that part of the world which thought of itself as ‘civilized.’ To the characters created for a mass audience by Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and any number of others – there seems in retrospect to be a “before” and an “after” to the war, which slashed a sharp dividing line across the cultural landscape; skirts were shorter, morals looser, music louder and more discordant, politics more rancorous, manners coarsened and buildings uglier. The shock and the loss of certainty in so much which had once been thought solid, stable, eternal … the reverberations when the guns finally fell silent on that day are still rippling across our consciousness, even when we don’t quite know why.

Also – found through Ace of Spades HQ – a meditation on Veteran’s Day, and how the Vietnam veterans were treated by the public – and generally slimed as unstable, drug-addled losers by the media for years after the war was over. I’m old enough to remember how veterans in the early 1970s were advised to leave a term of military service off their professional resumes.

The Light of Rutupaie Going Out

02. August 2022 · Comments Off on The Light of Rutupaie Going Out · Categories: Cry Wolf, European Disunion, History, Literary Good Stuff, War

Rutupaie, the modern Richborough Castle, in Kent, England – was once the site of a notable Roman military garrison graced by an enormous marble triumphal arch visible to ships arriving in the port, a tall lighthouse, and a thriving civilian town with an amphitheater. The lighthouse and the triumphal arch are long gone, but a large portion of the circuit of twenty-five-foot-high walls still remain visible above ground. This was the terminus of Watling Streat, a keystone in the network of carefully engineered roads which covered Britain like a net. It was most likely the site of the original Roman bridgehead in the time of the Emperor Claudius, which would in large part become the province of Britannia. Rutupaie became the major port of entry all throughout the four centuries that Roman power held sway over that far and misty isle, their ships and galleys guided into safe harbor after dark by the fire atop the lighthouse.
In one of the opening chapters of the novel The Lantern Bearers, a young Roman-British soldier makes his decision to remain in Britain when the legions are finally and officially withdrawn by order of the Emperor. Having deserted his unit as they are on the point of departure for the last time, he lights the great fire atop the lighthouse, as the galleys row away on the evening tide; a last defiant fire, as darkness descends. Peter Grant, who blogs at Bayou Renaissance Man noted this week that Rosemary Sutcliff’s series of novels about the Romans in Britain and the long, slow, painful dying of Roman civilization there were being republished at a reasonable price in eBook. This reminded me again of my very favorite historical author; The finest and most evocative historical novel ever in English is either the Rider of the White Horse or her retelling of the Arthurian epic, Sword at Sunset. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s version, The Mists of Avalon, is overwrought trash in comparison.

The haunting element of Rosemary Sutcliff’s series, which beings with The Eagle of the Ninth and ends with The Shield Ring, is the slow dying of a civilization, and how ofttimes those people in it look around, and know without a doubt that things are not as they once were and might never be again, for all that they might do. They see the unmistakable evidence, know that their world is disintegrating bit by bit, even as the Roman-built cities, garrisons and farmsteads in Britain decay or were abandoned, in the wake of continuing invasions by the Saxon tribes from the mainland. These various characters are haunted by knowledge that the best they can do may not be enough to keep the light of Rutupaie on for another night. They fought gallantly and died bravely, holding off the barbarian hordes who came over the walls and swept the old Roman laws, culture and establishments, civil and actual into oblivion and all memory, save for the archeologist’s trowel and the writer’s art. The walls crumbled, the roads were grown over, the cities either vanished underneath the green turf, or were inhabited by people who built simple timber shacks among the colonnades and walls that they no longer could rebuild, repair, or replicate until centuries later.
It’s the notion of a dying civilization that haunts, especially in this year. One has the sense of standing on a crumbling wall, looking at the odds and knowing that even if you win for the day, tomorrow there will be another assault, and another after that. Many of us are now standing on that wall, or lighting the fire in that tower, resolving to resist the barbarian horde, but there is a single overwhelming difference. In the times that Rosemary Sutcliff wrote about, the enemies of the Pax Romana were barbarians from outside, intent on conquest, wanting land and riches for themselves, and to brutally quash anyone getting in their way. In our own time, the barbarian savages, hungry for power above all and motivated by the unquenchable thirst to destroy through famine, plague, economic destruction, and open warfare against all of those who stand in their way … are none but our own ruling elite. Comment as you wish.

After Words

09. May 2022 · Comments Off on After Words · Categories: Domestic, History, Old West, Texas, Working In A Salt Mine...

A writer friend put a promo link to one of my books on one of the major news aggregator sites last week, with the refreshing result that sales of the book skyrocketed – this was my first historical, To Truckee’s Trail, and the one which was almost the most fun and the fastest to write. I was a bit downcast when I finished it, because it meant that I was done with the story and had to say goodbye to all the characters, especially the one or two which had been created for the story out of whole cloth. Truckee must have been such a fast write for me because the whole plot was already there: the first wagon train party to make it over the mountains into California with their wagons, and not having lost a single person to the emergency of being stuck in the deep winter snow with slowly diminishing food supplies. The participants in that great adventure were all real, historic people, with the exception of the little boy Eddie Patterson, and the noble mastiff Dog; it was more a matter of teasing out what little could be deduced about what they had been like, and then and fleshing them out to become real, breathing, sympathetic characters. There had only been one diarist among that party, and that diary was later lost, and only one member of the party left a memoir later on … so I had a little bit to work with and was sorry when it was all done. I couldn’t write a sequel – the story was whole and perfect the way it was, and in any case two of the central characters, John and Liz only lived for a few years after – I still think that is why the story of the Stephens-Townsend-Greenwood-Murphy wagon train party was so little known, otherwise. John Townsend would have been an important and influential person in California, historically, and how he helped lead the party to safety from the jaws of icy death in the mountains would have been part of it.

There were three interesting connections between the Stephens-Townsend Party, and the tragic Donner-Reed Party, aside from the circumstance of both being trapped in nearly the same place in the pass over the Sierra Nevada. The first was that elements of the Donner-Reed survivors took shelter in the same little cabin by Truckee Lake which Moses Schallenberger, Allen Montgomery and Joseph Foster had built to winter over, hoping to guard the wagons which their party had to leave behind for lack of oxen to pull them. The second was that Martin Murphy’s youngest son, John, later courted and married Virginia Reed, who is usually cast as one of the heroines of the tragedy. And finally, the old mountain man and trail-guide, Caleb Greenwood, was a volunteer – in spite of his great age – in one of the organized relief efforts to rescue the survivors of the party. I did consider, when I came around to writing the Gold Rush adventure of Fredi Steinmetz in California a decade later, of having him meet briefly with Moses Schallenberger, and John and Liz’s little son, or maybe even some of the Murphy family just to complete the circle – but the plot just didn’t allow for that.

Other “after words” to my books – it was suggested that following Willi Richter’s life and adventures with the Comanche in the late 1860s, and his return to his birth family ten years later would make a ripping good yarn. But that would make necessary a really deep dive into Comanche history, life and culture, and I just didn’t feel it. Another reader suggested maybe exploring the anti-German lurch on the part of the general public around the time of World War 1, but I just didn’t feel that, either. So much came crashing down in that war and immediately afterwards – empires, optimism about the future and society generally – I just couldn’t feel that, either. Although I did reference in passing in My Dear Cousin, that Steinmetz’s family legally changed their name, because of the anti-German animus of the time; which is why Fredi and Sophia’s granddaughter went by the surname of Stoneman.

I wonder if I should have added a bit more to that book, mapping out how the post-war world treated the two cousins and their husbands. The couple that I based part of Peg and Tommy’s lives in Malaya on, eventually had to leave their rubber plantation for their own safety because of the Communist insurgency. They had children by that time, and the constant threat against all of their lives – threats carried out to the point where they had to fortify their main residence – forced them to leave. I rather think that Peg and Tommy, with the children that they had after Tom and Olivia (and they would have had more children) would have eventually relocated to Australia and rebuilt a secure life there.

For Vennie and Burt, I have a feeling that they would have had a rockier road. I couldn’t see Vennie settling down to be the perfect wife of an up and coming academic at a moderately snooty west coast private college. I think that they would have separated – but not divorced — after a couple of years. I could picture Vennie going back into nursing, serving as a military nurse in Korea. She had a rather overdeveloped sense of duty. And eventually, Burt would have taken up another position, somewhere in the intermountain West, and he and Vennie would reconcile, perhaps adopt a couple of war orphaned Korean children, before having a couple of their own. So that’s how that ‘after word’ might have gone – but I don’t believe I’ll be writing it out – the story was complete as it was.

Now, to finish the Civil War novel, which is half-done, and leaving Miss Minnie Vining as an established lecturer on feminist and abolitionist causes … a writer’s work is never done.

Our Culture, What There Is of It

13. April 2022 · Comments Off on Our Culture, What There Is of It · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Old West, Texas

This last weekend, I actually went out of my house/neighborhood and did something different. Something interesting and out in the real world, or something that resembled the real world, out there, beyond the keyboard and computer screen. I had a table for my books at a cultural event, the Folkfest in New Braunfels. Historically, New Braunfels was one of the German Verein-founded towns in the Texas Hill Country, one of those that I have written about in my historical series; the main reason that I was invited to the bash under the oak trees at the Heritage Society’s campus on the northern edge of town. The Adelsverein Trilogy touches on the circumstances and reason why more than eight thousand German immigrants ended up on the wild and unsettled Texas frontier in the 1840s. A consortium of German noblemen and princes hoped to make a tidy profit – and to do a good deed for their struggling countrymen – by taking up an entrepreneur grant in the independent Republic of Texas. They were honest in their hope to make the venture advantageous economically for them, which distinguishes them from many other ostensibly charitable enterprises of late. That the Adelsverein went broke within two years had more to do with the princely gentlemen overselling their program to eager potential immigrants and badly underestimating the costs in transporting them to Texas. That it resulted in a godly number of able, educated, independent-minded and patriotic new citizens turned out to be a bonus. It also resulted in Kendal, Gillespie and Comal counties being almost completely German-speaking for better than a hundred years, which explained the prevalence of dirndls and lederhosen worn with cowboy boots at the Folkfest.

The Heritage Society has moved a number of buildings of historical note onto the property; a dog-trot cabin, carpenter’s shop, a windmill, one-room schoolhouse. blacksmith shop and others. For the Folkfest, these buildings are inhabited by docents and volunteers, augmented by historical reenactors in tents and pavilions, eager to exhibit their skills and gear. The flintlock and black powder shooters shot their long rifles regularly during the two days, as did the cannon crew with their antique artillery piece. There was live music under the trees – a Celtic band, a children’s choir singing German folksongs, a clogging dance troupe, an array of country-western singers – and a children’s costume parade on Saturday, carrying on the tradition of a May Day parade established by the teacher of the first school in New Braunfels in the 1850s. A pair of charro performers demonstrated rope tricks and fancy riding skills in a temporary rink, the owner of a genuine 1913 Ford Model-T gave rides around the circuit of the grounds, and the owners of an authentic cowboy chuckwagon demonstrated making biscuits and cooking over a fire with iron Dutch ovens. In other years at Folkfest I have seen lace-makers showing off their skills, and carpenters demonstrating how to use templates and hand-tools to shape chair spindles and legs. Last year, the hayride was in a wagon pulled by a pair of horses, this year merely a trailer lined with hay-bales pulled by a tractor. But there was a good crowd, over this last weekend; families and couples having fun, listening to the music while sitting at the tables by the beer garden, under the great oak tree in the center of the grounds by the beer garden. There wasn’t a single mask in sight, and no social distancing that I could see. It all reminded me that not everything is awful and catastrophic – and that many of us are holding on tight to our history and our traditions.

 

Aristos a la Lanterne!

17. March 2022 · Comments Off on Aristos a la Lanterne! · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Media Matters Not, Politics, Working In A Salt Mine...

When the rage of downtrodden French peasants, living-on-the-edge city dwellers and frustrated bourgeoise towards the ruling nobles and royalty final exploded into a kind of civic wildfire, there was no appeasing their collective anger. A handful of wary and fleet-footed aristocrats, or those who had made a good living out of serving the royals and the nobility fled from France in all directions. The slow and unwary made a humiliating appointment with Madame Guillotine before a contemptuous and jeering crowd, if they had not already run afoul of a mob with pikes and knives, and ropes at the foot of civic lampposts. (The fury of the French Revolution flamed so furiously that it that eventually it burned a good few leading revolutionaries themselves. As the Royalist pamphleteer Jacques Mallet Du Pan remarked pithily, “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.) For a long time, my sympathies as regards parties in the French Revolution tended to be with those who fell out with it, sympathies formed by popular literature and music: The Scarlett Pimpernel, A Tale of Two Cities, Dialogues of the Carmelites, and other tales which basically tut-tutted the madness which overcame all reason and discretion, and championed those who had the brunt of it fall on them, either justly or not. How fortunate that our own very dear revolution had been able to escape such conflagrations: Loyalists in the colonies might have suffered being tarred and feathered and ridden out of town or having to leave in an undignified rush when Yankee Doodle went to town and made their independence stick. But the jailhouse regrets of those who called up and inflamed that conflagration, even inadvertently is not my concern here.

It is, rather, the arrogant, condescending incompetence, and corruption of our current ruling class, and the hardships they have and continue to blithely inflict on us all – Covid, inflation, civic disorder, energy shortages, unequal application of law when it comes to public protests, the ruination of our domestic industries, our currency, and a possible war. Our political ruling class and their allies in mass media and academia have all played a part in bringing about all these disasters, while blandly denying blame and responsibility. Clueless arrogance is mingled with single-minded conviction of their own competence and absolute determination to double down on failure, failures which have already ruined lives, businesses, and industries alike, and promise to ruin more. These ruinations have left the ruling class serenely unaffected, and even wealthier than ever, and prone to issuing condescending suggestions to us all that if we can’t afford gas, maybe we ought to buy an electric car. It’s infuriating; but to this point, we feel only a cold, sullen fury. To carry on with the wildfire simile – it’s as if the wood is not only dry, but soaked with gasoline, and these fools are only lacking the book of lighted matches. What will that metaphorical lighted match be, that sends ordinary citizens howling ‘Aristos a la Lanterne!’? Most likely something that affects our children; the insistence of schools in pushing CRT brainwashing and inappropriate sex education to children who are barely aware of sex as it has already has parents lighting up local school boards and teacher’s unions. Discuss as you wish, and have insight into what will send us into the streets singing Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira, or quietly sabotaging the ruling class.

All That Remains

13. October 2021 · Comments Off on All That Remains · Categories: Domestic, History, War

So, I was watching Youtube videos, mostly to amuse Wee Jamie, the Grandson Unit, as he sits propped up in my lap – we are attempting to keep him awake and amused during the day so that he will sleep for a good portion of the night. I found this video, about antique historic home renovation, wherein the couple who purchased a historic Victorian went through the room where all the unwanted detritus from the previous owners were stashed in tatty boxes, ancient suitcases.

The couple went through the room full of junk left over from the owners of the next of kin and rejects from the estate sale, looking for treasure, or at least, interesting relics of modest value … and one of the assortments they found was stuff consigned to a trash bag – a disintegrating photo album stuffed with seventy-year old pictures and documents to do with a first brief engagement of the wife of the previous owner to a naval aviator. The engagement took place during WWII and ended when the fiancé was lost at sea during a naval aviation action. There were the photographs, letters, certain documents, attesting to the existence of the doomed romance: a portion of two lives – possibly all that was left of one, all wrapped up in a single bag.

It all reminded me of several members of my own family – that all of their lives were summed up in a handful of pictures, documents and bits of this or that, and fading memories, as the people who knew them the best passed away themselves. There was a small, cheap suitcase which held the bits and pieces of my Uncle Jimmy’s nineteen years; the olive-green wool serge blouse and trousers of his US Army Air Corps uniform, a scrapbook he kept, full of newspaper and magazine cuttings, which were equal thirds divided between the war, news about aviation and various big bands, a small black pocket diary for 1941, which mostly documented the movies and big bands that he went to see, and the friends that he hung out with. For December 7, the entry was “War” with three exclamation points. There were a few other items in the suitcase which I don’t remember. My brother Alex has the diary, possibly the scrapbook, too. The rest likely burned in the 2003 fire which took down my parents’ retirement home, along with just about all the other relics and things which Mom and Dad inherited from their respective parents.

Of Great-Aunt Nan, I have an autograph book, full of messages from her friends, pictures of her in her WAAC uniform, a tiny “Ruptured Duck” service pin and a couple of other things. Nan lived a peripatetic life in small rented apartments. She traveled the world; some of her souvenirs also gravitated to me; some silver bracelets, a couple of tiny dolls which serve as Christmas ornaments. Of her older half-brother, Will, who perished on the Somme in 1916, there is even less remaining – copy of a single picture of Nan and Will. Nan herself was the last person living who remembered Will at first hand. Mom will be the last one, save for some childhood friends of the same vintage who remember her brother.

In the end, that’s all that most of us ordinary people leave – memories in the minds of those who knew us, a few faded pictures and entries in various public and private records.

The Twilight Zone

05. January 2021 · Comments Off on The Twilight Zone · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam, History, Iran, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant

Well, it appears that the mullahcracy in Iran is still steamed over the death of their military mastermind Quassam Soleimani, the chief of so-called Quds Force – sort of the Iranian SS, I have always thought. On the one-year anniversary of that momentous drone-zap (a consummation quite overdue in my opinion) the president of Iran directly threatened the life of President Trump. Talk is cheap, and Iranian threats of dire revenge are the equivalent of those teeny and nearly worthless Spanish 1-peseta coins, which were struck from aluminum in the early 1990s, about the size of a child’s fingernail and looked like nothing so much as doll money. But still … the militant Muslims of Iran are certainly dedicated and determined sufficiently to have racked up any number of lesser-known and less-protected hits, so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this was something more than just tough talk for the benefit of their domestic audience and fans of Islamic mayhem in other countries.

More »

1942 – The Year That Everything Happened

21. September 2020 · Comments Off on 1942 – The Year That Everything Happened · Categories: History, Literary Good Stuff, War

Weirdly enough – and this apparently happens to authors at random – I had a dream about the plot of a new book late this past summer and woke up just in time to remember it all. A novel set in WWII, which is at least half a century or more out of my fictional headspace; I like the 19th century. Got all the reference books, the books or art, a grasp of the vocab and the look of the whole 19th century universe and outlook. (The costumes, too; yes – I dress in late Victorian or Edwardian garb to do a book event. No, the corset isn’t that uncomfortable, and yes, how people react to me in this get-up, hat, reticule, gloves and all … it’s amazing. Last time out in all this, I had a guy tip his hat to me and say, ‘Howdy, ma-am’ and that is just freaking amazing!)

But – WWII. For me, it is just enough close in time that I knew a lot of people personally involved, from Great-Aunt Nan, who was one of the first-ever women recruited for the WAACs, to any number of high school teachers (some of whom were more forthcoming about their service than others) to the Gentleman With Whom I Kept Company for about a decade, to a neighbor of Mom and Dad’s who had been a prisoner of war in the Far East and fortunate enough to have survived the experience. In short, the books, the movies, even the TV shows that I watched as a kid and teenager, were all marinated in the memories of the Second World War. I was born a bare decade after it was all over; shows like “World at War” were in the ‘must watch’ category at our house, as well as any number of now slightly cringe-making series like … never mind. Just take it for granted that WWII was inescapable for a person of my age. I also scribbled some bad and derivative juvenile fiction with a WWII setting. (Which I found in a box in the garage during the most recent turn out … yep, it was bad. Supposedly, one must write a good few millions of words to get the bad out of your system. Just about all of that is in a box in the garage, against which are orders to the Daughter Unit to burn in future.) And I had a self-directed exploration into the 1930s-1940s in college, when I had access to a college library with microfiche scans of a certain newspaper; I read every issue from 1935-1945, which was like seeing a whole decade of history’s first draft narrowly through a key-hole.

Anyway – enough of the throat-clearing. As is my wont when working out the fine details in a plot, I set up an Excel spreadsheet broken out by month and year, marking events in various theaters, all the better to work the travails of my fictional characters against. It struck me all over again that 1942 was the year That Everything Happened. For Americans, it was the first full year of war on two fronts; for Britain and her colonies and the governments-in-exile of her allies, it was the start of a third year of a war formerly limited, more or less, to Europe and North Africa. And then all merry old hell broke out in the Far East. Possessions, colonies, independent small countries began falling like nine-pins to the Japanese war machine. British Malaya and Fortress Singapore, Dutch Indonesia, the Philippines, Guam and Wake Islands, a good chunk of New Guinea and other islands all across the South China Sea – all fell in the first few months of 1942. It would have been a depressing thing, reading any major Western newspaper during those weeks; weeks where Allied confidence in their own ability to fight a balls-to-the-wall war and win took a considerable beating. The Allies reeled … but in May, the fortunes of War began to smile on the Allies. A naval clash between Japanese, American and Australian naval forces in the Coral Sea checked Japanese attempts to take Rabaul in New Guinea. In the next month, another sea battle – again between dueling aircraft carriers in the defense of Midway Island – blunted further Japanese advances in the Central Pacific. In July and a world away – the Germans were blocked and turned back from Egypt at the first battle at El Alamein, and then again three months later, in the same place. In the month of August, the Americans began landing on Guadalcanal and the Australians began taking back New Guinea. The Axis tide was checked, and slowly began to retreat. In November, the Allies (American and British with Canadian, Australian and the Free Dutch naval backup) opened a second front with the Torch Landings in French-controlled Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco – this not quite a year after Pearl Harbor. In barely a year, the Allies went from disaster and defeat on practically every front, to regroup and to begin effectively striking back. It would take another two years and more to completely defeat the Axis Powers, but it is striking to look at the timeline for 1942 and to see how the war situation turned from humiliating defeat, through resolve, and then to begin the long march back.

Discuss as you wish.    

In the Field

08. September 2020 · 1 comment · Categories: AARRRMY TRAINING SIR!!!, Eat, Drink and be Merry, History, Media Matters Not

Sometimes, long after first reading a book or watching a movie and enjoying it very much, I have come back to re-reading or watching, and then wondering what I had ever seen in that in the first place. So it was with the original M*A*S*H book and especially with the movie. I originally read the book in college and thought, “Eww, funny but gross and obscene, with their awful practical jokes and nonexistent sexual morals.” Then I re-read after having been in the military myself for a couple of years, and thought, “Yep, my people!”

The movie went through pretty much the same evolution with me, all but one element – and that was when I began honestly wondering why the ostensible heroes had such a hate on for Major Burns and the nurse Major Houlihan. Why did those two deserve such awful, disrespectful treatment? In the movie they seemed competent and agreeable enough initially. In the book it was clear that Major Burns was an incompetent surgeon with delusions of adequacy, and that Major Houlihan was Regular Army; that being the sole reason for the animus. But upon second viewing of the movie, it seemed like Duke Forrest, Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John McIntyre were just bullying assholes selecting a random target for abuse for the amusement of the audience.

More »

Flashy Himself – A Literary Diversion

22. February 2020 · Comments Off on Flashy Himself – A Literary Diversion · Categories: Fun and Games, Geekery, History, Literary Good Stuff

So it took a link on Powerline last week to bring to my attention that George McDonald Fraser’s first Flashman book came out fifty years ago.

My, I don’t know how the time flies – but it does. I must have read the first couple of Flashy’s adventures sometime in college, shortly thereafter, and being quite the history nerd even then, they were rowdy enough, and amusing enough that I read most of the rest of them when they came out, even if I had to order them from an English book catalog when I was stationed overseas. I do remember very well reading The General Danced at Dawn, in the back of one of my more boring lecture classes at CSUN and nearly self-strangulating in trying to not laugh uproariously out loud. The professor lecturer would not have been amused – he was a medieval history expert with a thoroughly tedious interest in the most comprehensively boring of early dark age church confabulations and absent any detectable sense of humor.

My main regret as far as the Flashman series goes is that GMF never wrote of Flashy’s adventures in our own Civil War, which sounded from references in other books, as if Flashman conducted himself in the manner which we came to expect of him – that is, purely and basely devoted to the preservation of his own skin, while dodging, lying, fornicating and back-stabbing on battlefields spread across three continents, as well as hob-nobbing socially or sexually with all sorts of likely participants. As one early reviewer put it, Flashy saw 19th century history briefly over his shoulder as he fled down the corridors of power at high speed. His adventures in our very own Civil War would have been … interesting, although when I touched on this matter before, a reader pointed out that a) Flashy was a British officer and hardly gave a toss as to what we recalcitrant ex-Colonials got up to, and that b) that all our native ACW experts, amateur and professional alike would have made passionate objection to any error or omission, fancied or with historical backing that GMF might have worked into the plot. So, the effort wouldn’t have been worth the candle to him … although I and most of his fans would have loved to read it anyway. Just to see the process by how Flashy got suckered into participation by Abraham Lincoln, fought on both sides, and wound up being pals with George Armstrong Custer and well-acquainted with General Grant, and how many other Civil War notables.

I myself would have loved to see Flashy entangled in some kind of partnership with Elizabeth Van Lew, the Richmond spy queen, or perhaps a much deeper entanglement with Allan Pinkerton, of the national detective agency … it all would have been great reading, no matter how contentious the fallout might have been with Civil War historians. His take on Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals would have been interesting, as well. Because GMF had the eye, an absolute gift for writing 19th century dialog, and loved history enough to go into the deep weeds about it all … and most of all, make it interesting to the reader. Pop media is not downhill from culture, it’s in a symbiotic relationship with it. One shapes the other, mutually.

The darkly appealing thing about Flashy is that as a character, he was blunt and unsparingly honest, especially about himself: coward, toady, professionally self-serving, enthusiastic fornicator, (rapist, also on one occasion), and all-around scummy character – and yet with pluck and luck, always coming up out of the sewer smelling like a rose. As well as being brutally honest about himself to himself, Flashy was also was also magnificently candid about a lot of other matters now held to be absolutely radioactive. And that’s a large part of his appeal. I rather suspect that GMF had a great deal of fun in writing Flashy as a character, kicking politically correctitude right in the shorts, over and over again.

And what a wonderful miniseries Flashman would be, supposing that GMF’s literary executors would allow the rights to be negotiated for it, and a producer had the budget and stones to do it right, covering Flashy’s eventful career. You’d likely need eight or nine seasons to do it all justice, filming in fabulous locations in Europe, the US, Russia, China, India, Indonesia and Africa, an international cast of actors buckling swashes right and left … it would leave Game of Thrones in the dust, for sure. Likely it would never happen, given today’s social climate – but it would be glorious. Oh, well – at least we have the books. Discuss as you wish.

The New Versailles

21. January 2020 · Comments Off on The New Versailles · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, History, Politics

My daughter actually suggested this line of thought; that the current ruling class (or those who think themselves to be so) in the United States are perilously akin to the French nobility – those who were termed the ancient regime, of pre-revolutionary France. The ruling class were gathered together deliberately at Versailles, where all was all as far as the nobles and ruling class were concerned for at least a hundred years.

There, amid the squalid splendors of Versailles, they were gathered together, under the eye of the King, to frivol their lives away, distracted by spectacles and the vicious grasp for and fall from power within a very small realm. Only instead of a vast palace, outbuildings, gardens and minor palaces, our ruling class disports in a slightly larger venue, that of Washington, DC and the surrounding suburbs.

More »

When Doom Comes a’ Calling

10. January 2020 · Comments Off on When Doom Comes a’ Calling · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam, History, Iran, Iraq, Media Matters Not, Military

(I started this post last weekend – but real life and a new book project intervened. Consider this a footnote to Trent T.’s post, here.)

Well, it certainly came a’calling for Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani last week, Middle Eastern time. Nothing left but bits of scrap metal and meat, and a bruised hand with a large ring on it. Kind of fitting for the guy who perfected the fine art of IEDs, and brought so much business to the developers of artificial limbs for those survivors of that deadly art. As the satirist Tom Leher noted, so many decades ago, and in a slightly different context,

“Some have harsh words for this man of renown, But some think our attitude Should be one of gratitude, Like the widows and cripples in old London town Who owe their large pensions to Werner von Braun.”

So it seems that the late General Soleimani will not be missed … not missed much by an assortment of parties in Iran, the Middle East, Israel, and US State Department employees across the world, some of whom posted their congratulations in the first blog reports that I saw first thing. The Daughter Unit reports that most of the veteran social media participants were absolutely fizzing with glee, as were apparently Iranian anti-mullacracy exile communities across the world. Considering that the late General S. had a hand in nearly four decades of Islamic violence (violence which racked up casualties in the thousands, and which did include American troops), across the Middle East and was about to take a hand in fomenting some more in Iraq last week, he will definitely not be missed.

The remote pilot of the drone which dropped our final farewell gift upon him didn’t miss, either, although to read the Twitter caterwauling laments of Hollywood idiots like Rose McWhatserface is nearly enough to make one upchuck. The trauma of being sexually molested by a creep like Harvey Weinstein obviously blotted from what remains of her tiny mind the reality of things like … umm, Iran’s forty-year jihad against the US, beginning with overrunning our embassy in Teheran and keeping staff, employees and casual American visitors to said embassy captive for more than a year? In the old days, an attack on a foreign embassy counted as declaring war. It fries me no end that the Teheran embassy thing happened so long ago that I was in my first Air Force enlistment, and my daughter was born a couple of months later. That’s how long we’ve been waiting for anything like an appropriate response.

And Jimmy Carter was such a clueless, limp-dcked, Saudi-loving, anti-Semitic wimp that he couldn’t even countenance the appropriate response, which should rightfully have been along the lines of – “Release our people and vacate our embassy (and clean up the mess as you go) or various essential real estate of yours will become slightly radioactive glass. Counting down… three … two…” THAT response would have spared us all – especially in the Middle East – decades of trouble, but morons like failed novelist Ben Rhodes certainly wouldn’t grasp that point, being twenty something, or perhaps older now, and still dealing with equally educated idiots. And as for ostensibly American news media painting, certain celebs and politicians painting the late General in romantic shades of “able soldier, handsome charismatic leader, an inspiration to his troops, austere poet, snappy dresser and all-around-good-fellow…” People, do you have any comprehension of how that makes you appear to the rest of us? It’s as of you are lamenting and condemning the death of Reinhold Heydrich, who was also cultured, handsome, a charismatic leader, et cetera, et cetera – and every but as much a murderous a*hole as Qasem Soleimani. Is this truly what you wish to embrace, and to appear to the rest of us as a sympathizer of? Discuss as you wish, and add any insights.

At the Civil War

25. November 2019 · 2 comments · Categories: AARRRMY TRAINING SIR!!!, Ain't That America?, General, History, Local, Military

The reenacted Civil War, at Liendo Plantation this last weekend. I went with a camera, in search of some good pictures, to use for the current Work in Progress – That Fateful Lightning.

Crusade

05. November 2019 · Comments Off on Crusade · Categories: History, Literary Good Stuff, Media Matters Not

A bit of a loaded word, isn’t it? But a label that American anti-slavery activists would have felt entirely comfortable with, in the first half of the 19th century. Such was the knowledge that taking up the cross of a cause could be hazardous, indeed – but the fight was for the right, and the eventual prize was worth it and more; the promise that every man (and by implication, every woman as well) had a right to be free. Not a slave, as comfortable as that situation might be to individuals – but to be free, answering only to ones’ conscience, as was expressed in the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, never mind that one might have varying degrees of success in that pursuit – one had the right to decide how to go about it, in whatever method and manner than one chose. One had the right to not be property, as if an ox or a horse.
More »

Occupation: A French Village

12. October 2019 · Comments Off on Occupation: A French Village · Categories: European Disunion, History, That's Entertainment!, War

On the strong recommendation of David Foster, the Daughter-Unit and I began to watch: A French Village, that seven-season long miniseries which follows five years of German occupation and a bit of the aftermath as it affects the lives of a handful of characters in a small town in eastern France close to the Swiss border – from the day that the German invaders arrive, to the aftermath of the occupation, in a fractured peace, when all was said and done. (It’s available through Amazon Prime.) A good few of the occupants of that village did not really welcome liberation and had damn good reasons – guilty consciences, mostly, for having collaborated with the Germans with varying degrees of enthusiasm. (A benefit is that this series stars actors of whom we have never heard, in French with English subtitles. Given how the establishment American entertainment media has gone all noisily woke, anti-Trump and abusive towards us conservative residents of Flyoverlandia, this is a darned good thing. Seriously, for years and years I used to only personally boycott Jane Fonda and Cat Stevens, now my list of ‘oh, hell NEVER! actors and personalities is well into the scores.)
More »

Age and Guile

02. October 2019 · Comments Off on Age and Guile · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General Nonsense, History, Media Matters Not, Rant, Science!

Age and guile, so the saying goes, beats out youth and speed by a long chalk. (As does possession of generous insurance policies.) Age and experience also build up an overflowing reservoir of cynicism about a lot of things; protestations of enduring love, promises by politicians campaigning for election, and belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, among a long, long list of other things.

So it is with heartfelt convictions when it comes to media and academic protestations of “OMG, The Earth Is Gonna End and We Are All Gonna Die!” Sorry, if you’ve been around long enough (as I have been, long enough to collect Social Security while it still exists) you have been to this rodeo before. And to a good many performances, usually championed by the national media with their hair on fire; Existential doom – how many are there, shall I count the ways? The biggie when I was myself in grade school and for a goodly few decades thereafter was Immanent Nuclear War and Annihilation. Nuclear Winter afflicting any of us fortunate enough to survive that! Then there was the catastrophe of Global Cooling – the New Ice Age descending on us all! (insert extraneous exclamation points here.) We were all gonna freeze! More »

The Way Things Were and Are

04. September 2019 · Comments Off on The Way Things Were and Are · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, History, Media Matters Not, Rant

Separately, the Daughter Unit and I watched a series on Netflix (don’t hate on us, there’s still some good stuff there, and I don’t want to bail out until we’ve milked it dry) about the last Czars of Russia – specifically the series which mixed fairly serious commentary about the Russian Revolution with interestingly high-end reenactments of events in the life of the last czar and his family. (Seriously, though – I doubt very much that Nicky and Alix made mad hot whoopee on a fur coat underneath his official czarsorial desk, while the household staff made a heroic effort to ignore the amatory noises coming from behind closed doors. Just my .02. She was a Victorian, for Ghod’s sake. Really; Queen V.’s granddaughter. Who privately thought that Dear Alix wasn’t in the least up to the challenge of being Czarina of all the Russians; Alix may have waxed poetically amatory about her affection and trust in Father Grigory Rasputin, but to do the nasty on the floor, in daylight? Even with your wedded husband? Just nope. Nope.)
I will accept that the orgiastic interludes involving Rasputin were likely and wholly believable. And that Nicky and Alix loved each other, that their four daughters and son with medical issues all loved each other with a passionate devotion that lasts through this world and the next. The last shattering sequences in the Ipatiav House rings true. That was the way it was, and that was how it ended. (I reviewed a book on this, here.)
I was meditating on all of this – with a consideration towards royalty; the old-fashioned kind, and the new-mint variety. More »

Retconned America – The 1619 Project

19. August 2019 · Comments Off on Retconned America – The 1619 Project · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Media Matters Not

It appears that this week, the New York Times, the so-called paper of record, upon whom the self-directed spotlight of smug superiority ever shines – has now taken that final, irrevocable step from the business of reporting news and current events, matters cultural and artistic to becoming a purveyor of progressive propaganda. Of course, as characters in British procedural mysteries often say, ‘they have form’ when it comes to progressive propaganda; all the way from Walter Duranty’s reporting on famine in the Soviet Union through the drumbeat of ‘worst war-crime evah!’ in coverage when it came to Abu Ghraib, and the current bête noir – or rather ‘bête orange’ man bad. It seems that it has now become necessary for the Times to make the issue of chattel slavery of black Africans the centerpiece, the foundation stone, the sum and total of American history. Everything – absolutely everything in American history and culture now must be filtered through the pitiless lens of slavery.
More »

Another Snippet of “That Fateful Lightning”

08. August 2019 · Comments Off on Another Snippet of “That Fateful Lightning” · Categories: History, Literary Good Stuff

(Miss Minnie Vining, spinster of Boston, is visiting relatives in Richmond, Virginia – and acting as a chaperone for her very much younger cousin, who is being courted by none other than the very raffish Pres Devereaux. On an excursion out into the countryside to look at the summer wildflowers, they are involved in a dreadful carriage accident.)

She couldn’t breathe. All the air was sent from her lungs by the force of that fall over the side of Mr. Devereaux’s Tilbury gig. A constellation of exploding stars blotted out the sky overhead, and Minnie felt herself suspended between not being able to draw a breath and a white-hot agony exploding up to her shoulder and down to her hand, and from her head, which had struck the road with cruel force. Somewhere, a woman was crying out in alarm. She sounded very young, panicky – Minnie felt herself lifted, as limp and powerless as a rag doll in the grip of something. She couldn’t think, only felt – and what she felt was pain, pain and more pain.
“Miss Minnie! Wake up, open your eyes – speak to me!” a voice begged – a somehow familiar voice. A man. Authoritative … and for some curious reason, frantic in concern.
Minnie obeyed the command to open her eyes, although her sight was somewhat baffled by … oh, yes, the brim of her bonnet, now crushed and disarranged, and a flood of something sticky and warm on her face, wetting the collar of her dress. And this was the countenance of … oh, yes – she fished in her dis-jangled memory for a name. Mr. Devereaux, the handsome and raffish adventurer … presently courting the very young Charlotte Edmonds.
Yes. She was supposed to have been their watchful chaperone.
Minnie struggled to recall – yes, an aggravating and contrary man, a whirligig of opinions posed for nothing more than to harass and torment … but he … he was a man … and Minnie fished for knowledge and insight in her present torment.
A man who waged a war on a chessboard and was the most gallant when losing to a mere woman.
“She’s bleeding so awfully!” the younger voice exclaimed in horror – Charlotte; yes, that was Charlotte, daubing ineffectually at Minnie’s forehead with a dainty handkerchief smeared horribly red. Mr. Devereaux replied,
“Her head struck a large rock on the ground, I believe – and it is well known that such injuries always bleed out of all proportion … Miss Minnie, please speak to us!”
“Wha … h’ppened?” Minnie stumbled over the words. It hurt to speak.
“A runaway team, on the road!” Charlotte exclaimed. “The driver could not control them – he had fallen from the wagon, and the wagon struck Mr. Devereaux’s gig … they kept on going! And now the wheel is utterly smashed! What are we to do, Mr. Devereaux? What are we to do, since we are all this way from town? Surely, Cousin Minnie needs a doctor at once!” More »

What Went on in Shockoe Creek Bottom

22. June 2019 · Comments Off on What Went on in Shockoe Creek Bottom · Categories: History, Literary Good Stuff

Shockoe Creek was a creek emptying into the James River – a creek now mostly channelized and paved over. It lay between two substantial hills upon which the city of Richmond, Virginia, was built; in the earliest days of the city, it was the market district; convenient to the waterfront, the main roads, a transshipment node where goods from deep-water cargo ships were transferred to smaller boats, to wagons, and warehouses. Commerce was the lifeblood of that part of Richmond, within sight of the grand white neo-classical building which was the state capitol. Here was the shipping basin and canal which led to it, the market building housing venders of meat, produce and other comestibles. Nearby was the bridge which crossed the James, the Haxall mill which ground fine white flour for shipment throughout the Americas. Up-river a little way was the Tredegar Iron Works complex, the pride of the ante-bellum industrial South.

And another kind of commerce was centered in the Shockoe Bottom – the trade in slaves. In the decades before the Civil War, Richmond was the second-largest wholesale and retail market in the South: the offices of brokers, agents and traders in slaves, auction houses, and holding-pens – known as slave jails, all were situated in a quarter-mile square area. I have discovered all kinds of curious things about the slave trade as practiced in Richmond – curious to me, that is. I wasn’t raised in the South, the ancestors of my one American-born grandparent was a fire-eating abolitionist; frankly, all I knew about the matter was what there was in the generalist history books pertaining to the Civil War. Nothing much about the nuts and bolts of actual practice, as it were.

I have had to become acquainted with all of this, as I am working on the next historical novel – and this involves a heroine, Minerva Templeton Vining, a spinster of independent means and thinking, who becomes an active campaigner for abolition in the 1850ies, and then a volunteer battlefield nurse during the war itself. The catalyst for all of this is a visit that she makes to Richmond to visit kinfolk – and while she had to that point been of abolitionist sympathies, she is radicalized by what she sees in the course of that visit. So I have to write about what she sees, and create the conversations that she would have had, dealing with what was termed the ‘peculiar institution.’ I don’t think that she would actually have witnessed a slave auction first-hand; so far, all the accounts and pictures that I have found have only men attending the auctions. It seems that male slaves were often asked to strip entirely, so that their state of health and soundness could be judged – I have read one account of a woman slave being stripped for a prospective buyer in private, but not at the auction location. Both male and female slaves often had to show their bare back and shoulders, though, to determine if they had been whipped. The degree and age of scarring would indicate a discipline problem, and downgrade market value in the eyes of a potential purchaser.

I did go into this project knowing that for most Southerners, a slave was a luxury good. A first-rate young field hand was worth $1,500-2,000; something on the order of $25,000 to $30,000 in today’s dollars. A slave who was trained in a particular skill might command an even higher price.
A particular curiosity – which makes sense, once I thought about it – was that the dealers in slaves who kept a slave jail (basically a warehouse/boarding house/dormitory) took every effort to make their sellable human merchandise look good upon being put up for auction, although the actual conditions in the slave jail may not have been very good. Those slaves being held for sale were provided with decent food, medical care if required, and a period of recovery from any particularly grueling travel. On the day of auction, they were provided with means of bathing, were groomed and dressed in new clean clothes. There is a painting by an English abolitionist who made sketches of an auction on the spot and later produced a then-well-known painting: five female slaves, clad in grey dresses and white aprons, with red bows at the throat, with one man, in trousers, white shirt, tan trousers and a red waistcoat. One of the women has a small child in her lap; they sit patiently in a row. They are luxury goods – of course, the vendors want the merchandise to look good. I think that is the most unsettling aspect of it all; not outright cruelty (of which there was some, although not quite as much as the campaigners for abolition would have had it) but the fact that it was just business, the business of selling and buying human beings.

Slaves Waiting for Sale - 1861 - Eyre Crow

Slaves Waiting for Sale – 1861 – Eyre Crow

Finally – an interesting curiosity: one Robert Lumpkin, who kept a slave jail of such notoriety that the compound was called “Hell’s Half Acre” was formally married to a slave woman, who had five children by him – including daughters who were sent to a finishing school in the North. When he died, at the very end of the Civil War, his wife inherited the property … and sold it to a Baptist minister who founded a school for blacks – the Richmond Theological Seminary. The site is half-under a freeway, now; the half that isn’t is an empty lot with an outline of some of the buildings in the compound.

« Older articles