Stuff

Busy, busy, busy.  Advanced the ball a few yards on the house the past couple of days.  Signed loan documents, disclosures, etc.  Got documents from the realtor - the seller's disclosures, etc.  Have arranged for an engineer and a pest control guy to do inspections next Tuesday morning.

I ran some of the customary errands for the elders today.  When I went back to mom's around 1:30 PM I saw a big fat 'n happy land otter sneaking into the woodshed.  Got mom and we went into the bedroom at the back of the trailer to spy on him.  By that time he was standing by the raging stream at the back of the property.  Jumped in and started swimming upstream.  We legged-it over to the bedroom on the other side of the trailer.  And here he comes up the bank of the creek with a (barely) alive salmon.  He hauled it under the neighbors shed.  Bet it will be mighty aromatic in that shed in a few days...  Very fun to watch the otter however.

In other news, I've been doing a fair amount of reading.  A couple of days ago I finished The First World War - A Complete History by a Brit historian, Brian Gilbert.  It is worthy of a few comments.

It has been decades since I read a history of the War to End All Wars.  I consider myself quite knowledgeable about the Second World War but have never given the first major European conflict of the 20th century the attention I now believe it deserves.

Indeed I do not believe it is possible to have a good understanding of the second conflict, the Cold War, or current  European affairs without a working knowledge of WWI; and in particular how the war affected national and ethnic interests.

For example, the post-Cold War conflicts in the Balkans can be regarded, in part, as simply unfinished business from the Great War.  The Treaty of Versailles created Yugoslavia - a solution that at the time was generally regarded positively by it's constituent parts - the Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and other groups who desperately wanted separation from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Similarly, the genocidal mass executions and deportations of the Armenian people by the Ottoman Turks echoes down through the decades.  As does the unsatisfied national aspirations of the Kurds.

Both the Central Powers and the Entente played a ruthless game of promise and counter-promise with groups seeking their own nation-states.  The Poles probably played the game as well as the Great Powers and were duly rewarded (for twenty years at least).  The Zionists and the Arabs who had sweet-nothings whispered in their ears by the British - not so much.  And we all know how that has turned-out thus far...

And then there is the sheer magnitude of the slaughter.  More military casualties resulted from WWI than any other conflict.  Trench warfare was truly hideous.

The Central Powers, the losers in the war, lost 3,500,000 soldiers on the battlefield.  The Allied Powers, the victors, lost 5,100,000 men.  On average, this was more than 5,600 killed on each day of the war.  The fact that 20,000 British soldiers were killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme is often recalled with horror.  On average, a similar number of soldiers were killed in every four-day period of the First World War.

While Gilbert's history is in most ways quite conventional, he does offer numerous personal stories that serve to make the story both poignant and horrific.  British and American soldiers, it seems, had a particular affinity for writing poetry while in the trenches.  The quality of the poetry varied greatly - but the themes were very consistent.

Among the troops sent forward on the following day [the second day of the Battle of the Somme] were detachments of the Foreign Legion.  In their ranks were several dozen Americans, including the Harvard graduate, and poet, Alan Seeger (Legionnaire No. 19522).  He was with a unit led by a Swiss baron, Captain de Tscharner, in an attack on the strongly fortified village of Belloy-en-Santerre.  During the attack they were caught in the enfilade fire of six German machine guns.  Lying mortally wounded in a shell-hole, Seeger was heard crying out for water, and for his mother.  In his poem 'Rendezvous' he had written earlier that year:

I have a rendezvous with Death

On some scarred slope or hill,

When Spring comes round again this year

And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep

Pillowed in silk and scented down,

Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,

Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,

Where hushed awakenings are dear...

But I've a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town,

When Spring trips north again this year,

And I to my pledged word am true,

I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Forty-two Canadians had been killed in the attack on September 16.  Among those killed on the Somme six days later was a nineteen-year-old British soldier, E.W. Tennant.  Having left school at the age of seventeen in order to enlist, he had been in the trenches since shortly after his eighteenth birthday.  His poem 'The Mad Soldier' opened with the lines:

I dropp'd here three weeks ago, yes - I know
And it's bitter cold at night, since the fight -
I could tell you if I chose - no one knows
Excep' me and four or five, what ain't alive.
I can see them all asleep, three men deep,
And they're nowhere near a fire - but on our wire
Has 'em fast as can be.  Can't you see
When the flare goes up?  Ssh!  boys; what's that noise?
Do you know what these rats eat?  Body-meat!

Well, I'm gonna ice the cookies I just baked.  Paula Dean's Loaded Oatmeal/Raisin Cookies with Brown Butter Icing.  Tomorrow morning I am going to make spicy potted shrimp.  Something sweet and something savory for a fundraiser for Loren Jones tomorrow night - my old department colleague is running for the Juneau Assembly.

Cheers!