Winter VII. English cooking + Yanks

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Winter VI. Tea

English cooking

One has heard much condemnation of the English kitchen... The class which provides our servants is undeniably course and stupid, and its handiwork of every kind too often bears the native stamp. For all that, English victuals are, in quality, the best in the world, and English cookery is the wholesomest and the most appetizing known to any temperate clime.

... The aim of English cooking is so to deal with the raw material of man’s nourishment as to bring out, for the healthy palate, all its natural juices and savours... Our beef is veritably beef; at its best, such beef can be eaten in no other country under the sun... It never occurs to us to disguise the genuine flavor of food... Only English folk know what is meant by gravy....

Alpha.

As someone who has been a vegetarian for over 40 years, and ate very little “English” cooking while in Britain in the 1980s, I certainly can’t speak to this. But I did eat meat through high school and it isn’t convincing that he praises boiling cod and mutton.

Yanks to the rescue.

The initial U.S. troops arriving in Europe in October 1917 closely resembled the BEF of 1914, they were the few regular Army divisions and Marine formations then ready, more or less, for combat. These units (the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th infantry divisions) are familiar names in the military history of the United Sstates for the rest of the 20th and the early 21st centuries. However U.S. forces didn't start fighting until April of 1918 after their training was more advanced. By Summer, the previously mentioned units plus the 26th, 32nd, 33rd, and 42nd (all National Guard) divisions, and the 5th and 6th Marine regiments, were involved in resisting the big German offensive of 1918.  

At first there weren’t enough men to even form an independent American army on the entrenched line of battle. The Americans were attached to French armies as reinforcements. By late summer these initial units were joined by the 5th, 82nd, and 90th divisions, so Pershing, the American commander, was able to form the First (U.S.) Army. Colonel Douglas MacArthur fought with the 42nd division during the mid-summer Aisne-Marne offensive. Lieutenant Colonel George S. Patton lead 270 (Renault) tanks during the St Michel offensive, while Colonel "Billy" Mitchell commanded a force of 1,500 aircraft supporting that ground attack.

By the end of the war on 11/11/18, there were two U.S. Armies in the field as more and more men arrived in France from America. To the units mention above had been added the 28th, 29th, 35th, 37th, 77th, 79th, 80th, 81st, infantry divisions -- and that's an incomplete list. The war ended before the full might of U.S. strength could be employed in the field. (Another reason Christopher and Mark Tiejens were so disgusted by the Armistice, that the war wasn’t pursued into Germany itself.)

The U.S. Navy also reinforced the U.K. Grand Fleet after 7 December 1917 with Battleship Division Nine (4-5 battleships). These ships helped enforce the blockade of Germany until the end of the war. 

Next: Winter VIII. Second course....

Autumn XX. Wine and war

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Autumn XIX. Italy

Truly, I grow aged. I have no longer much delight in wine.

... I would not speak unkindly of anything in cask or bottle which bears the great name of wine, But for me  it is a thing of days gone by. Never again shall I know the mellow hour cum regnat rosa, cum madent capilli. Yet how it lives in memory!

“What call you this wine?” I asked of the temple-gardian at Paestum, when he ministered to my thirst. “ Vino di Calabria,” he answered, and what a glow in the name! There I drank it, seated against the column of Poseidon's temple. There I drank it, my feet resting on acanthus, my eyes wandering from sea to mountain... The autumn day declined;  a breeze of evening whispered about the forsaken shore; on the far summit lay a long, still cloud, and its hue was that of my Calabrian wine.

How many such moments come back to me as my thoughts wander!  Dim little trattorie in city byways, inns smelling of the sun in forgotten valleys, on the mountain side, or by the tideless shore, where the grape has given me of its blood, and made life a rapture. Who but the veriest fanatic of teetotalism would grudge me those hours so gloriously redeemed?  No draught of wine amid the old tombs under the violet sky but made me for the time a better man, larger of brain, more courageous, more gentle....

Alpha.

He seems to get more pleasure from wine than I do, but then again I’ve never been to Italy or drunk the wine he describes. But I do agree about wine’s ability, at least on occasion, to make you “larger of brain.”

One evening I was enjoying a glass or two -- perhaps three -- of wine when I started thinking about something I had previously read about the war on the Western Front during WW2. Following the famous Allied breakout from Normandy (Operation Cobra) as the various Allied armies raced east and north, their commanders, in particular Montgomery and Patton, fought for logistical support as they were each convinced that they alone possessed the correct strategy for slipping by the Germans and racing to Berlin where the war would quickly (and relatively bloodlessly) be brought to an end.

Eisenhower, in overall command, held other views. He recognized that the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS forces they faced were too experienced, well lead, and well trained to permit any brilliant outflanking maneuver on the part of the Allies. The Allies would have to wear the Germans down in a battle of attrition. They would need to methodically destroy the German army as a fighting force, division by division. This was not something anyone really wanted to hear, but it was reality.

The book where I picked up this idea about Eisenhower, was about the little known (but very bloody) battles that took place during the autumn and early winter of 1944 when Allied forces hit the German West Wall (or Siegfried Line) prior to the Battle of the Bulge. But as I drank and reflected on this truth -- that the most vital thing in 1944 was not capturing land but destroying the German army as a fighting force -- I suddenly saw that Patton’s race across France, when he famously drove past his assigned stopping points and pushed his tanks forward until they ran out of gas, was a terrible mistake.

Most of the time it is a good thing to capture land from the enemy, especially if you can do it quickly and without heavy losses, but this is not always the case. In some cases, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 being a famous example, moving quickly just makes your logistical situation worse, as it improves the logistical situation of your foe. In 1944, when the Allies lacked a single port on the European coast, and had to bring in all their supplies over a beach, fighting as close to those beaches as possible made things easier. Conversely, the further into France the Germans had to fight, the more their lines of communication were subject to Allied air attack and Resistance sabotage. Racing to the French-German border made everything easier for the Germans and harder for the Allies.

And then, I thought of another instance of the same phenomenon in another American war. Just as most people think Patton was bold and smart in racing east in 1944, most people think General Butler, commander of the Union Army of the James, blew a once in a lifetime opportunity when he failed to quickly take Petersburg in 1864 during the American Civil War. The bloody Siege of Petersburg and Richmond, which was the consequence of Butler’s failure to take Petersburg when it was all but undefended, is one of the nastier chapters of this already quite nasty war.

But looking at this campaign from, let’s call it, the Eisenhower perspective, we see that had Butler been as bold and dynamic as Patton, General Lee, and the still powerful Army of Northern Virginia, would have been driven out of the cities and away from tidewater Virginia toward the hill country to the west. They would have had the advantage of withdrawing along their railroad line of communications while the Union armies would have been parted from the support of the U.S. Navy, which had been moving troops and supplying logistical support wherever it was needed. Navy ships could not navigate the river above Richmond.

As it worked out, the armies settled down into a prolonged siege in which battle and disease severely weakened both forces. But at the same time, the Union made use of the time to build up its logistical situation around Petersburg -- even building a railroad to aid the movement of troops and material. And in the spring, the Army of Northern Virginia was a sad remnant of itself, while the Union could bring in a fresh army under Sheridan (the Patton of that war) to force Lee out of Richmond and Petersburg and then chase him down and bring the war to an end.

The Siege of Petersburg turned out to also be a preview of trench warfare during The Great War -- though technology would make the early 20th century battles even more gruesome than the late 19th century siege had been.

The lesson here, it seems to me, is that the most important thing in war is to know what victory looks like. From the opening days of the American Civil War, Union generals and politicians had been focused on capturing the Confederate capital, Richmond. But, as important as Richmond was, it was the Confederate Army, and in particular the Army of Northern Virginia, that was the strength of the Confederacy.

In WW2, once the German armies had been methodically destroyed in late 1944 and early 1945, the Allies could pour into Germany almost unopposed as there were no strong divisions (and almost no tanks) left to face them.

More recent American wars, like Vietnam and the even more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, suffer from a similar failure to know what victory might look like. Capturing land, in itself, achieves very little.

Would all of this have ever occurred to me without the benefit of wine? Who knows. I only know how it in fact happened.

Next: Autumn XXI. Young writers.

Autumn XVIII. Flawless day + The Old Contemptibles

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Autumn XVII. After they've seen Paree

I cannot close my eyes upon this day without setting down some record of it;  yet the foolish insufficiency of words!  At sunrise I looked forth;  nowhere could I discern a cloud the size of a man’s hand;  the leaves quivered gently, as if with joy in the divine morning which glistened upon their dew. At sunset I stood in the meadow above my house, and watched the red orb sink into purple mist, whilst in the violet heaven behind me rose the perfect moon. All between, was loveliness and quiet unutterable... From stubble fields sounded the long caw of rooks;  a sleepy crowing ever and anon told of the neighbour farm;  my doves cooed above their cot. Was it for five minutes, or was it for an hour, that I watched the yellow butterfly wafted as by an insensible tremor of the air amid the garden glintings?  In every autumn there comes one such flawless day....

Alpha.

What especially attracts me in this passage is the line “All between, was loveliness and quiet unutterable.” From the perspective of Jane Austen’s perpetually rambling heroines, Gissing’s world was already comparatively noisy with the (now nostalgic) roar of steam locomotives and the like, but to contrast it with today’s world of jets and helicopters and cars everywhere -- of power (noisy) everything -- it was a blessed world of silence.

There has always been a connection between the sacred and silence -- think of Medieval cathedrals, monasteries, cemeteries. One of the prices we pay for the Mephistophelean world of technology we live in is the toll of near perpetual din. The “infernal racket” of the modern age. Anyone filming a movie or TV episode outdoors, can tell you how hard it is to avoid the roar of planes and helicopters. Every time I see a news piece about the latest attempt to give us personal flying cars, I pray that this desire will continue to be thwarted. People have many romantic misconceptions about the past but the thing I would go there (let’s say the 17th or 18th centuries) to savor, if I could, would be the general quiet of that world.

The Old Contemptibles.

In both the Great War and in World War II, the British began fighting on the European continent with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). In WWI this army came to be known as “The Old Contemptibles” because the Germans had so little regard for it. Consisting of what few regular divisions the British Army fielded, before the Territorials ventured abroad and before the mass enlistment that followed the outbreak of war, the BEF engaged the German army in a prolonged fighting withdrawal from Mons (August) to the 1st Battles of the Marne and of the Aisne (September). It then again pitted itself against the Germans in the Race to the Sea where it all but expended itself in finally stopping the German advance at the 1st Battle of Ypres.

By 22 November 1914, at the end of that series of battles, what little remained of the divisions that started the war were pulled out of the line and returned to Britain to be reconstituted -- with fresh men and equipment. The British lines were then held by Territorial units and then volunteer units (the Pals) and in 1916 conscription was instituted and for the remainder of the war the British had conscript armies like everyone else. What Ryecroft had feared had come to pass.

Something similar happened in 1939 when the few regular British divisions, again known as the BEF, went to Belgium to hold the left flank against the German onslaught. This time French and BEF forces were overwhelmed by the new German Blitzkrieg tactics, and the BEF had to be evacuated off the beach at Dunkirk. It would be four years before a Western Front against the Germans would be recreated. Dunkirk and the Battle of France are usually viewed as a disaster, but the British government, in it's most reflective moments, must have acknowledge that they had dodged a bullet by not having to maintain a section of a Western Front for four years as they had done in the Great War. Far better to throw in a few armies at the end.

Next: Autumn XIX. Italy.

Summer IX. Anabasis

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Summer VIII. Heat + light

I read much less than I used to do; I think much more. Yet what is the use of thought which can no longer serve to direct life? Better, perhaps, to read and read incessantly, losing one’s futile self in the activity of other minds.

This summer I have taken up no new book, but have renewed my acquaintance with several old ones which I had not opened for many a year. One or two have been books such as mature men rarely read at all -- books which it is one’s habit to “take as read”; to presume sufficiently known to speak of, but never to open. Thus, one day my hand fell upon the Anabasis, the little Oxford edition which I used at school, with its boyish sign-manual on the fly-leaf, its blots and underlinings and marginal scrawls. To my shame I possess no other edition; yet this is a book one would like to have in beautiful form. I opened it, I began to read -- a ghost of boyhood stirred in my heart -- and from chapter to chapter was led on, until after a few days I had read the whole.

... Were this the sole book existing in Greek, it would be abundantly worth while to learn the language in order to read it. The Anabasis is an admirable work of art, unique in its combination of concise and rapid narrative with colour and picturesqueness. Herodotus wrote a prose epic, in which the author’s personality is ever before us. Xenophon, with curiosity and love of adventure which mark him of the same race, but self-forgetful in the pursuit of a new artistic virtue, created the historical romance. What a world of wonders in this little book, all aglow with ambitions and conflicts, with marvels of strange lands; full of perils and rescues, fresh with the air of mountain and of sea! ...

Alpha.

Where to start with this? His first paragraph if full of “but!”s for me. I may read a bit less now, since I read less at a time, precisely so I can think more. His notion of a time when thought is obsolete is truly foreign to me... I was tempted to write that it was Greek to me.

By a really startling coincidence, in just the past week I was advising a fellow YouTube commenter (on a video about the BEF fighting retreat from Mons to the Marne, in the opening weeks of the Great War) to read the Anabasis. My copy is a Penguin paperback that is nice enough (by my standards) and, of course, translated into English as The Persian Expedition. I would as soon learn to fly a plane so I could travel to Europe, as learn a language so I could read a particular book. If I had any ability to learn languages I would learn Japanese so I could read biographies of Imperial Japanese Navy admirals that I can’t find in English. Or I would learn French so I could read biographies of Marshal Berthier, for the same reason.

Xenophon and Thucydides are the fathers of written history and, of the two, I somewhat prefer Xenophon -- in part because he was also of Socrates’ set in Athens, and actually wrote an alternate Symposium to Plato’s more famous version. (Recently I went to my shelves to find Xenophon’s Symposium only to discover I don’t own a copy. I neglected to search online -- because Xenophon and Internet don’t normally mingle in my mind -- but of course the book does exist, and in a fairly attractive version, in cyberspace here.)

Herodotus seems to have been the most gullible of the Hellenic race. In my imagination, word would spread through any barbarian village Herodotus entered that a Greek had arrived who would believe absolutely anything... and write it down for posterity. It has been many years since I’ve read either of these authors -- though now I’m thinking of re-reading Xenophon -- but the only story I recall Herodotus actually having reservations about, was the story of the Phoenicians who claimed to have circumnavigated Africa. Of course this is also why we now have reason to believe the story, since what Herodotus found unbelievable was that you could go from summer to winter by sailing south. But even this is interesting.

On the one hand, Herodotus rejects a story because the details are not in agreement with his conception of reality -- rather than questioning that conception of reality based on new data. On the other hand, he still relates the story including the details he finds suspicious so that we, much later, can read him and think, “Damn, those Phoenicians must have really done it.” He so easily could have ignored the story or dropped the details that sounded fishy. So I have to give him credit, and if the BBC some day has a feature on the giant, gold-digging ants of South Asia, I will owe him a heartfelt apology.

Next: Summer X. Pilgrimage.

Summer VII. International politics + war, revisited

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: VI. Peace and war + Internet & good at TV

I have been reading one of those prognostic articles on international politics which every now and then appears in the reviews. Why I should so waste my time it would be hard to say; I suppose the fascination of disgust and fear gets the better of me in a moment’s idleness. This writer, who is horribly perspicacious and vigorous, demonstrates the certainty of a great European war, and regards it with the peculiar satisfaction excited by such things in a certain order of mind. His phrases about “dire calamity” and so on mean nothing; the whole tenor of his writing proves that he represents, and consciously, one of the forces which go to bring war about; his part in the business is a fluent irresponsibility, which  casts scorn on all who reluct at the “inevitable.” Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.

But I will read no more such writing. This resolution I make and shall keep. Why set my nerves quivering with rage, and spoil the calm of a whole day, when no good of any sort can come of it? What is it to me if nations fall a-slaughtering each other? Let the fools go to it! Why should they not please themselves? Peace, after all, is the aspiration of the few; so it always was, and ever will be... Let them blast the cornfield and the orchard, fire the home. For all that, there will yet be found some silent few, who go their way amid the still meadows, who bend to the flower and watch the sunset; and these alone are worth a thought.

Alpha.

How lucky he was to have not lived to see the age of “Total War” and the “Doomsday Clock.” From 2nd grade through most of my young adulthood, I lived with the knowledge that I, and everyone around me, could be vaporized in the next hour or so. When there were international crises of the kind Ryecroft here alludes to -- and which did in fact lead to a Great War -- this thought was much more on our minds, but we also knew that it could come out of the blue, either on purpose or as a cosmic accident -- see also Doctor Strangelove.

Today I am even more frightened, in retrospect, by the knowledge that for much of this time I was “protected” by Air National Guardsmen equipped with short range surface to air nuclear missiles. How a bunch of screw ups like George W. Bush failed to accidentally blow-up some American city is perhaps the greatest miracle of the 20th century.

On the other hand, nuclear weapons succeeded in ending the chain reaction of conflict among the most powerful states at any given time. Study history from the Hellenic period to WW2 and you would predict the inevitability of a war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. -- yet this never quite happened. Perhaps the M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) aspect of nuclear war will not always protect the world from use of these weapons, but so far it has been surprisingly effective. One could almost suggest a policy of giving perpetually warring states nukes to make them finally give it a rest -- India and Pakistan could be the test of this policy.

Beta.

There is really no excuse to write more about the Great War than I already have, but I am writing this in August of 2014 and that now antique war is much on my mind.

Again I’m reminded of Uncle Toby from Tristram Shandy, as we would have got on like a house afire. First he would take the bit between his teeth about the exploits of the first star of the Churchill family, the Duke of Marlborough, and when he finally ran out of gas, I would seize the reins and go off on the multiple generations of campaigns in that same small area of Europe (There are competing equine and also an automotive metaphor in there, but I feel they all work well together.) 

It always amazes me how close together many of the battlefields of the War of the Spanish Succession, Napoleonic, Franco-Prussian and World Wars were. From Ypres on the west to Bastogne on the east, from Sedan at the south to Oudenaarde in the north -- it's such a small portion of Europe yet within it you will also find Waterloo, Wavre, Ramillies, Tournai, Malplaquet, Mons, Ligny/Fleurus. You would think that Belgium was the geographical prize of the planet for all the blood the English, French, Germans and eventually Americans have spent there. 

It is also worth noting that in five of these battles the British, Dutch, and Germans fought the French while in six (including the four Great War battles around Ypres) some combination of British, French, Belgian, and Americans fought against the Germans. In three other battles it was strictly Germans against French.

The military authorities of Europe had largely dismissed the lessons of the American Civil War because the American armies were militias, not professional European armies. That wasn't unreasonable, at least for the first years of the Civil War. By the end, however, the American armies had become well trained by war and even, for the most part, well lead. In particular, General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia (ANV) was as experienced and efficient an army as you will likely find in the 19th (or arguably any other) century. Following the death of Lee’s brilliant wing commander, Jackson, the ANV had become a one trick pony, with the sole trick being the ability to quickly form defenses at any point using almost exclusively infantry with muzzle-loading rifles and artillery very similar to what Napoleon knew. European armies seemed to be less proficient at this trick of defense in the decades of the 19th century that followed, and also during the opening weeks of the Great War -- even though bolt-action rifles and machine guns should have made them even more deadly. In compensation, the rapid technical development of artillery between the 1860s and 1910s -- and that the machine gun was a weapon that cut both ways -- gave the offence again some advantages in the field. But the lessons of the American Civil War remained true and only waited for armies to grow as practiced and efficient as the ANV had been. This is what did in fact happen as the First Battle of the Marne and especially the Race to the Sea came to an end, and this superiority of the defense would remain decisive until new tactics (fire and maneuver) and new technology (armored fighting vehicles) again changed the equation in 1918.

Next: Summer VIII. Heat + light.

Spring XIX. A Gathering Storm

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: XVIII. The Literary life

Some one, I see, is lifting up his sweet voice in praise of Conscription. It is only at long intervals that one reads this kind of thing in our reviews or newspapers, and I am happy in believing that most English people are affected by it even as I am, with the sickness of dread and of disgust. That the thing is impossible in England, who would venture to say?... Democracy is full of menace to all the finer hopes of civilization, and the revival, in not unnatural companionship with it, of monarchic power based on militarism, makes the project dubious enough. There has but to arise some Lord of Slaughter, and the nations will be tearing at each other’s throats. Let England be imperilled, and Englishmen will fight; in such extremity there is no choice...

A lettered German, speaking to me once of his year of military service, told me that, had it lasted but a month or two longer, he must have sought release in suicide...

... From a certain point of view, it would be better far that England should bleed under conquest than that she should be saved by eager, or careless, acceptance of Conscription. That view will not be held by the English people; but it would be a sorry thing for England if the day came when no one of those who love her harboured such a thought.

Alpha.

He was right here about what was coming, and only 12 years in the future. War and Conscription both. Reading this made me remember the brother who refused to fight in On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin.

World War I or “The Great War” or “The War to end all war.” I’m a student of history in general and of military history in particular, but I can’t really tell you why that war was fought. A Nervous Splendor, by Frederic Morton (one of my favorite books, about Fin-de-siècle Vienna), argues for Kaiser Wilhelm II being a dolt and an ass. The Magic Mountain seems to argue for a romantic death-wish on the part of the German people. It’s been too long since I’ve read Barbara Tuchman’s wonderful The Guns of August about the start of the war, but my recollection is that she felt the war started largely by accident -- people playing brinkmanship and everyone lost their balance and the world fell down.

After rereading A Nervous Splendor, I found myself wondering what would have happened if Crown Prince Rudolf had killed William in a “hunting accident” (this was a fantasy of his) and had gone on to push his father off his thrones. What if there had been no Great War? Would the world today be better or worse?

Unfortunately, you can’t answer a hypothetical question. This is a lesson I learned while counseling young men attempting to avoid the Vietnam War by seeking Conscientious Objector status. The rule was that you had to object to war in general, not just a specific war. The person applying for CO status would be asked if he would have refused to serve in World War 2 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The answer to this was that, being a hypothetical question, he couldn’t answer it truthfully. You can say what you hope you would do, but that may not be what you would actually do.

For me, CO status wasn’t an option because I knew I didn’t object to all war. I only objected to stupid wars. But, I honestly don’t know what I would have done if conscripted for WW1. It was as stupid as a war can be, but once begun, it also would seem to be a war you needed to see to the end. I’m glad that my paternal grandfather was able to assist the French in holding their right flank in 1918. And I’m glad he survived, and ran into my grandmother on his way home at the end of the war.

I had a creative writing teacher in college who was a mystery writer of middling success. He advised us, when we were blocked, to have a character fall down a flight of stairs... just to get things moving. It seems to me that The Great War could well have been a spectacular case of “falling down a flight of stairs.” It didn’t make a great deal of sense, but it got so much moving as a consequence.

Next: Spring XX. Art.