Posts Tagged ‘World War I’
“You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don’t help”*…
Horseshoe charm made from a fragment of German shell by a wounded Belgian soldier.
During (and after) World War I, British folklorist Edward Lovett made a point of collecting examples of lucky charms and amulets that soldiers had carried to war. Some of these—included in a new book about the Imperial War Museum’s World War I collections, The First World War Galleries, by Paul Cornish—are below.
Lovett was a contemporary folklorist, collecting and analyzing material from his own city of London instead of working with archives or in other countries. Most active during the 1910s and 1920s, Lovett worked at a bank by day, gathering examples of amulets, charms, and talismans in his free time.Lovett was interested in seeing how country folklore lived on in working-class parts of London. He investigated the use of such charms to cure illnesses, wish ill upon enemies, or attract good luck. You can see some of his larger collection online through this Wellcome Library digital exhibition.
The charms Lovett collected from soldiers were sometimes fashioned from materials with some significance to their owners: bog oak or Connemara marble, carried by Irishmen as mementos of home; [or as in the photo above] bits of armaments that could have killed the bearer, but didn’t.
Take in more talismans at “The Lucky Charms Soldiers Carried Into WWI.”
* Calvin (Bill Watterson)
###
As we rub our rabbit’s feet, we might spare a thought for George Frederick Ernest Albert, George V, King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India; he died on this date in 1936. In a statement, the King’s physician, Lord Dawson of Penn, reported that the King’s last words were “How stands the Empire?” But in his diary, uncovered much later, Dawson recalls a less elegant end: The physician confessed in his memoir that he prescribed the fast-failing King a fatal sedative so that his death would be announced in the Tory morning papers (and opposed to the afternoon tabloids). George’s actual last words, as a nurse approached with the morphine- and cocaine-filled syringe, were “God damn you, you’re going to kill me!”
George V
“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing”*…
What did the United States look like to Ottoman observers in 1803? In this map, the newly independent U.S. is labeled “The Country of the English People” (“İngliz Cumhurunun Ülkesi”). The Iroquois Confederacy shows up as well, labeled the “Government of the Six Indian Nations.” Other tribes shown on the map include the Algonquin, Chippewa, Western Sioux (Siyu-yu Garbî), Eastern Sioux (Siyu-yu Şarkî), Black Pawnees (Kara Panis), and White Pawnees (Ak Panis)….
See a larger version of the map and learn more about it and about the history of Turkish maps of North America at “The Ottoman Empire’s First Map of the Newly Minted United States.”
* C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
###
As we ponder perspective, we might recall that it was on this date in 1918– four years and a day after joining World War I as allies of Germany– that the Ottoman Empire surrendered and signed an armistice with the Allies at Mudros, ending the war in the Middle Eastern Theatre.
“Veni, vidi, vici”*…
A young (and unshaven) Julius Caesar
In chapter 2 of his Life of Julius Caesar, the Greek historian Plutarch of Chaeronea (46-c.120) describes what happened when Caesar encountered the Cilician pirates, who infested the Aegean Sea, in 75 BCE. To that point, the Cilician’s had regularly offered the Roman senators slaves, which the nobles needed for their plantations in Italy– and which the Senate accepted as tribute, refraining from sending the Roman navy against the pirates.
The translation below was made by Robin Seager.
First, when the pirates demanded a ransom of twenty talents, Caesar burst out laughing. They did not know, he said, who it was that they had captured, and he volunteered to pay fifty. Then, when he had sent his followers to the various cities in order to raise the money and was left with one friend and two servants among these Cilicians, about the most bloodthirsty people in the world, he treated them so highhandedly that, whenever he wanted to sleep, he would send to them and tell them to stop talking.
For thirty-eight days, with the greatest unconcern, he joined in all their games and exercises, just as if he was their leader instead of their prisoner. He also wrote poems and speeches which he read aloud to them, and if they failed to admire his work, he would call them to their faces illiterate savages, and would often laughingly threaten to have them all hanged. They were much taken with this and attributed his freedom of speech to a kind of simplicity in his character or boyish playfulness.
However, the ransom arrived from Miletus and, as soon as he had paid it and been set free, he immediately manned some ships and set sail from the harbor of Miletus against the pirates. He found them still there, lying at anchor off the island, and he captured nearly all of them. He took their property as spoils of war and put the men themselves into the prison at Pergamon. He then went in person to [Marcus] Junius, the governor of Asia, thinking it proper that he, as praetor in charge of the province, should see to the punishment of the prisoners. Junius, however, cast longing eyes at the money, which came to a considerable sum, and kept saying that he needed time to look into the case.
Caesar paid no further attention to him. He went to Pergamon, took the pirates out of prison and crucified the lot of them, just as he had often told them he would do when he was on the island and they imagined that he was joking.
* (“I came, I saw, I conquered”) Julius Caesar, in a letter to the Roman Senate, 46 BCE (after his short war against Pharnaces II of Pontus)
###
As we exclaim “Great Caesar’s Ghost!”, we might recall that it was in this date in 1914 that Franz Ferdinand, 51 year old heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo, then the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovnia, where he was visiting to inspect the Empire’s troops. A member of the Black Hand nationalist group, Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed both the Crown Prince and his wife as they were being driven through the city. The assassination– triggering, as it did, competing accusations and the “calling” of interlocking alliances– ignited World War I, which broke out one month later.
Franz Ferdinand
Then and now…
Filmmaker Simon Smith has come up with a clever way to show how much (or little) London has changed over the last century.
In the 1920s, Claude Friese-Greene filmed his travels around Great Britain for a project called The Open Road. He used a film coloring process based on the one his father developed, exposing black and white film through color filters. Claude’s project still captivates viewers today; the British Film Institute eventually restored and re-released it for a 21st century audience.
The London portion of The Open Road inspired Smith to make his own, matching version. In his six-month project, titled London In 1927 and 2013, Smith re-shot each of the scenes Friese-Greene documented 86 years prior. He then lined it up with the 1927 footage for comparison…
email readers click here for Smith’s film
Read more at “London, Then and Now (1927 to 2013)”; and see Friese-Greene’s The Open Road here.
###
As we redouble our efforts to master The Knowledge, we might recall that it was on this date in 1915 that Great Yarmouth became the first British town attacked from the air in WWI, when two German zeppelins (which had intended to attack Hull, but gone astray) dropped bombs on the Norfolk port. Zeppelin attacks continued and soon reached London… “shaping” the urban landscape that Friese-Greene captured just over a decade later.
The aftermath of a zeppelin bombing in London. 1915
Breaking bread…
A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes
–– Wendell Berry
Food is our common ground, a universal experience
– James Beard
Conflict Kitchen is a take-out restaurant [in Pittsburgh, PA] that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. The food is served out of a take-out style storefront that rotates identities every six months to highlight another country. Each iteration of the project is augmented by events, performances, and discussions that seek to expand the engagement the public has with the culture, politics, and issues at stake within the focus country. These events have included live international Skype dinner parties between citizens of Pittsburgh and young professionals in Tehran, Iran; documentary filmmakers in Kabul, Afghanistan; and community radio activists in Caracas, Venezuela…
More about Conflict Kitchen on their site.
Those who look to food as the apotheosis of another kind of aspirational experience would do well to heed the wisdom of the (much misunderstood) father of Epicureanism…
We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink…
– Epicurus
###
As we lick our lips, we might pause to recall that this was the date, in 1917, that the “Third Battle of Ypres”– or “Passchendaele”– began in Flanders during the War to End All Wars, World War I. It lasted over three months, and cost over half a million lives – the Germans lost about 250,000, and the British and their Commonwealth allies, about the same. To put the scale of loss in perspective: the British death toll at Passchendaele far exceeds the combined death, casualty, and missing-in action toll on U.S. forces during the entire Vietnam War… and the world was of course smaller then: the young Commonwealth of Australia, with a population of fewer than five million at the time, lost 36,500 men.
Eventually, on November 12, the Canadians took the village of Passchendaele, or what was left of it, and the battle was finally over. In the end, the battle was of little import to the larger conflict. In his memoirs Lloyd George wrote, “Passchendaele was indeed one of the greatest disasters of the war…. No soldier of any intelligence now defends this senseless campaign…”
You must be logged in to post a comment.