I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
11 Tuesday Nov 2014
Posted Uncategorized
inI could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
David said:
“See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”
“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”
“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender is the Night)
I’m really liking the Blueprint for Armageddon series about WW1. The podcast does a good job of getting across the awe-inspiring nature of the conflict, while also keeping you aware of all the human suffering caused in it.
LikeLike
ckp said:
Indeed, I can’t wait for his coverage of the Russian Revolutions.
LikeLike
Susebron said:
Link to Blueprint?
LikeLike
ckp said:
Full list of Hardcore History podcasts here, Blueprint for Armageddon are the most recent:
http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/
LikeLike
Susebron said:
Thanks.
LikeLike
Nornagest said:
I’m hardly a Kipling scholar, but I’ve always thought it’s really interesting to see the transition between his works pre-WWI (where he comes off as a nuanced but basically enthusiastic backer of old-school British nationalism) and post- (where he comes off as painfully disillusioned).
That’s a change reflected in much of Western culture, of course — we don’t call Hemingway and Eliot’s the “Lost Generation” for nothing — but it’s uncommon to be able to see it in action in a mature, prolific writer.
LikeLike