August 2020 – Political theory and practice

Until the Last Trumpet Sounds: The Life of General of the Armies John J Pershing (1999) by Gene Smith.

Goodreads metadata is 384 pages, rated 3.62 by 56 litizens.

Genre: Biography.

Verdict: One of a kind.

If you don’t know Jack (and a surprisingly large number of people of my acquaintance don’t – and they wouldn’t get that remark) read that subtitle above which includes the phrase ‘General of the Armies.’ Plural. At the time that rank was accorded to Pershing by an act of Congress, the only other officer ever to bear it was Ulysses Grant.

Born to a shop-keeping family in Missouri Jack Pershing (1860-1948) liked to read and write, as well as the other pursuits of a boy in a small town. The Civil War had been a fratricidal war in Missouri and the other border states, and its residue gave the boy Pershing a belief in the necessity of order that never left him. This inchoate conviction was born from the ragtag of armed villains who prowled Missouri claiming to be soldiers for either the North or the South during and after the Civil War, but who were in fact criminals. The economic depression that followed the Civil War ruined his family’s fortunes and the boy had to make his own way in the world. How he did that shaped the man he became.

At seventeen he became a backwoods school teacher to earn a living, albeit school teaching was usually woman’s work in that time and place. He would have been teased about that, but what really got a reaction was the students he taught. It was a reaction that stayed with him to the end of his time.

He was hired to teach freed slaves and their progeny to read and write. This experience lead to the nickname that he had the rest of his life: ‘Nigger Jack.’ He was bullied and assaulted and that drove him to the serious study of self-defence, i.e., boxing. This experience with blacks has echoes in his late life. Stay tuned.

School teaching put food on the table, but it led nowhere because his students were black. He then learned that the West Point nominations for Missouri would be filled by open examination, and he saw in this a way to get a free college education, which he and family otherwise could not afford. It was not the army that attracted him but the education. He went at preparing for this examination the way he came to do most things with longterm, meticulous staff work, as his father used to manage the store. He sought out previous candidates who had sat the exam and interviewed them about it. He hired, out of his meagre salary, a tutor to start him on French. He haunted the few free libraries within his reach to study grammar and geography. He gained admission and excelled there.

His youthful reading and writing had given him the ambition to be a lawyer and the army was a means to an end, but he liked the order, discipline, and purposefulness of military life.

As a young lieutenant he spent six years at the University of Nebraska as a Professor of Military Science and ran – with efficiency and excellence – the ROTC-scheme that existed at the time, and today bears his name. Here as everywhere else he served, the regimen was one of strict discipline which was imposed with an even hand. Even the son of the largest donor to the University as well as a star athlete felt the rod in that hand. Soldiering was never a game to Pershing. While performing his duties, he also obtained an LLB degree from UNL but that ended his legal career (as it has for so many others).

That is why there are so many things named Pershing in and around Lincoln, including Pershing Elementary School, Pershing Auditorium, Pershing Drive (Omaha), Pershing town in Burt County, and the Pershing Block at UNL. The Pershing Rifles is a national drill and discipline organisation headquartered for years in Lincoln.

His military career included the tail end of the Indian Wars in New Mexico (around Silver City) and North Dakota. Unlike many of his brother officers he respected his foes and learned much about tactics from the Apache and Sioux he pursued. The only time his unit came into contact with hostile Indians it was the latter who attacked.

His service in New Mexico was noted and he was promoted and put in command of a regiment of Buffalo Soldiers in Montana. Buffalo Soldiers? These were black men, mainly one-time slaves or veterans of the Civil War, or the sons of the same. He was proud of the discipline and deportment of these men and that earned ‘Nigger’ Jack more scorn from peers. Later on his recommendation several these troopers received the Congressional Medal of Honor. He had no doubt of the courage and wit of these men in doing their duty. This assignment spread that derogatory nickname further and wider in the army. He commanded the 10th Cavalry for three years.

Then came assignment to West Point to teach tactics. At the start of the Spanish-American War in 1899 he was a well-known and experienced line officer who was readily available because he had no field command. He was re-united with the Buffalo Soldiers and together they stormed up a hill and defeated the Spanish, while Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders with attendant journalists went up the other side to a glory won by the Black Blue Boys, as the Buffalo Soldiers were called, on the obverse side. This action earned the unit a citation and Pershing a Silver Star. It was then that he made his medal recommendations. Shortly thereafter he contracted malaria in Cuba and it stayed with him for years.

The Buffalo Soldiers he commanded in Puerto Rico.

In the same year he was assigned to the Phillipines where his commander in Manila wanted to teach this ‘Nigger lover’ a lesson in the real world and assigned him a command in the most difficult part of the most difficult island. Pershing started by learning the local language and began a public relations campaign with the locals that featured medical care for children, free food for the elderly and infirm, agricultural tools swapped for produce, feast days for one and all. His troops also paraded around to remind viewers that there was muscle behind the good will. He engaged in some tense negotiations with local warlords who in time came to trust him. He thus pacified Mindanao over a four-year period with a minimum of bloodshed. Made me think of J. Paul Vann.

He then served as an observer with the Japanese army during the Russo-Japanese War in engagements when Gustav Mannerheim of Finland was in the Tsar’s army across the river. His tactful persistence finally got him permission to visit battlefields and to accompany patrols. His reports on the effects of new weapons (repeating rifles, machine guns, ranged artillery, much improved binoculars, barbed wire, telegraph communications, trains, and aerial reconnaissance) were terse and much discussed in Washington D.C. More importantly, he bore them in mind in 1917 in his insistence on training and equipment, and the use of all arms, including artillery and aviation, though not cavalry.

Republican President Theodore Roosevelt promoted him from captain to brigadier general, passing over nearly a thousand more senior officers, making Pershing no friends in the army, but stiffening his resolve to be worthy of the rank. To explain: The president cannot promote an officer from captain to major, or a major to colonel, but the president can promote anyone to general, though the custom was to promote to that rank only senior colonels. TR was no one to follow custom.

When in 1915-1916 Democratic President Woodrow Wilson decided to teach Mexico what was good for Mexico, Pershing was assigned command of the mission, which had no clearly defined purpose or goals. His efforts to extract the latter from Wilson had no success. Its purpose became the apprehension of Pancho Villa, whose raids across the border into Texas had attracted Wilson’s attention. In that mission it failed but it did break up Villa’s armed gangs and so was declared a success. During this exercise Pershing commanded 10,000 men in the field with all the attendant necessities of logistics, supply, medicines, transportation animals, wounded, hygiene, and so on. The Mexican government, such as it was, did not cooperate, and Wilson, perhaps embarrassed by his overreaction, starved the expedition of support at a time when all eyes were on the Great War in Europe. Yet it might be well to note that from 1914 Germany encouraged and financed disturbances in Mexico to distract the USA from the European war. Read the Zimmerman telegram for details.

‘Lafayette, nous voilà’ is a phrase forever associated with him. Idiomatic, it means ‘Lafayette, here we are’… to repay the debt of the decisive French financial and naval support during the American Revolutionary War. When Wilson entered the Great War to defend the freedom of the seas, Pershing was the obvious choice for command. He had managed more troops in the field than any other serving general, and was relatively young and energetic. In May 1917 he arrived in France with a headquarters company of 250, and they marched through Paris to bolster civilian morale. Months of acrimony and conflict followed.

The French and British wanted men in the trench line N O W! Pershing did not want to entrust US soldiers to them, though the author is too circumspect to say why. Stay tuned to find out more. Moreover, he wanted US troops to serve only under American command. Finally, he wanted them to be trained and equiped. All of this took time. Lots of it.

French and British leaders went over his head, repeatedly, to President Wilson who absolutely deferred to General Pershing. If American units had been fed piecemeal into the trenches, is there any doubt exhausted French and British commanders would have used these fresh troops as cannon fodder to spare their own for at least a time. None whatsoever. But the author omits this point, though he does note that the French and British denied that American troops needed any training for trench warfare nor any weapons their own, implying the short lifespan anticipated.

The press introduced him to the American public and applied its alchemy to the nickname, changing it to Black Jack without explanation.

Pershing’s finest hour(s) may have been at the conference table with Allies to withhold US soldiers until they were trained and equipped, and in so doing to save them from being cannon fodder. By the end of the war there were 2.2 million American troops on the Western Front and when unleashed they swept all before them. The Germans called them ‘Devil Dogs.’ The battle of the Argonne Woods lasted forty-seven days, a sustained offensive then quite beyond the men and material of the French and British. Among those who learned from him were George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, George Patton, and Douglas MacArthur.

There is no indication in the book that US forces used poison gas, though it certainly was used against them. (See the comments on Rondo Hatton elsewhere on this blog.) Hence one vital piece of equipment was the gas mask. The book is likewise silent on the Buffalo Soldiers though other sources (see picture below) indicate that Pershing did make an effort to include black troops in the AEF but it was blocked by Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo who interfered generally in the latter days of the Wilson administration. McAdoo was also Wilson’s son-in-law, and having purged the civil service of blacks, he wanted to do the same for the army. He had presidential ambitions himself.

Pershing stayed in Europe after the war for a couple of years, attending to the aftermath, repatriating the wounded, planning cemeteries, inaugurating monuments, auditing equipment, and other mundane chores. He was feted and had to make numerous speeches, all short and awkward. Publishers offered him large advances for memoirs none of which he took, though he did struggle for years to write the indigestible account of the war that appeared, finally, under his name.

He was also briefly touted as a presidential candidate but shunned the call. He served as chief of staff in the Harding Administration, and created the Pershing Map of the roads of the United States, which in time became the starting point of the Interstate Highway System initiated by President Eisenhower. Pershing retired in 1934. Later he championed aid to Great Britain and France in 1939-1940 in press interviews.

He had been a happily married man with four children when a fire in the age of oil lighting and candles burned his house down while he was on campaign. His wife and three of the four children perished. He was stunned for more than year and became thereafter even more terse, unforgiving, morose, stoic, and a workaholic.

The book ends with a long and pointless chapter on his surviving son and then his grandson. It adds nothing to our appreciation of the subject, and is in lieu of, but no substitute for, a summing up the man and his achievements, strengths and weaknesses, and heritage.

I found Pershing mentioned in the biography of Phillipe Pétain I read and that reminded me that I had once been curious about Pershing’s connection to Nebraska, so I set out to scratch that itch.

Nicholas Atkin, Pétain (1997).

Goodreads meta-data is 252 pages, rated 4.0 by 3 litizens.

Genre: Biography.

Verdict: Great arrival but lousy trip.

Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Pétain (1856-1951) became the head of a state after the defeat of France in June 1940. He was eighty-four years old at that time, i.e., 84. This very old soldier became the head of brand new state known as Vichy France. That’s his picture on the wall in the opening scene of Casablanca (1942).

While two-thirds of France was either occupied, governed directly by Germany, or annexed to Germany, the mainly rural south became Vichy. Circumscribed though that territory was, the Vichy administration had civilian authority over the Occupied Zone, too, but not the Pas-de-Calais which absorbed into the German administration of Belgium, and Alsace and Lorraine which were annexed to the Reich. Vichy managed schools, hospitals, police, road maintenance, rationing, and everything else for most of France. Yet its ministers could not travel out the Southern Vichy zone without German permission which was seldom given. In addition, it exercised sovereignty over the vast French Empire, though again its officials were not permitted to travel there. Rather there were German civilian officials in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Senegal to observe French neutrality.

It sounds like a constitution drawn up by Rufus T. Firefly.

This book does much to explain how Pétain came to head this rump, client state. For those who tuned in late, Hitler preferred that defeated France mostly govern itself so that he could concentrate German resources first on the invasion of England and when that was shelved, then Russia. As long as the French complied with German demands for material, Hitler did not care how they went about it. In this way the Vichy regime had domestic autonomy.

Pétain was born to a peasant family in the North where his world was home, farm work, and church until he went into the army. He never read a book apart from the infantry manual, and while later many army publications bore his name they were all penned by ghost writers, including Charles de Gaulle. In 1913 when Pétain was 57 he bought a house to which to retire and married (to secure a housekeeper). There had been many women in his life and he only married when retirement loomed.

He had and projected a complete self-confidence born out of his nearly complete ignorance of the wider world. (Does that remind you of anyone?) When the Great War started he was a senior general and did his duty. In the chaos of trench warfare he was one of the few who opposed attacks, hurling men against barbed wire, minefields, massed machine guns, and point blank artillery. Indeed as the commander at Verdun he tried to rein in subordinates from launching offensives. He preferred the defence. Let the Boches attack our barbed wire, minefields, machine guns, and artillery.

He even engaged in tactical retreats to lure Germans into difficult positions, but in so doing he surrendered some of the sacred soil of France, which infuriated his superiors. Yet he succeeded in breaking the German offensive against Verdun – the birthplace of Jeanne d’Arc and thus often regarded as the spiritual core of France itself. Even with his defensive tactics more than 300,000 poilus died defending Verdun. Many others were wounded or captured, among them Charles de Gaulle who was both wounded and captured. Two of Jules Romains’s twenty-seven novel sequence Men of Good Will concern the political and social repercussions of this battle: Prélude à Verdun and Verdun (both 1938).

Promotion followed this success and he became one of five field marshals. He was the man of the hour, or one of them.

Compared to the other marshals and most of the generals he was perceived to be a Republican and a humanitarian. This latter adjective was granted even though he put down a mutiny with fifty executions. The thinking was that another marshal or general would have murdered ten times that number. The Republican attribution owes more to his humble origins than any recorded conviction or activity.

He had always been personally vain about his appearance (tall, erect, blue-eyed, blond) and the fame that befell him inflated and hardened that vanity. He began to believe he possessed all of the heroic qualities the press attributed to him. He collected the press cuttings and the grateful letters from the French as external affirmation. At Vichy he often spoke in the royal ‘We.’

Success and public adulation combined with his reticence and terse speech gave him an aura of mystery. Whereas other Great War marshals could not shut up, Pétain let his actions speak for themselves. That set him apart from Joffe, Foch, and their talkative ilk.

His experiences in the war confirmed his native born anglophobia. Trying to coordinate with Alexander Haig let him to suppose all British (and by extension) Americans were unreliable. That conviction was compounded, not cured, by his own realisation in 1917 that he and France needed both the British in the North and the supplies and troops the United States poured in. He resented that reliance and disliked those on whom he depended.

He had imbibed in his childhood the commonplace anti-semitism and it only grew during the Dreyfus fiasco. Though he observed a studied silence, there is no doubt he supposed Dreyfus should be punished, if for no other reason than being a Jew who had dared to wear the uniform. Equally from his peasant childhood he developed a resignation to expect and accept the worst. This negativism was often display during the Vichy years.

He left religion behind though he always recognised and respected the Catholic Church for the order and acquiescence it engendered in its adherents. He was a philanderer who married a divorcée and had no children and seldom attended mass and never went near the confessional. Nonetheless the Church nearly canonised him in the Vichy years.

When desperate Third Republic governments played musical chairs in the 1930s – eight defence ministers in sixteen months, each intent on undoing what the predecessor had done – one transitory government recruited the Victor of Verdun in the hope of stabilising parliamentary support. Pétain became minister of defence and set about cutting the defence budget. While he, unlike many of his rank, accepted tanks and aircraft, he thought only a few were needed, and certainly there was no need to develop them further. His penchant for defence translated itself into the Maginot Line. Later he would complain about the budget cuts that he himself had made without acknowledging his own actions. He was always ready to blame others for what he had done.

Pétain disliked the volatility of the Third Republic with its comic opera succession of cabinets and prime ministers. He saw that instability to be the inevitable fruit of parliamentary democracy and despised politics and politicians. Devoid of self-knowledge, he never realised that he himself was an inveterate and adept politician, having spent most of his army career undermining rivals in one way or another and continuing that approach in the Vichy regime.

When the defeat loomed in May 1940 Prime Minister Paul Reynaud as a last gamble made Pétain Deputy Prime Minister to raise public morale, rallying the French for another effort but it was far too little and far too late. By the time of this appointment Pétain had accepted defeat and said so. When Reynaud could not convince the cabinet to continue the war by going into Algerian exile and he resigned, then figurehead president Albert LeBrun nominated Pétain as Prime Minister to ascertain what terms for a truce the Germans would offer. Instead Pétain went on the radio to announce that France was surrendering. The first most soldiers knew of this was when German leaflet drops announced it.

Pétain surrendered to head off another Paris Commune, he said, fearing his countrymen more than the Nazis. Added to his other phobias was a fear of communism: Better Hitler than a red commune. In his hermetically sealed naiveté he supposed he would secure a favourable relationship with Germany, after all he was PÉTAIN. Thereafter he spent much of his tenure in office trying to collaborate with Germany, only to be rebuffed. Hitler did not want a partner. To woo Hitler Pétain ordered that the considerable French Fleet and the vast colonial empire to a strict neutrality. He even offered the Germans Lebanon and Syria to threaten the Suez Canal but to no avail. He had the tiny Vichy airforce bomb Gibraltar to show Hitler he was an enemy of Britain. He ordered French submarines to attack British ships in the Mediterranean Sea but most naval commanders found that their boats needed repairs as they studied the neutrality provisions Pétain had earlier signed. See Colin Smith, England’s Last War against France, 1940-1942 (2010).

His domestic policy was to undo the French Revolution which had germinated the Third Republic, creating the l’État français to replace le République française. The Marseillaise was supplanted by a paean to the Marshall himself. The motto ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ was overwritten by ‘Work, Family, and Country.’ Even the tricolore was changed to include on the centre white field a double-headed axe, the francisque, an antique Frankish device. It was a culture war across the board from school rooms, town halls, and the pulpit.

Bounties were offered to families to move from cities to the country, to have ever more children, the laws requiring basic schooling were relaxed in the countryside, the few taxes the Republic had dared levy on commercial property owned by the Catholic Church were eliminated, God and the Church were put back into the classroom as science was taken out, education was curtailed (especially for girls), books were denounced for making readers weak and confused, and so and on. Without German prompting decrees against Jews were nearly the first order of business in July 1940. To Pétain they were all foreigners anyway and not to be trusted as Dreyfus had shown.

When Pétain, absorbed by his colossal ego, ‘made France the gift of himself,’ as he put it on the day, he was eighty-four but walked without a cane, climbed stairs, and was alert in meetings, though he tired easily. Nor was he senile, though that was often said later in his defence. And in office he continued his ceaseless intrigues.

He had asserted that his new regime would replace the ever-changing circus of the Third Republic and bring harmony and stability. Ha! In fact his cabinet ministers and his prime ministers came and went even faster than had been the case during the Republic. Much of this was due to Pétain’s own manipulations, some was a reaction to external pressure – real or imagined, and other changes were due to his rivals who wished to turn him from the fountainhead of the new regime into its figurehead. The politicking was constant, the more so since there was little of substance for anyone to do. There were thirty cabinet changes as ministers came and went in the few years of the Vichy regime.

The book ends with a summation and evaluation of the man, the legend, and the regime. Pétain was, when all is said and done, a vain and imperceptive man in way over his head and did not know it. His self-confidence remained undented and unbreached to the very end. In conclusion there is a lengthy and cogent bibliographic essay that reviews a vast literature. It is a very impressive achievement in its own right.

While the content of this book is excellent with extensive secondary research and plenty of primary material, too, and well written with judicious summaries and conclusions, it is difficult to read because of the morass of typographical errors that dot the pages like a smear on a computer screen. I have never encountered such a welter of mistakes in any of the other five-hundred Kindle books I have read and for that reason I list below examples, most of which were repeated many times in the book published by the estimable Routledge of London. The author has a long list of other titles from this publisher. Ah hem.

Pans = Paris

Hider = Hitler

make = take

Begun = Belgian

refined = defined

Gamelxn = Gamelin

batde = battle

considtute = constitute

litde – little

Raynaud = Reynaud

setdement = settlement

parlie = Paris

apparendy = apparently

drôte = drôle

explicidy = explicitly

modon = modern

diat = day

tnat = that

associadon = association

Frangaise = Française

fluency = influence

tnarshal = marshal

oi = of

ir = in

providentieJ = providentiel

recendy = recently

fruidess = fruitless

oudawed = outlawed

oudlined = outlined

thoqgh = though

lie = he

beers = been

tiling = thing

‘threatened to resign In the country several’ = ‘threatened to resign. In the country several’

gready = greatly

french bases = French bases

shordy = shortly

blundly – bluntly

reladonship = relationship

tins = this

and the list goes on.

Was the text was rendered digital by OCR software and thereafter not proof read or copy edited? What other explanation could there be? Yet without human intervention this Kindle title sold for $64.51! That amount if $0.07 more than the paper cover. Though that is nothing compared to hardcover price of $286.40!

There is an excellent krimi set in 1944 Vichy by J. Robert Janes, Flykiller (2002), part of the Kohler-St-Cyr series. Janes has a laborious, cryptic style (think of the much lauded but nonetheless incomprehensible Hilary Mantel), but the setting is superbly realised. It helps to know Kohler and St-Cyr, too, by starting at the beginning of the series. This title and others by Janes are discussed on my blog.

——

Around the World in Eighty Treasures.

IMDb meta-data is ten episodes of 50 minutes each, rated 7.9 by 229 viewers.

Genre: Documentary.

Verdict: Addictive.

Architectural historian Dan Cruickshank set off on a five-month journey around the world to bring to viewers’ attention eighty treasures that define epochs, cultures, and civilisations. Singularly and collectively they represent instances of the highest achievements of our species. The itinerary went through thirty-four countries on all of the inhabited continents, considering about 400 objects for inclusion in the top 80. They ranged from massive buildings to vast irrigation schemes to buildings to intricate carved miniatures to manufactured goods to symbolic gestures to practical engineering.

The choices are in some cases, obvious, like the Taj Mahal, and others at the end of a long bow, like the Colt-45. But each of the candidates is interesting and the research, explanation, photography, and travelogue to put them into context are engrossing. There is no doubt that each of the candidates are themselves treasures, but, perhaps as a boy, inspired by Jules Verne, Cruickshank limited himself to eighty. The time constraints, the budget constraints, viewers’ attention spans, the limitation to eighty, combine to produce focus and discipline.

Other among the eighty are the Incan Salt Pans, Nazca Lines, Monticello, St James Church, Kakadu Rock Art, Ankor Wat, samurai sword, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, Giant Buddha, Jantar Mantar Observatory, Lalibela, Samarkand tiles, Petra, Dogon Mask, Tuankhamun’s death mask, Hagia Sophia, VW Beetle, Guernica, and more. As the list indicates, many are religious in one way or another. The Wikipedia entry lists them, and the DVDs are still available.

At fifty-six years of age, Cruikshank is intrepid, abseiling up rock faces, descending in a crouch for hundreds of meters down damp, slippery, and poorly lite shafts, ascending rocky scree for hundreds of metres in the Sahara heat to reach a treasure. Of course the unseen and unacknowledged camera operator and sound engineer always go first. Always Dan has a notebook in hand to record the details, always sports a neck bandana, and always whispers.

Like many others I find the whispering annoying when it is not done out of consideration of the environment. To whisper while observing a religious ritual is appropriate, but not when standing in an isolated locale talking about rock art. But whisper often he does, reminding me an Australian celebrity academic who always whispered, a technique to make the audience to lean forward and listen to his priceless banalities. I had the misfortune a few times to share a conference panel with this poseur.

At times, Cruikshank seems to go off script with visits to local bazaars and haggling over the price of hat or a meal. More exposition of the candidates and less beating down the locals in price would have been better.

We watched these in 2009 and reviewed them again recently.

The pompous, opinionated, and ignorant troll criticisms on IMDb attack his clothes, his accent, his inflection, his explanations, his choices, his hat, the bandana, the whole project and in some cases all of the above and more. Armchair trolls indeed.

Herodotus, The Histories (440 BC).

GoodReads meta-data is 716 pages, rated 3.99 by 1152 litizens.

Genre: Fact and fiction.

Verdict: First in best dressed.

Herodotus (484–425 BC) wrote a history of the wars between the Persians and Greeks, with many, many digressions. Many. The book was a best seller in its time and because it was widely distributed it has come down to us nearly complete. Cicero called him the Father of History because Herodotus systematically pursued his research. True, he was a persistent compiler, but Thucydides hard earlier noted, as have subsequent readers over two and half millennia, that Herodotus made up some things and was credulous about others. Plutarch termed him the Father of Lies. What both Cicero and Plutarch agree on is that Herodotus was a superb story teller.

It starts with this statement: ‘Here are presented the results of the enquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and Persians; among the matters covered is, in particular, the cause of the hostilities between Greeks and Persians.’

While the Persian wars are the declared subject about two-thirds of the book is labyrinthine wanderings through Persia, Medea, Thrace, Egypt, Syria, Phoenicia, Scythia, and more. For those who open the book to read of these wars, there are 450 pages of digressions, tangents, sidetracks, and more. We might add to his sobriquets ‘Father of Digressions.’ Some of them are rattling good stories in themselves, but they add nothing to the description of the war when it finally comes.

As a determined swat in college, I first read an abridgement but gave up somewhere in the maze of digressions that remained in even that truncated edition. Since then I have dipped into it now and again for a specific point, usually following a footnote in something else I had read. A few years ago I also tried listening to an Audible edition, but lost interest as it sounded like the Old Testament: begetting, slaying, strangling, sacrificing, attacking, raping, the son of the son of, siring, murdering, banqueting, crucifying, dismembering, and cruelty in a variety of places I find on no map. He spends pages and pages on some minor kinglet just as he does on the River Nile’s ebbs, flows, and floods. The latter is much more important than an ephemeral king in some corner of the map, but not to Herodotus. And anyway, what does the Nile’s perturbations have to do the Persian invasion of Greece? Good question, Mortimer.

When Herodotus is not reporting on the gods but on facts, a lot of what he wrote is pretty solid, if not relevant to his declared purpose. In this he is like some thesis writers who crowd in everything they know. The surplus information conceals rather than reveals the point. This profusion of irrelevant details has led contemporary editors to abridge the book into a focus on the wars, and it is sometimes published as The History of Persian Wars, or Greek-Persian Wars, cutting hundreds of pages of stories, legends, myths, and so on. That’s the version I had in college but even so it was maze. This war only figures in the last three chapters (out of nine) of the complete work.

Among the good stories are the efforts by one people to ascertain which race of men was first by isolating from speech two children, carefully reared and nurtured by mutes so that the children never hear speech. When the children finally speak, this will be mankind’s fundamental language. The children do speak and none of those who hear them know what the language is, but decide – what a surprise – that it is an infantile form of the own language. Remember John Hersey’s novel The Child Buyer (1960)? Tsk, tsk.

Then there were the Persian notables who decided the best way to choose one from among themselves to be the new king was by whose horse first neighed at the next day’s dawn. Crazy, of course, but then look what elections produce in the way of leaders.

Then there is a wild ride on a porpoise, a tuna fish that returns a discarded ring, the gold digging ants of India, the winged snakes of far Araby, and more.

Oracles, there were a few. O’Henry may written some of them. An emperor asks if he should attack a rival empire, and is told that if he does, a great empire will fall. Aha! That means he will win! Off he goes to war. He loses. A great empire – his own – falls.

It is often downbeat as when after a long conversation near the beginning of the tome the wise Solon concludes that the only happy man is one who is dead. ‘Lighten up, Solly,’ cried the fraternity brothers! ‘Do we have to read all 700 pages of this by Beer Time?’ They had stumbled into the library by mistake and quickly scooted to the beer refrigerator.

There is no doubt from the text and other sources that Herodotus travelled far and wide in the Mediterranean world on his research grant, interviewing anyone and everyone he could, and scrupulously noting down what was said. Mostly he reports these interviews, even where they are inconsistent or contradicted by other interviews, but sometimes he does rule against something as absurd. At other times, when, say, writing about cloven-footed men he passes it on without comment. He also spends a lot of time measuring distances, buildings, roads, coast lines, and just about everything. Hmm, these exercises are made all the more confusing because of the variety of units of measure used. It is tedious to read and has no bearing on any theme but it does demonstrate his commitment to facts.

As to facts, when he does finally get to the Persian invasion there are many catalogues of allies, weapons, ships, crews, horses, wagons, hot dinners, spears, bunions, slings, woes, clothing, and so on and on and on. The result is that he enumerated the Persian army to be 1,700,000. With at least that many others following it as porters, teamsters, sutlers, prostitutes, astrologers (and other consultants), priests, and families. Quite impossible but that is what he has. Makes one think about hot meals, hygiene, and sanitation.

The Persian army was counted in this way. The first 10,000 men with their gear were herded together and as they squeezed in a rope fence was drawn around them. By the way, ‘myriad’ meant 10,000. So that was myriad one. Thereafter the rest of the army was put through this pen, and it had to be done 170 times to get them all. Then there was the navy, and allies who joined the throng later.

Two things emerge for this reader. A myriad is 10,000. And that is equivalent to a division in a contemporary army.

The other is this: One of the most trusted allies was ruled by Artemisia, a woman, who is styled a king in the pages. She went on the campaign with her troops, and attended the meetings, and in at least one she contradicted Xerxes. He heard her out and then politely demurred. She also led her ships into battle at Salamis with some tactical success, thus ensuring her esteem in Xerxes’s eyes. Herodotus is from the same town and might have had firsthand knowledge of this woman.

The historical Xerxes in these pages bears no resemblance to the infantile cartoon character in the egregious film 300 (2006). (Not to be confused with the superior The 300 [1962], but that is not saying much.) Although Xerxes was often cruel, pitiless, and vindictive enough to be a manager, but not always, and usually only when provoked.

Though the telling seems prolix (because it is) the major themes are power, greed, and stupidity. Eternal and contemporary these are; just watch the news.

Many speeches are presented word-for-word. Many. How Herodotus came to learn of them and the credibility he attached to them is unclear. Sometimes he presented two contradictory accounts, leaving the reader to judge. At other times he indicates which he finds the more credible. But how in the world did his sources hear, retrain, remember, retrieve, and recite so many long speeches. We’ll never know.

Despite the wealth of details two things are absent. One is the seasons and the constraints of the weather. Storms at sea are mentioned regarding the navies but little or nothing about the effects of seasons, climate, and weather on the armies. Second and likely more important are the language barriers. While Herodotus catalogues the array of peoples and nations among the Persian host and often recounts discussions between Greeks and Persians, and the speeches as above, he says nary a word about the languages used and how all these people understood each other. That is a puzzler.

Above I have emphasised the speeches because Thucydides often takes a beating for the thirty of so speeches he has in his narrative of the Peloponnesian War, though we know he heard some of them himself. The critics are sure he fabricated some of them. Yet we know that Thucydides also travelled far and wide researching his book.

The edition of Herodotus I read on Kindle numbers the paragraphs in the customary way and divides the paragraphs into nine books titled with the names of nine muses although Herodotus specifically said he was not inspired by a muse but by the desire to record facts for posterity. See above. Lacking any first hand philological knowledge I do not know if the Greek text was set-out like that or whether this method of presenting the text came later like Stephanus numbers on Platonic and Aristotelian texts. Some paragraphs begin with a word in lower case or a comma and that indicates some missing text (I think). I would have preferred that to have indicated in the usual way. e.g., ’59 …. and then so on.’

We know nothing about Herodotus’s life save for his own few references. Only in the 11th Century AD did a Byzantine writer produce a biography (perhaps based on sources now lost) more than 1500 years after his death: A rather late obituary.

Gary Corby’s diverting krimi The Singer from Memphis (2016) features an amusing if obsessive Herodotus in the background. Extraordinary Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński’s reportageTravels with Herodotus (2007) is a handsome tribute to the inspiration of Herodotus. Is reportage really a word? The spell checker accepted it, but that is not a final ruling.

Star Maidens (1976)

IMDB meta-data is 13 episodes of 30 minutes, rated 6.5 by 163 cinematizens.

Genre: SyFy.

Verdict: A winner (see the last paragraph below before ordering).

Thanks to the physics of script writing a distant planet shifts into the solar system. Astronomers notice this aberration and squint into lens. This planet is Medusa which is ruled by women who regard men as noisome necessities to kept in their places as stronger and bigger but less intelligent, less rational, less stable, less disciplined, and less creative than women are. All of this is made clear from the many condescending, patronising, and sexist remarks the women make about men as dumb, flighty, unstable, vain, inattentive, hysterical and so on, applying to men all the stupid and sexist remark contemporary men applied to women. Though absent are the sexual innuendo and double entrendre common to the era.

Medusa’s women wear Sylvia Anderson styles (though she is not credited the wardrobe and sets shout her name) with clear visors, thigh-length boots, six-inch high heels, floor-length hair, elbow gloves, face studs, glitter, sparkle, and hot pants — all in primary colours: All 1970s.

By the osmosis of the script, word passes among the kept, domestic pet-men of Medusa that Earth is ruled by men! Psst, pass it on. An underground Mens Liberation Front takes form, led by Gareth Thomas, and Pierre Brice who decide to escape from their feathered life and steal a spaceship. They land on Earth and bumble around.

Can’t have uppity men stealing and leaving – never quite sure which was the more important crime: leaving or stealing – and so two women set off in slow pursuit and thus the two worlds come into contact. Each society changes a bit as a result. The end.

I may have missed some of the subtlety because at times I engaged the mute during some episodes.

Star Maidens was an Anglo-German production. The German actors, some of whom are Swedish, all speak nearly accent-free English, diluting any exotic element.

It is all played deadpan with awkward scenes, inconsistent characterisations, black holes in the plot, and timidity in the basic idea of gender role reversals. On this point more below. Along with the clothing fashions, the model work of space ships and alien cities – Sylvia again, I suppose – intrudes.

On the credit side, Medusa is not trivialised into either a paradise or a hell. Beneath the matriarchy normal emotional relations exist, just as they do within the Earth’s patriarchy. Though no children are ever seen on either planet. Hmm. There are no villains but collisions among differing ways of life. No shoot ‘em ups, no flames in space, no usual SyFy nonsense. It is all very low key for the most part and when that is combined with pedestrian writing, distracted acting, leaden direction, and butchered editing it is no wonder it died on release.

There are some nice, if heavy handed, role reversal moments. As when the hairy-chested Medusan runaway Brice on Earth has a coffee klatch with neighbourhood wives and shares recipes he got from his father and grandfather. Indeed most episodes are variations of the battle of sexes with nary a hint of science fiction. There are two exceptions, one involving self-conscious computer AI and another about time stopping. In addition, a promising idea set out at the start disappears, namely why the surface of Medusa is uninhabitable. It was implied in episode one, I seem to recall, that the surface was rendered uninhabitable by human action, though the opening background under the credit belies that. Oh, and by the way, recalcitrant men are assigned to work on the horrible surface though what they are doing there apart from whinging is never made clear.

Certainly the gender role reversal motif was daring at the time but the execution is half-hearted. After all it must still be the women on Medusa who bear children and somehow that is elided. There is nothing about domestic violence, unwanted children, child care, sexual abuse of children, abortion, slave labour, rape (in marriage), or any of the unpleasant reality of permanent domination. Entrenched matriarchy is likely to produce such corruptions as entrenched patriarchy, but in the 1970s these realities were far beyond the outer limits.

Gareth found fame later in the seldom seen Blake’s Seven. This seems to be Brice’s only credit in English, but he was Winnetou in eleven German western feature films of the 1960s based of Karl May’s books which I have noted elsewhere on this blog. Thomas is perfectly cast as a dolt, and does it convincingly. Brice frequently looks like he wants a stern word with his agent. In one episode the larger than life Terence Alexander is woefully miscast as a Soviet spy in a three-piece pin-stripped suit with a Scots accent.

The IMDb rumour mill has it that the episodes were originally prepared as 50-minute programs, but no one would pay or run them for that length, and so each episode was re-edited and cut to 25-minutes. It shows. The result is cryptic to say the least.

Among the cognoscenti rages an argument over which is the worst ever Brit SyFy television series. True, SyFy offerings are few — leaving aside the good Doctor (Who) — from within that small number there are many candidates for this accolade. Blake’s Seven springs immediately to mind only to be displaced by Space 1999 (1975), but then what of UFO (1970)? Indeed, what of it? And there is the reigning champion, Starlost (1973). But Star Maidens might give it nudge. Whatever its intentions the result is serial inanity. Needless to say some viewers think it is great. Indeed, one user’s review on IMDb takes the whole thing as ironic, showing how terrible a woman’s world would be.