GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages, rated 4.16 by 153 litizens.
Genre: Thriller.
Verdict: Good.
In late 1944 the Allied armies in Northern Europe reeled from the German offensive in the Battle of the Bulge. Though much of Belgium had been cleared of Nazis, the Germans remained nearby.
In particular Peenemunde was seventy miles from British lines in Belgium. Hitler had latched onto the rocket program as a wonder weapon that would yet win the war and poured resources into it, despite the doubts of the scientists and the objections of hard-pressed generals. Fictional Willi Graf is one such scientist, second only to Wernher von Braun (1912-1977) in the rocket team.
The V1 (doodle bug) had been superseded by the Vergentungswaffe 2, that is Vengeance Weapon 2. We learn some of the complications of operating, building, conceiving of such a rocket, and the humanity of those who worked on it, all through Graf’s eyes. None of the scientists and engineers are good Nazis but they are committed to the rocket as end in itself. Von Braun had joined the SS and made good use of that in this story to protect his team.
In parallel there is British Aircraftwoman Kay who studies aerial reconnaissance photographs in a London bunker as the RAF tries to find the launch site(s) so as to bomb them. Meanwhile, the Germans have learned to use mobile launchers to escape detection, and to launch mostly under cloud cover.
Kay survives not one but two V2 explosions in London and begins to take it personally. Meanwhile, Willi’s wife is killed in an RAF bombing raid that hits everything but the V2s.
Though the V2s are pinpricks in the bigger picture of 1944, they are dreadful and so a dedicated effort is assembled to target and destroy them. Kay and her slide rule are recruited to a team of RAF Aircraftwomen to go to Belgium and calculate the point of origin of the missiles by using radar signals of the launches correlated with impact locations in England. For this calculation to guide bombers to the target it has to be done in six minutes, which allows time for the RAF to strike before the Germans have dismounted the launch equipment and hidden everything in the forest.
We get more of Willi’s backstory than Kay’s, principally his long comradeship with von Braun and their mutual enthusiasm for space flight with rockets, spiced with some technical details. There is, what seemed to this reader, a pointless sidebar with a local prostitute, too.
Thanks to some (rather unbelievable) loose lips, the Nazis learn of the calculators in Belgium and target one V2 to hit them. It is Kay’s third brush with V2 death.
Unknown to each other, Kay computes angles to find Willi and company for the bombers, and Willi devises more ingenious ways to disguise the launch sites and shorten the dismounting time, while targeting one rocket to hit Kay and her squad of pencil pushers. They each have some near misses.
In the summer of 1945 they meet at a debriefing, and realise that they had been – in their own ways – trying to kill each other. The end.
About 3000 V2s were launched, half at London and half at Antwerp (the major seaport through which Allied armies were supplied). In London they killed about 3000 civilians, and injured far more. The destruction of the V1 and V2 explosions was the prime cause of homelessness in London after the war, effecting as many as 80,000 people. No doubt something similar in Antwerp was true. In producing the rockets between 12,000 – 20,000 slave labours died, either being worked to death, murdered, or hit in RAF raids on the production plants.
After the war both German generals and Allied analysts concluded the vast materiel and labour that went into the rockets detracted from the German war effort to no strategic or tactical gain. While Harris does not speculate, it is possible that Hitler’s desperate demand for wonder weapons and the resources devoted to them might have distorted German arms enough to shorten the war to some extent.
Most of the action takes place in the woodlands near Den Haag where I spent a semester in 1983. Indeed the nearest village is Wassenaar which was exactly where I was at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies. I walked through some of those woods near the seaside.
The moon is mentioned a couple of times as the goal of the rocketeers, but I thought their goal always was Mars with the Moon as an interim step, not a final goal. That is not hinted at in these pages.
In an afterword Harris says the text was written during the 2020 pandemic lockdown over some weeks. It was released on 17 September and I got it on that day via a Kindle order. Now that is a technology von Braun did not anticipate. He did however live to see a man on the moon.
The book raises the question of the morality of the rocket men, and also of the race to acquire them. In these pages they are technocrats like those that built the atomic bombs or tank chassis. Though in this case they also aimed and fired the weapons. Are they war criminals? Should they have been punished? In any event thanks to the wily von Braun, who, though he is seldom on the page, dominates the story, planned ahead and traded their technical knowledge for salvation so that more than hundred of his team were transplanted to the USA with no penalty.
Wernher von Braun at NASA
And if they were war criminals for targeting civilians, then so was most of those who served Bomber Command which started the so-called City Busting bombing campaign in 1942 and continued it long past any justification, including Dresden, except vengeance. The implicit indictment of Bomber Command in Freeman Dyson’s essay ‘The Children’s Crusade’ comes to mind.
I enjoyed this book a lot and read it in two nights, the more so for the resonance of the location with my own experience, but I did find it a little thinner than some of Harris’s other historical novels. It relied more on the technical details than the emotional lives of the characters. Willi’s ambiguity comes too easily and the loss of his wife does not quite seem real. Von Braun dominates the events but remains a cipher.
The SS officer sent to raise morale is emphasised and then lost in the story. When he appears the reader takes him for pivotal figure and invests in him, only to find him both cardboard and inconsequential.
GoodReads meta-data is 317 pages rated 3.91 by 78,875 litizens.
Genre: Bibliomania.
Verdict: Crackerjack.
In the morning 29 April 1986 smoke issued from air vents in the Central Library of the Los Angeles Library system. There soon followed a conflagration that required half of the City’s fire department to contain. The fire and subsequent water damage destroyed 600,000 books and damaged a like number, some of them rare, a few unique, but all representing the work, thoughts, and hopes of the individuals who wrote them and of those who read them.
The Library Book chronicles the origin and development of the Los Angeles central library with something of its branch libraries throughout the SoCal sprawl. There is a colourful cast of characters among the librarians from would-be writers, showmen, and suffragettes. This backstory is interspersed with an account of the fire and the recovery, as well as the investigation into the cause of the fire.
The fire began in one of the four closed stack silos and reached 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, melting the steel shelves, injuring more than thirty firefighters, and cracking three-foot thick walls. More than ten percent of the drinking water of the greater Los Angeles areas was pumped onto it, least it leap to other buildings. While books do not burn easily, they do burn at 451 F-degrees as all science fiction readers know. There is an amusing description of the author burning a book to see what it is like. Which book? Well it had to be that one written in this very building by Ray Bradbury. (If you don’t know that book, tant pis).
The building by the way was designed by the same architect who had earlier done the Nebraska state capitol building with its edifying accoutrements.
The response of the library community was remarkable. When the Fire Marshall declared the site safe, volunteers (some 5000 in number) went to work pulling books out of the debris. In her words:
“They formed a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person to the next, through the smoky building and out the door. It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.”
Overnight local businesses found 15,000 cardboard boxes, and fish processing plants combined to free an enormous freezer warehouse to hold the damaged books until they could be assessed and restored. (Mould is a book killer when exposed to water, and freezing prevents mould.) The success rate on restoration of damaged books is low, around ten percent. For maps and art work there was no chance whatever. Plates on glossy paper and magazines have no hope.
The fire investigators concluded it was arson and pursued leads and suspects for years with no result. Despite the reassuring world of detective fiction, in fact, arson is hard to detect, harder to prove to a legal standard, and almost impossible to prosecute with a clearance rate, according to insurers, of about 1%. Caught in these investigations was one hapless Harry Peak whose strange manner of existence is, per Orlean, most likely to be found in LA where make-believe is even more common than reality. Insurance investigators were not so sure about arson, and gave up the chase. The building was fifty plus years old and full of old and new wiring for electricity, telephones, and computers, most of it installed after it was completed. Then there are all those electrical appliances from coffee machines, sewing machines for binding repair, and more.
Loved her descriptions of Los Angeles: “The sidewalks in Hollywood sagged under the weight of all the handsome young men who flocked there, luminous with possibility.”
[Hope and ambition] “are in the chemical makeup of Los Angeles; possibility was an element, like oxygen.”
For the young who come to find fame and fortune “moments were fortune cookies ready to be cracked open.” They are “lifted by the continuous supply of hope and sun.”
Everywhere you look there are “over-groomed busboys…and gym-trim extras.”
There are also many love songs to books and libraries embedded with the pages as she traces the history of the library and librarians up to the fire and then the recovery. Savour a few:
“a library is an intricate machine, a contraption of whirring gears.”
“the whole orchestral range of book-related noises—the snap of covers clapping shut; the breathy whisk of pages fanning open; the distinctive thunk of one book being stacked on another; the grumble of book carts in the corridors.”
“the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books.”
“The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace.”
“Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”
‘There is a human mind behind every book waiting to meet the reader.”
“Libraries are the home of our oldest friends.”
The last word is this:
Heinrich Heine’s warning: “There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.”
The book is so well written I am tempted to read other of hers just to revel in the exact prose and the positive attitude that propels it. Chapeaux!
GoodReads meta-data is 380 pages, rated 3.80 by 254 litizens.
Genre: History.
Verdict: A comprehensible narrative. Aaaah.
The first and hardest thing for me to grasp is just how long the Portuguese and Spanish have been in the Americas. Sailors in the employ of the Portuguese monarchy landed in what is now Brazil in April 1500. They began building permanent settlements in 1532 and remained thereafter. To avoid conflict among Christian nations with the threat of the Ottomans in the East, the Pope brokered a treaty dividing the new world(s) between Spain and Portugal, recognising that the Portuguese were already in Brazil to stay. That solved one problem and created another since neither catholic France nor protestant England or the Netherlands recognised that division.
Brazil began to pay for itself with the sugarcane, the price of which skyrocketed when the Haitian rebellion against the French all but eliminated it as a source of the commodity. This lucrative trade attracted the Dutch, first to trade in it and later to grow it in Suriname, as it is now called, and likewise the French. Conflicts followed.
But the most unusual conflict, however, was among the Portuguese. Three hundred years after first contact, Napoleonic France invaded Iberia. In the ensuing Peninsula War, the French continued into Portugal, which had long been associated with England as a counterbalance to Spain. The French pursued the British into Portugal and in 1808 the Portuguese royal court went into exile wholes bolus, setting sail for Brazil, numbering as many as 12,000 courtiers, soldiers, merchants, officials, priests, and others. The English cooperated for a mix of reasons, some political and some commercial. Banks in London lent money to the exiles to set up in Brazil where the King John VI declared the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves (a province of Portugal itself like Holland in the Netherlands). There were also unrealised ambitions to extend this realm to the Portuguese African colonies of the time.
With the extinction of the Napoleonic threat by 1815 there were those who wanted to move the king and court back to Lisbon and return Brazil to the status of a colony ruled from there. Others wanted the court to remain, including the king for a time. Meanwhile, back in Lisbon a council governed with close English oversight in the royal absence, but in 1820 King John returned to quell the restive. (He was urged to return by the English who found the close oversight expensive and unproductive.) Now here is where the wrinkle sets it.
The king did not reduce Brazil to a colony, rather to placate local interests he left behind his son Pedro as Regent. Inevitably conflicts occurred between those who supported the Regent and those favoured autonomy or even independence, inspired by the distant example of the United States and fired by rebellions against Spain in its American colonies. Much manoeuvring followed.
The upshot was that in 1822 Pedro declared Brazil independent, even while in Lisbon lawyers were splitting hairs about the reversion of Brazil to one colony among many. A civil war of sorts ensued in Brazil between the Portuguese loyal to Lisbon and the locals. The French and Dutch stoked these fires to confuse the English, who were not quite sure whom to back, having sizeable commercial interest in both Brazil and Portugal. To distinguish him from his father the king of Portugal, Pedro became the emperor of the empire of Brazil. Compared to the long-lasting and bloody wars for independence in Spanish America’s colonies this transition was short. King John soon accepted this independence, partly in order to maintain commercial relations, lest the French intervene. At times Brazil invoked the Monroe Doctrine to ward off European interest in picking off part of its vast and underpopulated territory.
But wait, there is more! When King John died his presumptive heir was Pedro in Rio de Janeiro. The crowns were one, again, but not the nations. See? (No, neither do I.) Pedro soon abdicated the Portuguese throne in favour of one of his daughters who went to Lisbon to be queen.
While the author does not consider the general context, to this reader Brazilian independence in this way distinguished it from its other Latin American cousins. (1) The army was not the crucible that created the nation which it was in Argentina, Venezuela, or Colombia. Indeed the army was Portuguese and much of it left with the king. In its place were local militias which later morphed into a national army. But the Brazilian army did not create Brazil in contrast, say, to the Argentine army which created Argentina.
Boris Fausto
(2) When Simon Bolivar recruited armies to rebel against the Spanish he declared anyone who joined the fight was a free man be he white, black, or red and any shade between. While the liberation rhetoric of the King James Protestant Bible was absent, the message was indisputable, and at times Bolivar’s army was more dark than light, more Black and Red than White. In Brazil without this martial deliverance, race remained a fixed social identity and barrier, and all the more so because of the vast slave – mostly black but some red – population for the labour-intensive products: sugar cane, coffee, cotton, and rubber. Only external pressure and the vagaries of the markets for these commodities gradually led to emancipation. All of that made it a late entrant in attracting European migrants as a cheap source of labour to replace slavery.
GoodReads meta-data is 780 pages, rated 4.36 by 484 litizens.
Genre: History (not biography).
Verdict: Parochial.
Declaration: I only read the lengthy sample, and decided not to proceed.
The sample was long on pointless erudition and short on facts. It seemed to presuppose the reader was familiar with the major elements of the history of the region, the arrival of Europeans, and the individuals and families that founded Brazil. And then sets about to debunk them without ever quite explaining or contextualising them.
I did learn this. Portuguese sailors in the East Indies found a tree with red bark and red sap which was used to make a red dye. Then when the Portuguese in their constant competition with the Spanish went West, they found a red tree with red sap that could be used as a dye and they called the area Brasil after the name of tree in the east Indies. It is from the Latin for embers as a colour.
While the authors expatiate at length on the terrible consequences of the European invasion for natives, they are mainly portrayed as hapless and helpless victims even as the more detailed discussions show that some native tribes cooperated with the Europeans to defeat their traditional enemies.
After first debunking myths about cannibalism in the region, the authors then devote much space to it.
Yes, I know only a small mind would be bothered by these inconsistencies and so I stand convicted.
The book does not offer the short history of this vast and varied land that I sought. Rather it declares its purpose to be to debunking the myths Brasilians tell themselves about their history and country. Since this reader does not know these myths, there is no traction. It lacks the conventional road signs to guide readers and it lurches back-and-forth. There are no transitions, no indications of time, no summaries and much musing which is not amusing. There is a whiff of the post-modern. Always deadly.
The city of Brasilia registered on my imagination when I was an adolescent and since then I have come across a few references to it. The striking architecture is the main thing, though James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) has some diamond insights into the resulting city. John Brunner’s sy fy novel The Squares of the City (1966) was another take on it. I also sought out and read a couple of novels set there, but they made no use of the reality or fantasy of Brasilia. Some of this itch was stimulated anew by our visit to mother Portugal a couple of years ago where there was no sign of Brazil or any of its other one-time colonies. Not even any statues that I saw.
The post hoc criticisms of Brasilia are legion. I tried reading David Epstein’s Brasília: Plan and Reality (1977) but found it largely impenetrable. It is a discussion mostly of what other researchers have said, and so guarded and encoded in academicese that it does not communicate to a general reader – moi. It reminded me a little of the story of a Danish bus shelter without the insights or humour in Bent Flyvbjerg, Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice (1998).
This activity about Brasilia on Amazon awakened the mechanical Turk who presented me with this title. I clicked for a sample, and read it. In this case it is a substantial sample of many pages (though on the Kindle I cannot be exact about the number), whereas many Kindle samples of Non-Fiction are so consumed by superfluous front matter there are few pages of substance. Not so in this case. There is plenty to judge by.
Goodreads metadata is 341 pages, rated 4.03 by 118 litizens.
Genre: autobiography.
One of a kind Bill Buckley was asked during his 1965 electoral campaign for mayor of New York City what his first action would be if elected? ‘Demand a recount!’
He was always the smartest guy in the room, and that has been as much of a hindrance as a help. The book is convoluted, digressive, and replete with surgical insights hidden in glades within a lush prose overgrown by an elephantine vocabulary of polysyllabic words combined with his fastidious obsessions (too many to parody or name) to obscure nearly everything like a fog.
To venture a comparison, Buckley was magnificently gifted, talented, creative, and industrious but, unlike a comparably stellar athlete, say, Michael Jordan, Buckley never learned to play with and for a team, as Jordan did. Buckley always went one-on-one…against many teams at once, and he lost. No surprise there. But oh, some of his moves on the highlight tape were legendary.
At the time of this election Buckley was the uncrowned king of conservatives and Conservatives who found Barry Goldwater a spent force. Buckley reviled the press — at the time there were a dozen daily newspapers in New York City, each with several editions a day, and more weeklies — and it members reciprocated his revulsion; he seems to have spent hours each day finding his name in their pages and reacting, writing letters, sending telegrams, and dispatching texts by courier hither and thither to them to score points. He was a brilliant debater who never won an argument. See above.
After publishing six polemical books by the age of thirty-nine, he founded the National Review to give voice to the conservatism he thought excluded from the mainstream media after he had run the John Birch Society out of the Republican Party and the Conservative moment more generally. He also went on to host a syndicated television program – Firing Line – for 1,500 episodes. Busy he was as well as brilliant. What he lived off is left out of these pages but it is worth remembering that his father was a Texas oil millionaire. It just shows that inherited wealth can be put to use.
The mayoralty campaign was a platform for his many views. Aside from the trench war of words with the media, he also excoriated the voting blocs that dominated New York City politics: unions, Catholics, Irish, Italians, Jews, Blacks, Wall Street, police, and so on. Instead of pandering to the sweetheart deals a winning candidate had to do, he rejected all of that and himself free from the spectre of success had only to promote ideas not deliver on anything. Fearless as he claimed to be, I noticed no reference to organised crime in either the waste or construction business. Likewise with no danger of ever having to implement word-one, he had a license to shout from the roof tops in a way no prospective winner could, would, or should.
In one long and detailed exposition that would have deadened a seminar he makes a brilliant point buried in a tangled tropical rainforest of detail. He compares the reality of single working mother’s day with the statistical progress New York City has made in the last decade. On the one hand is her lived experience through the flesh of constant worry about her children (food and safety), an unendurable commute to sweatshop labour, and eking out a living while presenting a cheerful face to her kids. On the other hand in city hall there is the aggregate accounting which shows more and more money is being spent to make her life better: over the decade, so much more on schools, on policing, on transportation. But the accountants offered nary a word on her concrete benefits from such expenditures.
Her bus ride is seldom faster than walking. The preceding subway ride is crushed with unfettered bag snatching. The children’s playground is haunted by drug pushers. The manager of the sweatshop employs with impunity illegal immigrants who will work for less than she can. The air is polluted. The garbage is rarely collected. She herself walks home from the subway stop in the evening fearful of muggers. The apartment’s plumbing failures are a matter of indifference to the owners whose code violations are never settled. The school teachers have given up education and concentrate of getting through each day.
The example is trenchant and cuts to the core, but no doubt came across like static on a radio. He really needed a speech writer to trim the shag carpet of prose that comes from the typewriter. And perhaps a coach to affect, at least, a common touch. He always seems to be delivering testaments from on high to the unenlightened even in these pages, read more than half-a-century later.
In another attenuated instance he argued that free services were not free. Someone was paying, and it was mostly likely those least able to do so who paid the largest percentage of their income for services to be enjoyed by those better off. The example he used, just to rile the audience, was college tuition. It worked. The students were riled. After delving into some city hall accounting statistics himself, he showed that by far the bulk of the costs of free college tuition in New York City colleges was paid for by janitors, taxi drivers, doormen, waiters, bus drivers, dustmen, cops, while the student body came from the clerical and managerial class whose taxes were a lesser portion of their income and aggregated to a lesser amount of the total than those of the blue collar, working class. Needless to say he was booed off the platform at CCNY.
Did Peter Walsh, a one-time Finance Minister who understood that free is not free, listen at the time.
Candidate Buckley advocated an entry tax for cars coming into Manhattan and extensive bicycle lanes for transit not just recreation. Both were regarded as fantasy at the time, and both now exist in much of the world. He also proposed the legalisation of marijuana in 1965, which has yet to come. Later he served on the board of Amnesty International and raised money for its work.
The book is not easy to read. There is no core narrative but a pastiche of this brilliant and tendentious intellectual, being, well, intellectual, about all things, including doughnuts. It is a kind of performance art. A reader need not approve, agree, or care, but no reader can deny the verbal pyrotechnics on display. There was once an Italian showman who ran head first into walls to entertain jaded Romans; am I alone is seeing parallels with Buckley?
Pedants’ note. Since he was never mayor, the title seems inflated, like much else about Buckley.
Throughout his long career as a gadfly Buckley was constantly attacked by the likes of Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and Noam Chomsky. With that enemies list he rose in my estimation. The Supercilious, the Vain, and the Fatuous are just the enemies I want.
In case anyone wondered about the NR today.
In addition to the polemics he also wrote a series of spy novels, and I tried one years ago without its leaving a trace in my memory. Perhaps I should try again, starting with Stained Glass (1980). He was altogether a man for many seasons, if not all.
I have been searching for biography of John V. Lindsay who won that election, and in the absence of such a book, I turned to this title in the sure and certain knowledge it would flame for good and ill.
Buckley visited Australia once and I angled (through student who worked at the ABC) without success to get a ticket to the event, but it was ideologically closed and I failed.
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.
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.
A fragment of the text
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.
Marathon
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.
Xeres
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 Spartan snake column in Istanbul
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.’
Herodotus
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.
Goodreads meta-data is 432 pages, rated 3.55 by 38 litizens.
Genre: History
Verdict: All trees, no forest.
In 1940 Finland fought and lost the four-month Winter War with the Soviet Union, and to preserve its independence made extensive territorial concessions to the victor. The concessions involved about 15% of Finland’s population. These people were expelled from the territory taken over by the Soviets and had to be resettled in the remainder of the country in some productive way. It was major trauma. Virtually everyone in the country was affected by it. Yet it seemed better than the fate of the other Baltic states.
Through this period Finland was a parliamentary democracy with free political parties and a free press. This is a point to stress: Finland was an electoral democracy. As important as Carl Gustaf Mannerheim was and as powerful as he became as field marshal, commander in chief, and then head of government, he worked with elected parliamentarians, rather than dictated to them.
When the Winter War ended, Finns thought that it was merely an armistice and that the Soviets would be back for more in their own time. During the Winter War, Finland had appealed for help to its fraternal democracies in Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Denmark, France, USA, and England. None was forthcoming, though vague promises were made and some individuals — several thousand Swedes — went to Finland. The Comintern did not organise an internal brigade this time, nor did anyone else.
However, badly the Winter War initially went for the Soviet Union, and it went very badly, the result was a foregone conclusion. Thus, if and when, the Soviet Union wanted to re-open the conflict everyone in Helsinki assumed the remaining Western democracies (Sweden, USA, and GB) would again leave small, isolated, and democratic Finland to fend for itself. The precedent in 1938 had been the abandonment of democratic Czechoslovakia.
England faced Germany by November 1940 more or less alone and was unlikely to have the will or way to make a major commitment in Finland, and it would take a major commitment to check Soviet might. Sweden was locked into neutrality while it supplied Germany with vast amounts of raw materials and ball bearings for war, and as long as it shipped the goods its neutrality was accepted by the Nazis. France, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway were now off the board. The USA clung to fig leaf neutrality.
Finland was thus effectively surrounded, and alone. In that situation the enemy’s enemy is a friend. This axiom applied both to Finland and to Germany. The latter wanted to keep Finland independent both as a threat on the Soviet flank and as a source of nickel and other metals and minerals for its war machine. Finland was desperate to re-arm itself after the near complete depletion of its forces and resources in the Winter War, because the War had stripped men and women from the production of wherewithal of daily life it needed food and clothing to exist.
Moreover, Germany’s string of early victories made it seem to be the side of history. That and the Soviets miserable performance against minuscule Finland in the Winter War led both Germans and Finns to suppose that a war with the Soviet Union would be a short war in which a knock-out blow would destroy Red armies once and for all. That assumption explains the poor preparation and planning that went into the German-Finnish alliance. Six weeks was the estimate the Germans suggested to the Finns.
Accordingly, Nazi Germany and democratic Finland began negotiations for mutual assistance. There was precedent for this rapprochement when in 1917-1918 German troops had helped Finns gain independence by driving out Russians and had then supplied the White Finns in a civil war against Red Finns, even as Germany itself was collapsing. Out of that bloody and merciless civil war Finland became an electoral democracy with a free press, scheduled elections, competing political parties, and changes of government.
Back to 1940-1941, German aid to Finland was essential to the latter. It had to have help and Germany was the only available source. While for the Germans at the start aid to Finland was small and convenient but not essential, but when the preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union developed, using Finland as a staging area to attack the northern seaports of Murmansk and Archangel, and to surround Leningrad became central in the German plans.
That the Germans would turn Finland into a battleground whether Finns liked it or not, was another assumption made in Helsinki. That is, in a war between Germany and Russia, neither of these combatants would allow a neutral Finland. Germany became the lesser evil because it was further away and there was no historic enmity with it as there was with Russia on the border. The conclusion was to try to negotiate with Germany an arrangement that preserved some Finnish degrees of freedom.
It would become a German ally – a co-belligerent – against the Soviet Union, rather than be occupied and ruled by Germans as a puppet state, an example being Croatia, and could, then perhaps set their own ground rules for co-operating with the Nazis. In the event Finland allied with Germany but only declared war on the Soviet Union and stated its war aim was the restoration of the territory lost in the 1940 Winter War. When the German attacks on the Soviet Union began Finns advanced to Finland’s 1939 borders as they were before the Winter War and stopped, dug in, and waited, while the Germans pressed on toward the sea ports in the far north and Leningrad.
The Continuation War was to recover the lost territories in red above.
In particular, the Finns took no aggressive action against Leningrad. Mannerheim was adamant that the Russians would neither forgive nor forget an assault on Leningrad, and that Russia would always be there after the war. He also flatly refused Finnish participation in the attack on the Murmansk railway. The post-War futures of Finland and Russia were fixed by geography. See the two volume biography of Mannerheim by J. O. Screen discussed elsewhere on this blog.
Officially, the Finnish government referred to this conflict as the Continuation War, a continuation of the Winter War. However, it is true that Finland troops did on occasion advance beyond the 1939 border and even approached Leningrad to create a buffer against a Soviet counter-offensive which came in 1944. During the Continuation War about 20% of the Finnish population (old and young, male and female) was in uniform. The loss of labor from industry and agriculture made Finland completely reliant on German imports of food and clothing as well as war materials.
As time went on to please its Soviet ally Great Britain did declare war on Finland, but the United States did not. N.B. Finland did not reciprocate with a declaration of war on England until Nazi pressure made supplies of food contingent on it. As things got difficult for the Germans, efforts were made to draw Finland closer to Germany – including an unwelcome personal visit by Hitler on Mannerheim’s birthday. To keep the profile of this visit as low as possible Mannerheim claimed he had to stay at the front with the army and the meeting was held in a forest well away from journalists, photographers, and passers-by. No parades. No speeches. No flags. No public pledges of unity. No crowds. No banners. No cheers.
Finnish diplomacy made semantic distinctions to create a space between Finland and Germany, and when the prophesied short war became a long one, Finland began to enlarge that space in word and deed. In word diplomatic flirtations in nearby Stockholm (with the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States) increased and military cooperation became estranged (every German request was misunderstood, parsed, and squeezed and the responses were so slow that events often overtook the situation.)
During its alliance with Nazi Germany parliamentary democracy continued in Finland. It also did NOT take action against resident Jews, and on one remarkable occasion Mannerheim did leave the army to attend a ceremony in Helsinki honouring Finns killed in the war explicitly including Jews who had served the Finnish army. This occasion was reported to Hitler who flew into a rage that burned itself out.
The Continuation War lasted until 29 August 1944 when Finland sued for a separate peace with the Soviet Union. War did not end there, though, because one of the peace terms imposed by the Soviet Union was that Finland drive the German Army of Lapland in the far north out of its country. The Soviets did not offer any support, say by replacing the food and armaments the Germans had been supplying, but insisted that the Finns do it themselves. Now!
This German Lapland army numbered as many as 200,000 troops and this, so-called Lapland War went on from 15 September 1944 to April 1945 when the Germans evacuated nearly all these troops and their equipment from the Arctic north in a remarkable exploit comparable to Dunkirk, but seldom noted in Western Europe. By the way, more than half this German army consisted of Austrians.
To prevent pursuit by either the Soviets or the Finns, the retreating Germans scorched the earth in the far north. After the war Soviet pressure prevented Finland from accepting the Marshall Plan and it was years before the far north was rebuilt.
Finland is not the only country that tried to limit its inevitable association with Nazi Germany. Bulgaria confined its military operations to Greece, and so its army did not cross into Soviet territory, but that did not save it from Soviet imperialism later. That paper-state Yugoslavia had toyed with some kind of limited association but those deliberations were pre-empted by a German invasion to assist Italian adventures in the Balkans. When Hungary in 1944 tried to switch sides, the Nazis retaliated and this example caused Finns to walk softly.
End of the Lapland War
In the end, Mannerheim repudiated the association with Germany and made a separate peace with the Soviet Union. The terms were hard but not as impossible as had been feared. He had acted to defend Finland from destruction rather than continue to be bound to Germany. It had been a balancing act. In 1944 Finland needed German food imports to continue to resist the Russians so as to achieve a stable front from which negotiations with the Russians could occur to abandon the Germans. Of course, both the Germans and Russians were aware of what was going on and applied pressure and threats.
Likewise to keep the German food coming the Finns had to earn it by working with the Germans, but … at a distance rather than alienate the good will of the Western allies. The line they walked was to prevent the United States from declaring war on the Finland, and in that they succeeded.
Henrik Lunde
For reasons lost in the mists of time, Finland’s four-month Winter War with the Soviet Union stuck in my mind long ago and prompted me to add a stay in Helsinki when we visited Russia 2016. In preparation for the visit I read Screen’s biography of Mannerheim from which I learned a lot, and in Helsinki we went to museums and locales related to this period and more recently I have feasted on Indy Neidell’s superb Time Ghost You Tube channel. Even so I still had an appetite for more and read this book, but 80% of it concerns orders of battle and the movement of army units which is of zero (0) interest to me.
GoodReads meta-data is 362 pages, rated 3.81 by 997 litizens.
Genre: Autobiography.
Verdict: ….ellipses…, indeed!
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
In a southeast corner of Bavaria is the small town (population 17,000 in 2018) of Sigmaringen, which had been the seat of the principality of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen until 1850, there is a castle befitting that status. The town has since remained the personal property of the Hohenzollern family. Fascinating, uh?
In September 1944 the castle became home to the remnant of the Vichy government in exile, one of the more bizarre twists of fate in World War II. More than a thousand people, including Maréchal Phillip Pétain, President of the council of the Vichy government and his prime minister, Fernand de Brinon were trucked out of Vichy and ensconced in and around that Hohenzollern Castle at Sigmaringen. The others were Vichy loyalists, officials, army officers, clerks, ministers, telephonists, typists, janitors, archivists, aides, butlers, factotums, secretaries, churchmen, sycophants, diplomats, hangers-on, however, initially there were few of the French fascist zealots from Paris who were left to fend for themselves. Along with the loyalists went their families and retainers. This castle would qualify as an Old Dark House with dungeons, hidden doors, spy holes, caves, secret passages, bricked up passage ways, concealed rooms, and the ghosts of Hohenzollerns past. In residence was the last Hohenzollern princess who occasionally appeared from her private apartment.
This crew was officially known as – get this – first as la Commission gouvernementale de Sigmaringen, which was changed a few days later to la Délégation gouvernementale française pour la défense des intérêts français en Allemagne, and then la Commission gouvernementale française pour la défense des intérêts nationaux. Even in 1944, even in extremis managers reorganise and rename to justify their existence, it would seem. Whatever the nomenclature, it was the government in exile of Vichy France until April 1945. By a personal order from Hitler, the Castle and its environs were designated a French enclave ruled by the aforementioned government in exile.
Now why Hitler would bother with this lot is another question, perhaps for Indy Neidell one day. Hitler had rescued Mussolini and set him up with a rump government at Salo, yes, true, but that made some sense in that the Salo government kept order in northern Italy behind German lines. The Sigmaringen government had nothing to order but itself for the seven months of its tenuous existence. One speculation is that the Vichy Government, house of cards though it was, was kept intact so that should the the tide of war change it could be quickly re-installed. Chalk that up to optimism.
Neither Pétain nor Pierre Laval, for though deposed as prime minister the latter remained a power behind the throne, or so he thought, wanted to leave France, though what their fate would be if they remained requires no imagination, yet possibly both these men were so deluded they alone would have been surprised by the lynch mob. The solution was to make the enclave French territory on the model of an embassy. This German legal fiction was grudgingly accepted by the Vichy loyalists. Hence both Laval and Pétain could say they had not left French territory while in that castle in Germany. Look up legal fiction for details.
Meanwhile, some of those zealots who had fled from Paris joined the group. This was not a homogeneous lot. The zealots from Paris had long criticised the Vichy government for its sloth, incompetence, semitism, fashion sense, defeatism, and lack of commitment to the cause of fascism, failure to retain the French Empire, and poor grammar. Parisien leaders of factions, cults, and publicists put themselves forward at this eleventh and dark hour as alternative governments to the Germans in this city-state of one thousand damned souls. These rivalries are partly reflected in the name changes noted above, as the splinter groups of a few dozen jockeyed for position. The Germans had no interest in rocking the already sinking boat and stuck with the Vichy comedy.
Among the number in the castle were the medical doctor and novelist Céline, Lucette, his wife, and Bébert, their cat, and later in 1957 desperate to make a living, he penned this screed about those dying days. It consists of his well known ellipses in stream of consciousness. It seems to this reader it was published only because it had Céline’s name on it. After the war he had been judged a traitor and suffered national denigration for his collaboration. That denigration meant he was excluded from social services and even could not ride public transport. To see a doctor, to buy a metro ticket in those days one had to show the carte d’identité, and his card was marked. But he had been a celebrated novelist and his postwar notoriety, perhaps, added to the caché of the book, or so the publisher may have estimated.
A page of his text shows the ellipsis.
The Vichy French flag flew over the Castle, a newspaper of sorts was produced, a radio station was set up but seldom had enough electricity to broadcast, and some other accoutrements of a state, like – believe it or not – postage stamps were designed. The file clerks filed; the typists typed; the factotums factoted. There were also three foreign ambassadors in attendance, Italian, Japanese, and German. And it had its own army, a gang of the dreaded Milice. However, the aged Maréchal, who was well over eighty years old by this time, went into a sulk and refused to participate in this last charade.
Food was scarce, aerial bombardment an ever-present threat, drinking water often contaminated, the German-uniformed (mostly Croat) guards were warders who made sure none of their charges left, and they, too, were anxious. The more desperate the circumstances the more the exiles turned on each other. Leading the way, Céline shrilly denouncing them all as Jews.
News of the Christmas Nazi Ardennes offensive, rumours of Nazi secret weapons all gave hope to these desperate and despicable people, but the reality of no food, no paper, no wine, no soap, no fuel for heat, no hot water, no drugs, no clean bandages, no socks, no thread to mend ripped clothing, no nothing was crushing.
As Free French forces approached, Pétain and Laval and few others in their retinue fled into Switzerland. (Some sources say the French Free army was slowed to allow the inmates to escape as the Free French had no desire to deal with them.) Once in Switzerland Pétain demanded that he be returned to France and he was, while Laval demanded asylum in Switzerland which was denied and he, too, was returned to France. Meanwhile back at the castle the German-Croat guards disappeared as the Free French rolled in and bagged the remainder, though in the confusion a few individuals escaped to Italy.
The book is sprinkled with hindsight and it was all written well after the fact. Céline did not keep a diary, though he did practice medicine among the exiles and kept notes for that.
It is a story reminiscent of that other, smaller castle crew at Château Itter (Austria) where from 1940 the Germans held as hostages to fortune French officials of the Third Republic. Among them were former prime ministers Éduoard Daladier, who had sat in a numb silence at Munich, and Paul Reynaud, who in 1940 had wanted to continue the fight from Algeria, former Vichy cabinet minister Jean Borotera who resisted Vichy’s anti-semitism, and Generals Maurice Gamelin and Maxime Weygand, along with politicians Andre François-Poncet, Michel Clemenceau, and Albert Lebrun, as well as one of Charles de Gaulle’s sisters, and a few others totalling perhaps thirty. LeBrun had been the President of the Senate who had authorised Pétain to sound out the Germans about terms and was then surprised when Pétain used the commission to surrender without attempting negotiation.
There would have been no love lost among these people. Gamelin and Weygand were each at work on memoirs blaming the other for the Defeat, as were Daladier and Reynaud. Léon Blum, another one-time prime minister was not here, because Vichy officials had in mind a show trial to blame him for anything and everything, and kept him apart. The Itter was liberated in late 1944.
But let’s not forget that the most significant hostages to fortune that the Nazis had, namely, a million plus French prisoners of war, working as slave labor in German war industries and on farms. In addition to these unfortunates, there were also as many as another million French citizens sent to Germany as forced labor by the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO). The Vichy Regime made little effort to secure the release of the POWs or to stymie the STO. Indeed, as to the latter, sometimes it sent more conscripts than ordered by the Nazis to show how enthusiastic it was. In addition the production of millions of others in France was harvested and sent to Germany.
N.B. In 1941 the Vichy Regime did try to negotiate a return of prisoners by offering German unlimited access to Syria and Lebanon. This was attractive to Germany as a threat both to the Suez Canal and the Iraq oil fields. It took the Allied conquest of the Levant (in which Australians participated) to block that move. NSW Governor Roden Cutler had his leg shot off there.
This is a book about nothing and how important it is. Get that, and get it straight! Lear was right about nothing. Something times nothing is nothing. See? Yet nothing is always with us.
Babylonians with their sixty-based number system counted with abaci and started to use a space holder(s) to distinguish 1 on the first line from 10 on the second from 100 on the third, etc. They used slashes (/) to indicate the next line so 1 is 1, 1/ is 10, 1// is 100/,etc. Thus, like the numbers, zero came from the East to the West, and some of that passage was vexed.
Arabic numbers, derived from India, combined with zero (0) are much more efficient and effective than Roman numerals. Ever tried multiplying Roman numerals? Long division? Even writing them down shows that: Arabic 678 is Roman DCLXXVIII. And because there are fewer characters the margin of error in transcription is reduced. Plus the Arabic numbers are more distinctive one from another than the numerals with fewer inscription errors.
But nothing, zero, has metaphysical and mystical connotations that disturbed many. The Pythagoreans regarded it as a sign of the beast or hit-and-run and tried to keep it locked up. To some zero represented both nothing and everything. Both ends of that continuum were threatening. If there was nothing, where was it? Could nothing be anywhere?
On the other hand, it represent infinity, everything, say in Zeno’s paradox about going half-way to a goal ad infinitum and never getting there. Once infinity is considered, well, there is a lot of that to think about and our place in it must be pretty small.
When we are born are we one-year old? No when were are born we are zero-years old and twelve months later we are one year old. Everyone, even Republicans, well, maybe, knows that. But…., what about the calendar? There was no year zero there: 1 BC and 1 AD are adjacent with no intervening zero, which is one of the many reasons why the calendars of different civilisations vary as they do.
Zero became a number in India. When 2, a number, is subtracted from 2, a number, the result is 0 which, being the product of two numbers zero must itself be a number. Indian mathematicians accepted this logical result sooner and more easily than those to the West who resisted this obvious conclusion with some Olympian mathletics for nearly two millennia.
When zero (0) was a placeholder as in the Babylonian system it was put to the right of the numbers 1, 2, 3, ….9, and 0. But when it was promoted to a number it becomes the base 0, 1, 2, 3, …9. Ah, but that is counterintuitive. We do not count apples starting with 0 and then 1, and 2. We have three apples but only count up to 2 if we do, and we don’t (do that). So it went back to the right side of the sequence where it is on keyboards today. Although in England and Australia the ground floor of a building is in effect zero (0) and the second level is the first floor. Go figure. I still stumble over this fact.
The Indians were so phlegmatic that they also accepted negative numbers. When 3 is subtracted from 2 the result is -1. This conclusion was resisted to the last ditch in the West even to René Descartes’s day and age. In his determination to resist the negative, Descartes denigrated such numbers, e.g., the square root of negative number, as imaginary. See the Wikipedia entry for more mist and fog on the topic.
What a change since then. Nowadays everyone brags about Zero Tolerance.
The vanishing point in art also gets a look in. (Get it?) Leonardo was just one artist who saw mathematics in painting perspective. So does the elliptical orbit of planets from Johannas Kepler. Wide ranging indeed.
Then along came set theory, thermodynamics, string theory, a Cepheid variable, the Kelvin scale, the Casimir effect, cosmic Doppler shift, Mack the Knife, the Golden Ratio, and even rational numbers. For nothing zero has stirred up a lot somethings. Even the Black Hole comes into the equation. Is nothing sacred? Zero is everywhere and everything!
The book considers everyday examples like the Year Zero above, but also abstruse mathematics (e.g., projective geometry) , and even more abstruse metaphysics (infinity, as above) that I found it tough going, but, being tough, I kept going.
Charles Seife
All in all, the book is Much Ado about Nothing. (Yuk, yuk.) But surely Jean-Paul gets the last words with his Being and Nothingness. For the the fraternity brothers, let me explain: zero is something, so it has being; zero is nothing, so it has nothingness. Sartre could have called his book Zero and been done with it. (Maybe he feared a shelver would get it mixed up with Zorro.)
But wait there is more, the book ends with an appendix in which it is proven that Winston Churchill was a carrot. See for yourself…., if you dare.
In the Temple of the Muses (1992) of John Robert Maddox’s diverting SPQR series the protagonist Decius encountered an Egyptian mathematician, a woman, who is onto zero and spends all of her time, according to the jaded Decius, talking about nothing when there is much else they could do together that would be something.
