Category: Book Review

I have visited Smithsonian museums many times in Washington D.C. At last count there were nineteen (19) of them on the Mall. Vast and varied!

I vaguely knew that James Smithson (1764-1829) started it all with a whopping great cash gift in the 19th Century, and that Smithson was English and never set foot in the United States. That satisfied my need to know (-it-all) for years.
My interest was pricked a few month ago in reading a biography of John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States. Uniquely, after he left the presidency, defeated in a bid for re-election, he served in the House of Representatives for nearly twenty years, dying at his desk. In Congress he was instrumental in securing the Smithson gift and putting it to work as Smithson intended. (There were others who hoped to siphon the money off for their purposes; these others included the sitting president, Martin van Buren.) Quincy Adams navigated through these sharks and shoals, arriving at the first museum, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, that is the red brick building often referred to as the Smithsonian Castle these days, from the turrets of which Abraham Lincoln observed the Confederate Army at Harper’s Ferry in 1862.
Taken as read, I thought no more of it, until I happened to mention Quincy Adams’s role to a friend, who did not know that the Smithsonian was started with a private bequest or that the donor was English. I then realized how little of the story I knew because I could not shed any light on how or why the gift was made.
Clearly it was time to top-up my know-it-all tank and I sought out and read a biography of James Smithson. What did I find?

He was born to an English mother in France, where she had gone, as have many others, to have her illegitimate baby. The father, most likely, was the Duke of Northumerland, a man who owned about one percent of England. His mother was volatile and threw her own considerable wealth into one endless, pointless, and unproductive lawsuit after another trying to get yet money out of others. James grew up speaking French with other children and English with his mother. When she returned to England with him, he had to be naturalized. The Duke never recognized either his mother or him in any way.
Naturalization took an act of parliament, though routine, it was also conditional, namely that James, like all the others, was prohibited from holding public office, either elected or appointed, and could not receive any benefit from the crown, e.g., a royal pension. Later in his life he bristled as these restrictions, as well as the illegitimacy which prohibited him from taking his rightful place in society, as he saw it. He was twice estranged, once socially and once politically from Mother England.
His mother indulged him and used her contacts to get him into Oxford, at one of the lesser colleges, Pembroke, which contrary to the other more prestigious colleges, emphasized learning — rather than drinking and gambling — and even more unusual it emphasized science, and most unusual of all that dirty and stinking science where even a gentleman got his hands dirty — chemistry. It was a time when many advances were being made in chemistry outside the two historic universities and the Master of Pembroke College, striving to elevate the reputation of the college, went into chemistry with enthusiasm. Smithson loved it. He published many papers, and was elected to the Royal Society at twenty-two, the youngest ever at that time.
He inherited modest means from his mother, and invested it in canals and railroads, and made a lot of money out of each, which he reinvested, accumulating far more dosh than he could spent of display cabinets for his mineral collection, or blowpipes for his chemistry experiments, or on his travels.
Like other young gentlemen of his class and era, he made a Grand Tour through Europe; in fact he made three such Grand Tours. Whereas others frequented galleries, salons, and cathedrals, Smithson sought out chemists, chemistry laboratories, minerals, mines, and miners. He took meticulous notes, collected many specimens (rocks and dirt to the inn-keepers who often refused his baggage entry), measured anything that could be measured, and tried to measure some that could not be measured. Amateur scientist, yes, but deadly serious and completely focussed. He had several unwanted adventures on these Tours because Europe was rent by the Napoleonic Wars, e.g., he spent a year in a cold, stinking prison in Hamburg as a British alien at a time when all of Germany was occupied by Napoleon’s army, which saw a spy in those copious notes Smithson took of the geography and geology. In his travels around Europe he must have crossed paths with John Quincy Adams, on his many diplomatic missions, but they did not meet. Did he ever came across Ethan Gage?
Many of his English friends who had supported the French Revolution in the early days, were suspect in Great Britain as Jacobins. A few went into voluntary exile, including several to the United States, and they wrote to tell Smithson of the premium given to science in the United States. He also met Americans on the Grand Tour and they also told him that science was uninhibited and valued in the United States. He noticed when the incumbent President John Adams lost to Thomas Jefferson one was the President of the American Philosophical Society and the other President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The two leading political figures of the decade were intellectuals! Did George W. Bush ever read a book, after ‘The Little Prince,’ I wonder? Bill Clinton stopped reading with ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ Mitt Romney and books…does not compute. Barry O’Bama only reads himself.
In addition Smithson saw the vast private museum of Lumley Keate, a distant relation, broken up and auctioned, when all lamented that such a carefully acquired and artfully curated collection was sold piece-by-piece as curios, rather than preserved as a whole. In an England impoverished by the endless wars with Napoleon, there was no public means to capture this patrimony for the country. England along with Europe was consumed by wars from Portugal to Russia and the Baltic Sea to Sicily, leaving little time, space, or finance for science.
He continued to travel in Europe, despite the upheavals and convulsions. His health had never been good, and after that year in prison it got worse. Whole years are missing from the tale because the intrepid author could find no record of his activities, and surmises he was laid up somewhere recovering his strength. In 1829 he died in Genoa, Italy where he had gone see a collection of mineral specimens. He was buried there and in due course his will was probated in London. He had made the will some years earlier; he wrote it himself without consulting a lawyer; this is always a recipe for trouble. In it he left the income of his worldly goods to a nephew during the nephew’s lifetime, his only living relative, and the goods themselves to be divided equally among the nephew’s children, legitimate and illegitimate, when the nephew died, and in a secondary clause, ‘to the United States of America to found at Washington under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.‘ A quaint second clause it seemed, until the nephew drank and whored himself to death in two years, dying without issue. Accordingly the secondary clause applied. [Aside, reader of Charles Dickens’s ‘Bleak House’ know what is coming next: The Feast of the Lawyers.]
The British Government, skint from all those Napoleonic Wars, moved to seize the fortune for the Crown. Somerset House informed the American minister in London, who passed the word to the President (Andrew Jackson). A plenipotentiary was dispatched to London to secure the money for the United States. He did superb job, no doubt paying bribes, to keep the matter out of the Chancery Courts. It was Richard Rush, a wily Pennsylvanian, who had been United States Attorney General for President James Madison and Secretary of the Treasury for President John Quincy Adams, and previously ambassador to the Court of St. James. He wrestled the money from the British Bulldog in only two years. Various distant relatives of Smithson, retainers, friends, some of many scientific associations Smithson frequented, all tried to contest the will, and Rush parried each.
That was only the beginning of a story that would take another book to tell in detail. The short version is that no one in Washington wanted the gold. (Rush brought it to Washington in twenty-one chests, each filled with gold bars!) Southerners thought it would enrich the federal government to dominate the states with their precious states right (to slavery) and Northerners thought it was a devious British plan to take over the country.
How big? About 100 million pounds today! That is about $US166 million or $A179 million today.
A satellite image of the eastern half of the National Mall with 10 Smithsonian museums located on it.

This is what the money bought. The Castle is 14 above. This is only half the Mall, the others are on the west end. (1, 7, and 8 are not Smithsonians.)
In time the Smithsonian Institution on the Mall emerged, though it took many hands, like Quincy Adams, Alexander Graham Bell (yes, Don Ameche invented the telephone), Joel Poinsett (the flower man), and others to overcome, first, the objections, and then to stave off the swarm of special interests who wanted all, most, or some of the money siphoned off into hundreds of pet peeves, from butterflies in Maine, to public lectures in every town on fingernail clipping, and so on. It took years. Work began on the red castle in 1855 about twenty years after Smithson’s death. Even then claims from relations and retainers continued to arrive at the White House. I expect they still arrive today, addressed to the Smithsonian!
Where did the money come from? Why did he do it? The first is the easier question to answer. He invested in canals and railroads, and was one of the first to do either and one of the few to do both, and they each paid off and continued to do so all of his life. He also invested in inventors, some of whom paid him back twenty times over.
Why did he do it? Let’s break that down into some smaller, more focussed points. What we have here is multiple causation.
Let us be clear he left his money to his only living relative, that twenty-five year old nephew. Only when fate intervened did that secondary clause come into play. Perhaps it was a amusement for him to write in that afterthought.
He had long been estranged from England by the reactions to his illegitimate and foreign birth. He was completely divorced from the French by that year in the slammer. More generally, he saw Europe bent on destroying itself. Wherever he went there was war, France, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Austria ….
He had seem examples of philanthropies in England and France, though few aimed at scientific knowledge. Rather he had seem great scientific collections sold as paperweights, while to find specimens he had had to travel the length and breadth of Europe.
Did he want to immortalize himself as a man of science in a way that his own scientific labors did not achieve? He was a very able and dedicated chemist but he made no breakthroughs to put him in the pantheon, and he knew it. If so, Europe was not the place.
From the United States he had heard many good stories about the value of science there and that democracy did not hold a man of talent back because of his illegitimate or foreign birth. (He had a total loathing for sea voyages and never thought to go there. Even to sail from England to France was something he avoided, in one case, for four years, so much did he fear the ocean.)
The book is a sterling example of thorough research and the dexterous handling of uncertainty, and speculation. Little is known of Smithson’s life, partly because trunks with his private papers burned in a fire, much has to be inferred. The author tracks him rather like astronomers identify celestial bodies by the distortions they cause passing in front of star fields. She has combed bank records, passport files, police reports, and the correspondence of his contemporaries for mentions of Smithson and draws conclusions from them. The author handles these inferences well, they are qualified but integrated. There are many ‘possibilies,’ ‘surelys,’ ‘probablies,’ ‘maybes,’ and so on. None of this is easy, not even that name Smithson for it was not his birth name. For details, read the book.

I re-read Hanah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” inspired to do so by the film “Hannah Arendt.”  By the way, the subtitle “The Banality of Evil” is implicit in the book and stated only on the last page by way of conclusion on page 252.  At the end of this review staunch readers will find a note about Howard W. Campbell at the end.  (Don’t know about Campbell? Then read on to find out.)

Despite the furore at the time, portrayed in the film, Arendt did not:
1. In any sense exonerate Eichmann, 
2. Condemn Jews in any way, 
4. Blame Jews for their own destruction, 
5. Assail the court proceedings, 
6. Oppose the death sentence, 
7. Question the legitimacy of the trial, and
8. Assert that Eichmann was a Zionist.
Though each of these lies was said at the time dutifully repeated by those that do not think but react.
Once one of these falsehoods was said, it was repeated by other journalists too lazy or irresponsible to check the facts, long before Rupert Murdoch could be blamed.  Needless to say none of the journalists who recycled these falsehoods ever apologised.
Nor was such intellectual laziness limited to journalists.  Over the years I have heard them from academics who should know better than believe everything they read, something they quickly condemn in students while doing it themselves. 
First things first, the role of Jews in their own destruction is there, reported as fact throughout the book, the local organization of the Jewish Council.  Where a Jewish Council did not exit the Nazis tried to set one up.  Some Jews who cooperated with the Nazis in these councils were later themselves tried for crimes in the Successor Trials that followed The Nuremberg Trials but not specifically for crimes against Jews.  She does not sensationalise this Jewish cooperation, and acknowledges that in its early stages in Western Europe it may well have seemed the best thing to do.
She also points out that others cooperated in their own destruction at times when whole peoples were moved, deported, and then murdered.  Likewise she is very clear that resistance was impossible.  
In all these references to Jewish cooperation amount to, say, fifteen pages of the 300 in the book.  Perhaps a little more.
Second, it is forcefully argued that Eichmann in Jerusalem was demonised in order to allow the trial to tell the whole story of Jewish persecution and destruction.  That is why the prosecution introduced volumes of material that had nothing to do with Eichmann.  He was a cog, albeit a vital one, but nonetheless a cog, not a director, decision-maker, influencer of others.  He was a cog who could have been easily replaced.  But the trial was not about him, and is that not what trials are supposed to be about, the defendent. In exile on Argentina, Eichmann did boast of his part in the Final Solution, true, but perhaps he did this to ingratiate himself with the exiled Nazis he found there as much as anything else. Men do brag and exaggerate, now don’t they?
Third, all the nations occupied by the Nazis had Successor Trials shortly after the Nuremberg Trials.  None of these trials presented indictments about murdering Jews. Having no state, Jews did not.  Israel as the Jewish state had as much right to hold such trials as any other state, she concludes.
Eichmann’s self-defense was that the emigration, evacuation, and destruction of Jews were acts of the German state which were above the law and normal morality.  Though he did often refer to orders, “ein befehl ist ein befehl,” and even mentioned Immanual Kant. His six-day interrogation, his testimony in the trial, his many written submissions are muddled, inconsistent, repetitive.  He was working only from memory in Jerusalem and he was not a bright man to begin with. No Albert Speer he.
While rejecting resistance as a possibility she also reviews and dismisses the pop psychology explanations of the Jewish cooperation in their own destruction as some kind of death wish. One reviewer of the book said the same of her.  That she had written a negative book about Jews because she hated herself as a Jew.  There is no limit to imbecility.
All of Eichmann’s social, intellectual, bureaucratic superiors knew and accepted the destruction of Jews.  Who was this functionary, one-time salesman, to judge compared to them?  Remember not all the professional officials were Nazi thugs.  At The Wannsee Conference where Eichmann did the coffee, Count Ernst von Weisacker represented the Foreign Office.  Eichmann was thrilled to be in such distinguished company at the time.  
There seems also to have been a big difference between the approach to the Final Solution in Eastern Europe compared to Western Europe.  In the east there was no local government, e.g., Poland, a puppet government, e.g., Croatia, or a Fascist ally like Hungary.  Sometimes for a while Western European Jews had some protection afforded by their own governments, although Jewish refugees say in France were surrendered quickly.  But by 1944 even this protection was not enough.  Italy seems overall to be the best place for any Jew, including refugees who could disappear into the crowds, hills, forests.  Bulgaria is another country where the unwillingness of locals to cooperate stymied the Nazi killing machine.  Belgium is another exception because there many, many Jewish refugees and almost no Jewish organization, the Nazis had no place to start. But almost from the start German, Polish, and Russian Jews were murdered on an industrial scale. By 1944 nothing stopped the Death Machine.

Eichmann on trial
Her argument is that the crimes were unprecedented and so the justice done them had to be likewise unprecedented.  [Everyone knew they were crimes which is why all the euphemisms were used. She does not consider this point, though she notes how seldom there was an explicit reference to extermination, killing, murder, etc.]. Law serves justice.  Law should not thwart justice. No graduate of a law school would ever say that!
She has many criticisms of the lackadaisical and incompetent defense attorney who seemed to neither know nor care much about the events, Eichmann, or the trial.  She is also very scathing about the melodramatic, wandering prosecutor who never seemed to focus on the accused.
In the end we have great evil partly done by this pathetic, hardworking, if stupid and unimaginative individual.  He was shallow, unread, incapable of learning from his experiences, unreflective and untroubled by what he was doing.  What he did care about was his career advancement and he spent lot of time, rather incompetently, trying to secure promotion.  He never read a book, certainly not a novel, a poem, or a play, and probably nothing more taxing than a few pages in coffee table books, if that. He flunked out of both high school and vocational training. He repeated clichés and stock phases he heard without grasping their meaning or their trite nature. He is no Faust aware that he had sold his soul to the devil for a few magic tricks.  
The Nazis were able to destroy as many Jews as they did, in part, because Jewish communities were so well organized and disciplined.  When the Jewish Council in Poznan told a list of families to assemble at the train station for resettlement, they did.  This order made the fiction easier to bear, as Eichmann dimly realized, but it made the killing easier.  If the Jewish Council had told the truth, it is not resettlement but murder, or refused to cooperate the result would have been terrible, but perhaps fewer would have died.  Perhaps.  It is a question Arendt asks, and she speculates that fewer would have died though with foreknowledge and dread.  Does the doctor tell the terminal patient the truth of allow the patient to die in hope? 
Safe to say we have all met people like this Eichmann, but fortunately none of them held the power of life and death over us.  They even exist in universities, a PhD is no guarantee of thinking. [Jackson pauses to recall several exemplars.] We all react to stimuli but seldom do any of us think.  Some people never do.  Ameboa react to stimuli, too.  
Not everyone who does great evil is a fearsome demon.  Readers may recall that in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov” the devil that visits Ivan is a dirty, smelly, stupid, and vulgar lout.  He is no Mephistopheles, but rather Anyman.  Simone de Beauvoir said something similar about Pierre Laval, evil but insignificant. Of course, years after their crimes, defeated,captured, reduced to prisoners, not even vicious killers seem very threatening.
The book exudes urgency and importance.  The prose is hard and clean, no embellishments, no learned references, very few citations of other studies though some. It is easy to imagine the author pounding it out on a typewriter to meet a deadline, not an editorial one, but In this case a moral one, namely get it all and get it right. There will never be another chance. Of course, she made mistakes in proper names, sometimes, in dates by a week or a month, and there are overstatements a few times. These errors have been pounced on by reviewers for years, who themselves evidently have never made a mistake, to discredit the entire book.
I noted that the Dutch journalist Harry Mulisch is cited a few times.  I found his novel “The Assault” a compelling book, ditto the film based on it.  Infinitely sad and yet somehow satisfying it was when the message is at last delivered.  That would have been a better name for the novel, “The Message.”

In reading this book again I was reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Mother Night” and it’s protagonist Howard W. Campbell who never laid a finger on anyone, spied on Nazis at great personal risk, sublimated his own personality to his espionage, and …. was a war criminal because “you are what you do.”  

Another winner from this Sydney University graduate in Ancient History.

Nicolaos (Nicos) and Diotima find more trouble to get into with a very young and very annoying Socrates in tow. Will he never shut up! (We all know that answer to that now. Prattling away on his deathbed.)
This is volume four in the series, which began with ‘The Pericles Commission’ (2010), and this one closes with a teaser for the next installment. Hooray!
These are krimies for time-travellers. They are set in the world of Pericles, Themistocles, Aeschylus, the greatest generation of Greeks who turned back the mighty Persian Empire, not once but twice. Pericles in these stories is a young man on the make, and he suborns the even younger and far more naïve Nicos into his service as messenger, go-between, agent, spy, and detective, while keeping him at arm’s length in case anything goes wrong! Nicos brushes with the great but, as in this case, spends his time following bear droppings in the woods.

The touch is light, the history is real but measured out to amuse not choke by showing how much the writer knows, the characters are human beings and not ciphers or stereotypes, and Nicos’s realization that all is not what it seems, is always fun.
In this volume we learn about the education of highborn Athenian girls, how divorce works (and how it is best avoided), the limits on the husband’s rights over a wife, while seeing that Socrates was a pest right from the start. We also find out a lot about that battle at Marathon, a site I saw in 2007. It is always good to have Diotima your side, she is a dab hand with a bow and arrow, but even better to have a huge bear on your side. This is what Nicos learnt this time out.
The 192 Greeks who died at Marathon were buried in this mound which I saw in 2007.

Readers of the early Platonic dialogues will know that in the ‘Symposium’ Socrates credits Diotima with much of his education. Now we know why! She, by the way, is the only woman named in all the Platonic dialogues.

A book about the bookshelf and, more importantly, how bookshelves and books interacted and evolved by a civil engineer. It starts from papyrus scrolls and ends with the e-book which in 1999 was referred to as the Overbook.

As Books Bagshaw once said ‘Books do furnish a room.’ English Prime Minister William Gladstone seriously demonstrated that two-thirds of a gentleman’s home should be dedicated to books. He was thinking of about 25,000 books. Yes, 25,000! (If Books Bagshaw is unknown, show some initiative and find out who he is.)
There was much to learn as books and the shelves that store them progressed through history.
In the 15th and 16th entries books were often sold as loose leafs which the purchaser then had bound, either at the place of purchase or back home in the castle.
In the medieval and early Renaissance Europe context books were precious.
There were traveling book cases, useful to be able to pick up the collection and move when the bad guys came, be they royal agents looking for booty to steal, ahem, taxes, brigands looking for loot, a foraging army in the Thirty Years or One Hundred Years Wars.
These shelf-boxes were often designed to press the books within when closed. Book presses. In time individual books might have a lock on the cover or a hasp with a strap. With parchment books, moisture was the enemy and the books presses, in boxes, straps, or locks were designed to pressed the pages together to exclude moisture. Though over time books pressed would deteriorate anyway. These boxes often had three locks taking three quite different keys held by three different individuals. That is even more distributed security that the firing pin on a nuclear armed Polaris missile on a U.S. Navy submarine. They have only two keys.

Henry Petroski
From these boxes we get the armoire, and the linen press.
It came to pass that bound books were shelved vertically. Who started that is lost in time, but it was a revolution that led to more revolutions.
At first the spine of the bound book faced inward on the self for several hundred years. It often accommodated a metal hasp which held a chain, the other end of which attached to a rod bolted to the furniture. This is the chained library such as the one I saw in Avila. A reader consulted the book right there as the chain was short. The lectern beneath the shelf served the reader with its angled face and foot to keep the book stable. From this evolved the lectern in the front of the class room. The books were chained, as all librarians immediately understand: to keep readers from nicking them!
On those very rare occasions when a chained book was freed, say to be lent to another monastery, it was a major effort to uncouple it from the iron bar that might have twenty (20) other books attached to it. The bar itself was held in place by a lock, which often took more than one key to open as above.
Then there was the question of light. First candle light, then windows, then electric lights. In the early 20th Century glass floor tiles to diffuse the light had a fashion. Light was also an enemy when the inks and dyes were organic, yet it was also necessary so great efforts were made to find a balance.
Petroski compiled many drawings, wood cuts, plates, paintings, and other illustrations to show the evolution of the storage and use of books in Europe which edify and amuse. My favorite is the book wheel. It has been literally true for some readers of my acquaintance who always (claimed to) read many books at once and beyond the literal, more importantly, it is a metaphor for the life of a reader like me.

When books became cheaper and thus less valuable, the chains came off. That made it possible to turn the binding outward, and in time the title was printed on the spine, in Britain reading up and then in the United States, thanks to Ben Franklin, reading down.
George Orwell said that ‘People write books they cannot find on library shelves.’ Nowadays we scholars write book no one is looking for.
One of the pleasures of the book is seeing mention made of many libraries I have visited, like Widener at Harvard, the Bibliothèque National in Paris, the Library of Congress, the British Library, the New York City Public Library, the Bodelian at Oxford, Firestone at Princeton, the Hoover Library at Stanford, and so on.
The book ends with an whimsical appendix on methods to order books on bookshelves in a private collection. Each of the 20 or so methods Petroski enumerates has drawbacks that require an arbitrary rule apart from the method. For example, if the method is alphabetical by the author’s last name, the pitfalls come quickly. Is ‘O’Henry’ with the ‘Os” or it is “Henry, O’ with the ‘Hs” and if that hurdle is past what do we do with pseudonyms. Then there are multiple authors and so on. O’Henry was William Porter by name.
By the way, the Overbook is the Kindle today.
This gem was unearthed in the process of sorting and cataloguing books at home. I am pretty sure I have his great book The Pencil (1990) somewhere.

Jacques Barzun is a great scholar.  His essays are powerful microscopes that zero in on important topics. His ‘The Modern Researcher’ is not only a useful reference, but also a pleasure to read. He must have published thirty books and edited as many more. Among them is ‘A Catalogue of Crime’ with Wendall H. Taylor (1989) (Rev. ed).

Jacques Barzun
At a time when Edmund Wilson, he of the ‘Finland Station,’ and Robert Graves, who said ‘Goodbye to all that,’ deprecated mystery and crime fiction as ‘degrading to the intellect,’ Barzun took his stand, and what a stand it is. The ‘Catalogue’ is just that, thousands of thumbnail sketches of crime novels. Some examples follow below.
In the introduction Barzun maps out the country in his pellucid prose, the purpose being to guide other aficionados like himself through the forests of mediocrity to the mighty oaks within.  It is a catalogue raisonné which I have used for years but over time it disappeared behind the silt of newer titles on the double-ranked bookshelves, recently rediscovered in my campaign to catalogue all my books, a long, slow process that yields, as on this occasion, pleasures anew.
When it came to hand unexpectedly, I paused to re-read that introduction. Against the likes of Wilson and Graves, Barzun sets Dr Johnson who wrote lovingly, in another context, of ‘the art of murdering without pain’ which is the starting point for Barzun’s tour of the trails and vistas of krimie literature.  He turns to that philosopher and mystic R. G. Collingwood who opined that ‘the hero of a detective novel Is thinking exactly like a historian when, from indications of the most varied kind, he constructs an imaginary picture of how the crime was committed and by whom’ in his ‘The Idea of History’ (1946), a largely unintelligible work. Thus do intellectuals justify their human weakness.  That Marxist titan Ernst Bloch had a far more basic explanation: it is fun and satisfying to see villains get it, since in real-life they so seldom do. That is the gist; it took three weighty volumes for Bloch to grind that message out through the mill stones of Marxist clichés.
Barzun spends many words distinguishing the crime novel from thrillers and other interlopers in the scared grove, including some rather doubtful remarks about chick crim lit (p xiv).  Umberto Eco’s ‘In the Name of the Rose’ is likewise banished from the inner sanctum by definition (p xv). Lines have to be drawn and these will do as well as any, but I did not find the explanations enlightening or interesting enough to summarize.  Suffice it to say that Barzun is right at the core with Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ross Macdonald, Margaret Millar, and so goes the honour roll. He tosses off shafts of insight along the way, Chandler and Macdonald only make sense in a highly mobile (geographic and social) society where people do not know each other, and Christie and her ilk make sense in the Little England of Burkean communities of past, present, and future. 

Barzun strives with his many powers of persuasion to argue that a great writer cannot write a krimie, for in their works crime and punishment are but plot devices to reveal character. When great writers put this noble purpose aside to write a krimie the result is left-handed at best, citing the unarguable example of William Faulkner’s ‘Knight’s Gambit’ which is a poor thing indeed compared to ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ but then so is most of 20th Century literature when set against this marvel. (Barzun thus implies that the krimie is destined always to be a second-class book no less that Wilson or Graves, it seems.)
The flood of mystery book titles that Barzun saw in the 1980s is today a tsunami with subcategories galore and specialities undreamt of in his time.  Added to that is the profusion of translated works from Europe, not just those Nordic tales of angst, and the once-red world of Russia and China, along with every corner of the globe from Africa to Zagreb.  There is so much from which to choose that readers like writers may now specialise.  I, for one, prefer continuing characters whom I get to know, like Philip Marlow, Mary Russell, Lew Archer, Jane Marple, or Jules Maigret, and always, Sherlock Holmes.
As a reader, I have also become merciless at casting aside books, no matter how well received, that do not win my attention.  Why press on when it becomes a duty and not a pleasure?  Under that flag I have surrendered to the depths Nicholas Freeling’s ‘Van der Valk’ novels, despite my affection for the eponymous television series and for Amsterdam itself.  I have also dismissed Jan Wilhem Van Vetering’s endless efforts to be different as boringly adolescent.  For a taste of Netherlands vice give me A. C. Baantjjer with the redoubtable Inspector de Kok.
I reproduce here Jacques Barzun’s ‘Taxonomy of the Phylum Detective (Mystery) Literature.’ The opening essays offers an exegesis of this taxonomy. In cutting and pasting it, I lost the formatting of numbers.
I. Genus ‘Detection’
A. Species
Short (1845)
Very Long (1860)
Long (1912)
medium Long (1940)
Short short (1925)
B.Varieties
Normal
Inverted
Police routine
Autobiographical
Acroidal [?]
C. Habitat
Interior
Limited (train, ship, castle, etc.)
Village
Big City
Open country (moor preferred)
Exotic (Nile River, Suva)
Underworld (Los Angeles)
Institutional (hospital, school. convent, etc.)
D. Temper
Omniscient
Humorous (farcical)
Historical (real crime reconstructed)
Amateur (boy-and-girl team, et al.)
Ineffectual (drunk, fool, boor detective)
Private eye (decent or deplorable)
Official (and a Yard wide)
II. Genus ‘Mystery’
A. Species
Acclimated
Social (cult, blackmail, conspiracy, etc.)
Private (revenge, triangle, etc.)
Neurotic
Stabilized (‘suspense,’ Gothic, Rebecca, etc.)
Aggravated (HIBK, EIRF) [?]
Supernatural
Ghosts (sin punished)
Pagan (elemental forces)
Witchcraft , orgies (always nameless)
B. Varieties
Chase (paper, necklace, girl)
Napoleon of crime (Shakespeare manuscript, the Drupe Diamond, white power bitter to taste and such)
Mysterious East (idol’s left eye, curse of SingSingLong)
Domestic (poison pen, poison swig)
Commercial (stolen formula, child, white slave, black slave)
International (new math: 007, MI5, ect.)
But the best use of the book is leafing through it, reading the tart comments on obscure works relieves me of the need to do more, reading encomiums on old friends like Georges Simenon reminds me of pleasures past, and references to hitherto unknown titles of merit promise pleasures future.  Here are a few specimens to give a foretaste.
‘Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake (1943)
The exposition of situation and character is done with remarkable pace and skill, even for this master. A superb tale that moves through a maze of puzzles and disclosures to its perfect conclusion. This is Chandler’s masterpiece.’

‘Alan Hunter (James Herbert), ‘Too Good to be True’ (1969)
A suitable title for this tale, which has a little suspense but in which the detection is pathetic, consisting of as it does in waiting for the appearance of the accused man’s half-brother. the trial collapses as does the tale.’
‘William McGivens, ‘Night of the Juggler’ (1975)
Formerly a writer of good police procedurals in the terse style, McGivens has fallen under the spell of the new fad for excessive detail. The killer rapes and tortures young girls, always on a fixed date and for insufficient reasons. Go if you must on the case after the man and girl through the wilds of upper Central Park.’
‘Ngaio Marsh, ‘When in Rome’ (1971)
The flame still burns steady and strong. The writing is elegant and Det. Supt. Alleyn is impressive as he works with the Roman police in a case of double murder set in an ancient basilica. Blackmail is neatly interwoven with the the activities of a delux tourist agency. The participants in one of these excursions form the group of skillfully depicted suspects, including a remarkable brother-and-sister pair.’

‘Margot Neville (Margot Goyder), ‘Drop dead’ (1962)
Laid in Australia, written with something too much of female softness, but not disagreeable; composition choppy, characters and love relations perfunctory. Withal suspense in maintained and the part of official detectives are good.’
There are 5,000 entries in the book like these. Read on.

Recommended.
The versatile novelist Ron Hansen strikes again.  One change of pace after another from his ‘Mariette in Ectasy’ (1992) to ‘Isn’t it Romantic’ (2004), the first a study religious devotion in a turn of the century convent and the second a contemporary screwball comedy and this, an examination of the BEAST seen through the eyes of one of his very few relatives, a niece, the daughter of his half-sister.  

It concentrates on the period between late 1919 and early 1930 and is based on biographical details spun by the novelist’s creative imagination into a tale of obsession, confusion, and demonic egotism.  Hitler is almost human on occasion, but often playing a role to elicit the response he wanted from individuals at this early stage of his career: Pandering to some, bullying others, reasoning with a few, briefly avuncular.
I have never read anything about or by this the most famous man of the twentieth century, Adolph Hitler, so it was all new to me. The messianic self-confidence from the early 1920s that he WAS Germany (‘Du bist Deutschland,’ as Rudolph Hess always said), punctuated by lapses into exhaustion and doubt (human weakness) followed by a resurgence of manical energy charged with certainty.
The fulcrum of the novel is the niece Angela ‘Geli’ Raubal’s seduction by his aura, the prestige, and material wealth he increasing commanded with his periodic moods of sexual attraction to her and then revulsion from her.  She became a canary in a gilded cage.  Spoiled and then abused by turns, and at crucial moments lacking the will to break away when that might still have been possible. 

Geli
This tension opens a window on Hitler, the man, through these crucial years.  Hitler had at the start an iron self-control in public, and volcanic temper tantrums in private, but as his successes piled up, the line between public and private decayed for he discovered that he could get away with anything in public and still be hailed a genius.  The temper tantrums were unleashed in his tirades.
Hansen gives us Rudolph Hess, Jospeh Göbbles, Hermann Göring, and others, all mesmerised by Hitler’s charismatic personality.  ‘Charisma’ is a tried and trite word these days, and I try never to use it, yet there is no doubt it applied here.  Hess and the others simply melt in Hitler’s presence, losing their wills and personalities.
The same applies to the thousands in the audiences of his harangues, though at a greater distance, they too are also compelled, lifted out of themselves by his exhortations.  Hansen shows all of this, disgusting as it is, to be genuine, authentic.  There is no cynical or instrumental calculation to explain their adherence, obedience, and the ensuing terrible deeds.  
Long before he became Chancellor this man Hitler had a power over people that was tangible though invisible.  There is the mystery at the core that continues to fascinate. After the explanations of time and circumstances are exhausted there is still that element left that defies conventional, rational explanation.
Yes, there were aristocrats, financiers, and industrial barons who thought they could manipulate this rabble rouser to combat the menace of communism, and then discard him, but they, too, as they drew nearer to him soon enough submitted to his will.  Scenes in which Hitler seems almost deliberately to turn on his magnetic gaze — think Superman engaging his X-Ray vision — and bring to heel a millionaire, a full general, an heiress, a professor, a titan of industry, each his intellectual, organisational, or social superior yet all bowing down to this corporal without an education, with a grating Austrian accent, with a crude manner, spouting vitriol is …. astounding.  There can be no other explanation but that word ‘charisma.’ The novel is a case study of that C Factor. (‘Charisma,’ for those who have not been paying attention.)
In David Fraser’s ‘Knight’s Cross: the Life of Erwin Rommel’ (1994, p. 433) there is an occasion when the war in July 1943 is going badly and Rommel, who had doubts about its conduct which as a good soldier he stifled, is scheduled to go to Berlin. This trip he welcomes because, he said, he would warm himself by the Füher’s radiance and gain re-newed confidence.  It is a wistful, school-boy-with-a-crush kind of remark made by a decent, mature man who knew better and yet even he could not help himself.  Rommel, like so many others, near or far, was hopelessly and helplessly in love with one Adolph Hitler.
There are many memorable scenes and events.  Perhaps the best, for this reader, is the description of one of Hitler’s early speeches in an beer hall with an unruly crowd. Hitler is tight as a spring beforehand, nervous, angry, best avoided. He takes ten pages to the rostrum microphone in the hall, while the noisy crowd continues to drink beer and talk. ( We later learn that on each page is a bullet point in 10-15 words or so as a cue.) He begins…(after a few minutes the beer drinkers grow silent). The tirade mounts… (the beer drinkers lean forward to hang on every word). He continues … (the beer drinkers shout approval and applaud and he waves his hand and they fall silent like puppets on a string, this long before anyone even knew his name). HIs sermon becomes ever more explicit about what the problem is, what is to be done about it, concluding that Hitler alone sees the problem clearly and is willing to act on it with the merciless violence necessary to destroy the evils within Germany.

One crowd awaiting its master’s voice
He rants for more than two hours. The reaction is spontaneous and tumultuous. The beer drinkers rush to sign up for the Nazi Party. This is early in his career, there is nothing coerced about the response as would be the case later. He has jolted a nerve shared by members of this crowd – the western nations are eating Germany and Germans alive through their despicable agents the Jews, Jews and Communist are one and the same, wicked oriental cannibals, and the crowd’s response is galvanic. BANG! The poor, the uneducated, the impoverished veterans, dispossessed craftsmen, angry layabouts, the day labourers, the unemployed, the ignorant, these are the meek and they are being disinherited of their earth. For these, his is the voice. Hear it! Heed it! Obey it! (Christopher Isherwood says in this ‘Berlin Stories’ [1945] he went to a Nazi rally in 1938 and heard Hitler speak. Amid the shouting and frenzy he heard a familiar voice and turned to spot the speaker, only to realize it was he himself shouting his approval, even though he did not approve.)
After his speech Hitler is whisked away to a car out of sight. Sprawled on the back seat, he is drenched in sweat, reeking of vile emanations, exhausted, pale, his gaze unfocussed, twitching in throes, his clothes in disarray as if he clawed at himself. This description reminded me of Biblical accounts of John the Baptist channeling God’s will. It nearly killed John, but do it he must. Hitler, also, seems to be a messenger for something larger than himself. The agitator is himself agitated, as Harold Lasswell said all those years ago in ‘Psychopathology and Politics’ (1930).
Many were resistent to Hitler’s appeal like Geli herself who laughed in his face more than once.
Surprising to this reader was the cunning with which at times Hitler carefully tailored his message in the 1930 election so as not frighten voters.  I had not credited him with that kind of calculation. But by that time, like the racism that infests contemporary American politics, it was so well embedded that it need not be said for it was communicated by signs and whispers. The red star of communism was also the Star of David. To attack communism was implicitly to attack Jews even if they were not mentioned.  

Ron Hansen
False notes, there are a few. The most striking to me was the way Emile at the end seemed not to be bothered by Geli’s death.  
Minor missteps? I wondered about the reference to a crossword puzzle in 1927 when the first crossword appeared in the ‘London Times’ in 1930, and the crossword being an Anglo-American invention it would have taken time to migrate to Germany. There is also a reference to a zinfandel-coloured carpet. I stopped at this, because the zinfandel grape skin is black and the use of it as a wine grape is American. (Yes, I know it has a long history and has been used in Croatia for centuries as a blender, but I doubt a German in 1927 would reach that far for a colour.) I also found jarring the reference to Kaiser rolls and Ferragamo shoes. The Kaiser roll is Austrian and may be named for a baker, not The Kaiser, and more generally called Vienna rolls. Salvatore Ferragamo started making shoes in Florence in 1927 and went bust in 1933, to be reopened in the 1950s, leaving me unsure that Geli could buy such shoes in a shop in Munich in 1930.
One contrast to Hitler of these pages is his contemporary Charles De Gaulle who also felt himself to be the saviour of his country and as a result grew a kingsized sense of his own importance, and yet he seems modest, even self-effacing in comparison.  I read Jean LeCouture’s three-volume biography of Le Grand Charles years ago.  De Gaulle did not use up people and then murder them when it was convenient as Hitler often did, like Ernst Röhm and perhaps Geli, among many others.

22 Germinal 221

Nothing reminds us of the essential irrationality of the world than, there before our eyes everyday, the calendar.
Consider the numbers: the moon’s cycle is 29.53049 days which does not yield a nice set of months. Helios is no better. The earth orbit of Sol is 365.242199 days which yields 12.36827 months. These calculations were done by ancient civilizations around the world. Some of which had enough sense to stop there. The others formed committees.
(The hole gets deeper, if we ask what ‘a day’ is. And why, oh why, the seven day week? Let’s not go there, just now.)
The Julian calendar is one compromise, amusingly portrayed in John Maddox Robert’s novel ‘The Year of Confusion’ (2010) when Caesar tired of the squabbles among the expert committee he assembled to solve this problem. As always the defining feature of an expert committee is disagreement. After exhausting the treasure and patience of Caesar, the committee produced in 46 BCE a calendar that differed from the prevailing calendar by 0.0024 of a day! The committee did have enough sense among its cantankerous members to flatter its patron with that month ‘July.’
Pope Gregory repeated the exercise in the 16th Century with the result that the months range from 28 to 31 days, and inserted every fourth year a catch-up with Leap Year. No mathematical perfection there to please the Pythagorean in our souls.
‘Pope’ did I say ‘Pope?’ Yes, the Catholic Church owned that new calendar and completely colonized it with Saints’ days, feast and fast days, and more.
When the French Revolution ushered in the Age of Reason in 1793 it was as much a revolt against the Catholic Church as the Ancien Régime. All those saints’ and fast days had to go, and they went! They were rooted out right down to the calendar itself. The year of the Revolution was Year Zero, and that was 190 years ago and April is Germinal.
Another committee was formed….. It produced violent disagreements and incomprehensible technical disputes that led some of its member to the guillotine. How else to get a consensus but with a sharp edge? So the chair of many an expert committee has asked. Iain Pears’s charming Jonathan Argyll stumbles, as always, on just such a deranged committee chair in ‘The Titian Committee’ (1999), and though committee members are murdered one-by-one, the remainder are no closer to agreement. So true. Discordant unto death which in Latin, sort of, is ‘discordat usque ad mortem.’
The French Revolutionary Calendar made the irrational world, briefly, rational with decree after decree. The day, the week, the month, and the year, all had to change. And change they did (remember that sharp edge for those who clung to the forbidden, corrupt past).
As long as the earth spins, the irrationality remains despite what a committee in Paris does. The only solution is …. Yes, more committees. In the long outfall of the French Revolution, another French committee — inspired by the success of the platinum metre — tried again in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, but it soon fell apart and one member, the irrepressible August Comte, proceeded on his own with the Positivist Calendar with months named after Moses, Homer, Aristotle, Archimedes, Descartes, Fredrick the Great, Dante, … and Bichat. Bichat? [I don’t know.] Each week also got a name, e.g., Socrates, Confucius, Mohammed… So did every single day!
The Russian revolutionaries made their own calendar with the result that their own October Revolution retrospectively moved to November! It does get confusing when time is relative. Vide Einstein.
There came another committee at the League of Nations, which produced the International Fixed Calendar, dividing the year into thirteen months, each of 28 days with an extra day at the end. Not heard of it? Few have. It died with the League to be buried alongside that other bold effort at rationality, Esperanto.
The next effort to control time was when Adolf Hitler decreed that all of Nazi subjugated Europe keep Berlin time regardless of sun or moon. Megalomaniacs all.
By the way, the French Revolutionary Calendar is essentially a blank calendar template in which nothing ever changes, as per that phrase. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Having read three of Tuchman’s other books with relish, I moved on to this one. This book seems to this reader to be — superbly written, true to say — a glib festival of hindsight, with some self-indulgence thrown in.
It is certainly true that governments, the focus in these pages, persist in failed polices, at times with an irrational fervor. It was said of Phillip II of Spain that ‘no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence’ and it could be said of many others, too. (The same is also true of the corporate world, too, but that is another matter.)
That painful, self-destructive persistence takes some explanation. But it is not to be had here.

First is the indulgence: She, the doyenne of (at least) popular history, starts with the Trojan acceptance unquestioned of that wooden horse. Hey, that is the Iliad, which is fiction at best and myth at least! People do foolish things in novels and plays as plot devices. A false note at the start is not a good start.

There follow flawless accounts from the vantage of Olympian hindsight of the popes generating the Reformation, of England precipitating the American Revolution, and the United States trying to destroy itself in Vietnam. Each is certainly a remarkable example of political failure, each replete with fascinating personalities and stories which she tells far better than most; likewise much of it has been well told many times before. Another telling adds what?
The method is to identify the critics and naysayers, whom history proved right, starting with Cassandra. The naysayers show that there was doubt and that there was an alternative that was eschewed as time and effort instead went into the mistake approach, which she calls policy, a term to which we shall return below. Therein lies the rub.
There are always, I repeat, always naysayers. That they existed proves nothing. That fate in perfect hindsight vindicates some of them is no help. The naysayers are very often wrong. How can one discern the true negatives among all those negatives?
Look around, anything you see, a building or an institution, a custom or a practice had its naysayers. There is a Newton’s Law in society: for every action there is a reaction, though not aways equal, and not always opposite. One day cricket, oral vaccines, art deco buildings, trams, credit cards, women wearing pants, all of these had loud, heated, persistent naysayers, and some of them still do, by the way. The book about the March of Naysayers would fill every library shelf in the world. The file would be too big for Kindle.
So what? If everything stopped because someone feared the worst, nothing would happen.
These pages offer no way to distinguish a naysayer worth listening to from one not worth listening to. Remember that Cassandra had been against everything all her life. Like that boy who cried wolf, she had spent her credibility long ago, that is part of the joke that Homer has, the one time she was right was of paramount importance, but everyone was way past hearing her.
The very word ‘policy’ is part of the problem here. In the 1970s political parties discovered this term and began to use it to distinguish themselves. They no longer had programs, practices, procedures, or even promises, let alone principles, they had policies. Of course, no one has ever been quite sure what ‘policy’ means as distinct from all those other ‘p’ words, but it does at least mean consistency. These policies have been painted in ideological and partisan colours. Once the opposition has embraced a policy, its opponents can no longer touch that policy. Thus is the political world divided.
The media has fixed onto that consistency and first tirelessly demands that a policy be stated, and then attacks the stater for any deviation from it. It is win-win for the media. Though political parties started this game they are now reaping the whirlwind.
Pity the politician who offers no policies. Yes, I know Margaret Thatcher scorned the word but she practiced what she did not preach under the heading of principle which in her case was ‘policy’ sans le mot.
Never mind that the world is a wild beast, that circumstances change, that reality testing often returns negative results, that the same response does not always fit all cases.
The standard is consistency.
It is as though, we should demand that medical doctors prescribe the same therapy for each patient, regardless of medical history, circumstances, prognosis, capacity, etc., rather than try to tailor the therapy to the individual.
Policy, that is, consistency, is itself sometimes itself the problem. Yet the demand is always for more policy, another policy.
If all this seems inchoate and abstract, turn to the example of Franklin Roosevelt who never tied his hands with either policies or principles but willingly tried this-and-that to find something that might work. Like Abraham Lincoln, Roosevelt had a goal and he steered toward that, though not always in a straight line, which meant going left sometimes and right other times. One imagines the meal a smirking ABC journalist, or a shouting Fox …. [journalist] would make of that today.
By the way, the best book on American involvement in Vietnam remains Neil Sheehan, A Bright and Shining Lie (1989). J. Paul Vann was Thucydides in this war, and when he died, Sheehan became his amanuensis.

This is a study of how one Fabian Ware created the funereal symbols we now associate with World War I and subsequent wars. The subtitle is ‘How one man’s vision led to the creation of WWI’s war graves.’

A reference to ‘war graves’ brings to mind green grass and ranks of white head stones to many of us. A reference to symbols evokes the solemn statuary say in Martin Place, or the dawn ritual of Gallipoli. Each of these and more trace back to Fabian Ware’s Herculean efforts.
Before World War I and Ware’s many efforts, British war dead were left were they fell, unidentified except by their absence at the next roll call, and buried in mass pits or burned with whatever fuel was at hand. The families of wealthy officers might (try to) retrieve the body or have a memorial erected at the site. That was it. And as Britain went so went the Empire.
World War I changed that. The industrial scale of the slaughter, even in the early days of 1914 made the war dead a visible, national issue. Scale tells the story. At Waterloo Wellington’s army had 3,500 causalities. One day at Mons 1914 the British Expeditionary Force had 35,000 causalities. These men were volunteers, but later it would conscripts usually organized geographically. One result was that the eligible manhood of whole villages and towns were destroyed in a battle, say at the hellhole of Ypres, whole cities.
Ware went to France in the earliest days of the conflict as a volunteer ambulance driver. He was a good organizer and soon commanded ever more ambulances and crews. Having been a student in France he spoke the language and loved all things French, apart from the Catholicism. He saw the way the British dead were ignored, and dealt with only as a health hazard or nuisance, and he went to work with a fury.
The metal dog tag, identity disk, was one result of his efforts, along with others. Tommys originally had a cloth name tag on the inside nape of the shirt. In heaps of mangled and rotting dead bodies no one wanted to wade in and cut those out, and most would have impossible to read. Given the staggering number of dead, the British authorities preferred to list the dead as missing to reduce the impact on public opinion. This conspiracy of silence outraged Fare and an outraged Fare was cold, methodical, utterly charming to win over allies, scrupulously rational in argument, and equipped with a mind-numbing array of facts and figures all heated by an evangelical zeal.
Like Thomas Edison and other aliens, Ware needed little sleep working all day driving the ambulance and all night compiling his arguments. In time he shifted his work from ambulances to identifying the dead, and marking and recording the sites where they lay buried.
There was much resistance to this effort but he pressed on and made allies as well as enemies. It is important to note that he was doing this often amid shot and shell. He gathered around him a dedicated team whom he taught, at night after an exhausting and terrifying day’s work, to speak enough French to ask locals about ‘Morts Anglais?’
His work transformed into the Imperial War Graves Commission, and again with a perseverance, tenacity, and wit beyond mere mortal he convinced the Empire dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India to leave it all to him.
He tried to control everything from the grass to the statuary that arose after the war. Tireless is the only word for it. Megalomania is another.

He convinced the French government early in 1915 to cede the land English soldiers were buried in to England! Imagine that. (See the note at the end for further explanation.) After the war that led to the consolidation (i.e., digging up thousands of graves and transporting the remains) into large necropolises like that vast expanse at Ypres. Every step was dogged by opposition, religious, familial, national, bureaucratic, political, institutional, church, racial, personal and Ware overcame them all. He anticipated much of this and was sensitive to religious and racial matters in handling the dead that seems enlightened by today’s standards.
In time most of this work was at a desk in London, but he would occasionally put down his pen at 6 pm in London and take the overnight boat-train to France for inspections. He descended on his field teams and more than once took a shovel himself. The men who worked for him hated these inspections for he was a strict taskmaster, but admired his commitment to the cause.
Like Steve Jobs he sweated the small stuff as well as the large.
What was that ‘cause’ any way? World War I, he thought, as did many others, was the last war and even more important it was an Empire war that united all the British peoples, all those naive volunteers, all those conscripts, all those lads from the Dominions, together they were everyman. Most had no wealthy families to care for them in death, and, as a Christian, death and those mortal remains had a sanctity that had to be respected. Moreover, the enormity of the death would discourage future wars, if only that enormity were brought home, he thought.
Death is a democrat; it takes all just as we are. Ware was an egalitarian at this level. He prevented many wealthy families from retrieving their beloved dead in contradiction to his vision of a single nation from all walks of life and parts of the world united in death. Imagine the outrage that caused. Only 10% of the one million British and Empire dead were identified, i.e., 100,000 but the families of many of those wanted their — son, brother, husband, nephew — to be singled out as an exception and some were willing to campaign for it and to pay for it. Thousands of letters to the Times denounced Ware in every way. Aristocrats petitioned the Palace and lambasted successive prime ministers. There questions in the House! Ware tried to explain his reasoning in response but the abstractions of equality or the vague promise that mass, majestic, silent cemeteries would stay the sword next time meant nothing to the bereaved here and now. The budget cutters in parliament snipped away as did Treasury. A perfect storm! How did he come through it all?
There is more to the story that is best read. And remember the Imperial War Graves stretched from Mesopotamia to East Africa to Gallipoli to Palestine to Greece to Italy and to the Western Front.
It is another of those cases that shows what a single person with intelligence and will — a Gulliver among the Lilliputians — can accomplish pretty much singlehanded, at the start, even in the face of vast bureaucracies (the Army, the Public Works Office, Treasury) that have other important priorities and in the face of an orchestrated and angry public reaction.
The story is much more powerful than the telling. The book is hard going. Many sentences I had to read twice to get the point. Obscure, elliptic, cryptic, inverted, recessive, these words come to mind in describing the prose.
Note. Ceding the land for cemeteries meant it cost nothing, but much more important it made the very land, say, at Étaples forever British even more permanent than an embassy.

In 1940 when the German army occupied Étaples it thus occupied British territory as much as the Channel Islands. The British flag flies there by right, not by courtesy. That is a gesture as thoughtlessly magnanimous as Winston Churchill’s in 1940 offering to surrender British sovereignty to France by combining the countries as one to continue the war. Another story there.