Imperial Art - Portrait of the Battle of Inkerman, Ukraine, 5 November 1854 by Thomas Rose Miles

While I'm working on my piece about Verdun, I'm working my way through Tervor Royle's Anglo-centric Crimea: The Great Crimean War. I just finished the chapter on the Russian attempt to break the siege of Sebastopol at the battle of Inkerman so I decided to post a picture. The battle was fought across a series of hills and valleys and in heavy fog. It's called "the Soldier's Battle" because units were cut off by weather and geography, often fighting a series of seemingly unconnected engagements. 

Movies from the Imperial Age

In keeping with what I'm reading, I decided to track down a couple of appropriate films. Three I've seen, the other only glimpsed part of years ago.

The first is Khartoum (1966). It stars Charlton Heston as Charles "Chinese" Gordon and Lawrence Olivier as Muhammad Ahmed, the Mahdi. The problem I see for many modern viewers will be the pretty terrible blackface worn by Olivier to portray a dark-skinned Sudanese. Personally, I'm less worried about that than I am by Olivier's awful hamminess. I haven't seen it in years, and I'm curious how it holds up.

The second is the blackly comic, Royal Flash (1975), the great Richard Lester's film about George MacDonald Fraser's rogue, Harry Flashman. It stars Malcolm McDowell and Oliver Reed, and it really doesn't get much better than that in the seventies for my money. Scripted by Fraser, it's the only one of the Flashman novels to ever be filmed. I haven't read anyof the books (yet). I remember liking this movie a lot.

Next, returning to seriousness, I got Zulu Dawn (1979), a prequel to Zulu (1964). It depicts the victory by Zulu forces under King Cetshwayo at Isandlwana earlier in the same day as the Battle of Rorke's Drift. Again, I remember liking it, but I have no idea how it stands up today.


Finally, a strange film I saw bits and piece of on cable several years ago: The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). It's filled with all sorts of off-kilter moments and Punch-inspired animation. It's supposed to be both satirical and decently accurate, its script be heavily based on The Reason Why by Cecil Woodham-Smith, a study of the Light Brigade's fatal charge. As I'm about to dive into Trevor Royle's history of the war, Crimea: The Great Crimean War, I'll probably watch this first.

Banner Art - Solferino

My new banner art is part of Carlo Bossoli's painting, The Battle of Solferino. From the little bit I can glean from the badly translated Italian Wikipedia page, he was Swiss born naturalized Italian. He was hired by a British publisher to follow the Piedmont War (2nd Italian War of Independence) and create lithographs. Later, the Prince of Savoy commisioned him to paint pictures from the war. This is one of them and it can be seen in the Museum of the Risorgimento in Turin. Risorgimento means resurgence and it was the word used to describe the movement to unify Italy during the 19th century.

Solferino was the climax of the war. A French and Sardinian army under Emperor Napoleon III smashed into the Austrian army commanded by Emperor Franz Joseph I. At the end of the day the Austrians were beaten and retreated back to the protection of their fortresses called the Quadrilateral. Soon after, peace negotiations started.

When I tweeted the painting above yesterday, Teresa Edgerton remarked how gorgeous it is and that it would make a great book cover. I don't have a book in need of a cover, but I do want a new banner. 

Napoleon III at Solferino

The Long Nineteenth Century

So the Chaosium Cthlhu Mythos project I embarked on late last year has clearly fallen by the wayside. I haven't posted anything on it in months and I haven't been able to make any headway in the next book, Cthulhu's Heirs, for weeks. Every time I tried to get going again I found myself distracted by anything else. I just couldn't stay focused on the stories, no matter how good. So, I'm calling it quits for now. Maybe I'll go back in the future.

What I AM interested in right now are the various wars and colonial actions between 1789 and 1918, a period the repellent Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawn, crafted.  The French Revolution represents a shattering of the feudal, social, and relgious order in most of Europe. At the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the Great Powers attempted to re-establish the old order at the Congress of Vienna and it never really took. Between that span, nationalism sparked numerous revolutions and wars. France, England, and many other powers continued their imperial expansion bringing millions of people under their rule.

The slow-motion race toward the Great War and the vileness of the colonial undertakings are fascinating. At a time of rapid cultural and social growth, of scientific advancement at a speed never before experienced, the developed nations of the world seemed bent on proving themselves by force of arms and with bloodshed. From my cossetted early-21st century place it makes little sense. But of course it did to millions upon millions of educated people at the time.

When I read history, when I encounter the past, I try hard not to simply dismiss it because people and societies aren't as liberally minded as we like to think of ourselves today. People weren't evil (okay, some of them clearly were), but instead, had the same sort of complex thinking and understanding of human actions we have but with completely different underlying assumptions. My hope is to come to a greater understanding of how people came to such different conclusions than we do (most of the time) today.

Between 1815 and 1914, Europe saw numerous wars. Among them were the First and Second Italian Wars of Independence, and the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars. Even poor little Denmark gets ravaged by the Prussians.

The decaying state of the Ottoman Empire led to three wars between the Turks and the Russians. In 1882, Britain sort of, kind of, took control of Egypt from the Ottomans and in 1911, Italy helped itself to Libya. The British supplantation of the Ottomans in Egypt led directly to various excursions into the Sudan.

The Japanese make their entrance onto the world stage by defeating first China in 1894, then Russia in 1905.

None of these had the scope or duration of the Napoleonic Wars, but they were brutal and showed the way to the industrial slaughterhouse of the Great War.

Then, most egregiously, there are the numerous colonial conquests and exploitation. Germany, France, Belgium, England, and Italy into Africa. England, France, Russian, Japan, and more into China. Sometimes the colonized had the temerity to rise up, hence the Great Mutiny and the Boxer Rebellion. The Boer Wars, if not perfectly, fit into the catergory of uprisings as well.



The greatest proof of the failure of the Congress of Vienna is the Great War. All the nationalism, all the competition between the Great Powers for colonial possessions, martial and economic power, exploded in the summer of 1914. Though sparked by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it had been building for a long time before that.

At present, inspired by the centenary of the Great War, I'm reading
The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 by Alistair Horne and The Marne:1914 by Holger Herwig. Both are excellent studies of the respective battles, providing excellent studies of the commanders, strategies, and tactics involved. Both books go a long way to showing the disastrous conduct of the battles were more the result of failures by the generals to understand the changes wrought by technology. Rare were the commanders who really were able to take these things into account and incorporate them into tactics and strategies.

So, that's what I'm doing here, for the next few months at least. Oh, at I'm leaving the US out of this. Sure, we were doing the sames things as Europe (and Japan). We had a bloody expansionist period, a bloody war of consolidation, and a nice quick war with Spain and colonialism. But, as an American, I'm already familiar with it, so I'm not looking to read much about it now (but maybe next time. I've got two good looking books about the Spanish American War that straring at me from the shelf).


Oh, and I'm too bored/tired right now, but I will be updating the banner.

RIP Sir Christopher Lee

I guess every fanboy and girl is going to post Sir Christopher's death notice today, and why not? Growing up in the seventies, his portrayal of Dracula was ubiquitous on television. Forget, Lugosi, Lee was the Count. 

When I was a teenager and saw The Wicker Man for the first time it was also the first time I saw him out of his Dracula uniform. His performance as Lord Summerisle is mesmerizing. It remains my favorite of his many performances. His turn as Death in the Discworld animated movies is a close second, though.

By all reports he was a good and brave man. RIP, sir. Thank you and good bye.

Simakpalooza!

I'm not sure what the first story I read by Clifford Simak was, but the first I remember is "Desertion." It's part of the book he's probably most famous for, City. The novel is a mournful farewell to humanity and Earth and stars robot butlers and talking dogs.

"Desertion" is about a scientist and his dog on Jupiter investigating missing explorers. They were transmogrified into lopers, a lifeform native to the planet's surface. None so far have returned to the station.

There's a tremendous sense of wonder in the tale as the nature of what's going on is revealed. I think of it as the story that showed me the true potential of sci-fi as something way more than rockets and rayguns (not that there's a single thing wrong with them).

Sadly, Clifford Simak seems to have slipped into the ranks of the unjustly forgotten sci-fi writers of the past. Growing up, he was just part of the general fabric of sci-fi and most fellow sci-fi fans I knew had read at least something by him.

Doing a search on Waystation the other day, I discovered a 2009 review in the UK Guardian. The author admitted he had never even heard of Simak until he started exploring past Hugo winners. Only twenty-three years after his death, a man who was the third Science Fiction Grand Master (after only Robert Heinlein and Jack Williamson), winner of three Hugos and a Nebula, was unknown by the science fiction reviewer of a major paper.

I can't blame the critic. As of 2009, most of his books were no longer in print. Happily, that seems to be changing a little, though, at least in the UK. Gollancz has published City and Waystation, and Gateway/Orion is releasing e-books of what looks to be all of his novels.

It's been a long time since I've read anything by Simak. John O'Neill's post about The Goblin Reservation and the comments reminded me how much I loved his work. There's a warmth and comfortableness to his stories that I love.

Here are the novels of his I have in storage. I just dug out Enchanted Pilgrimage, his first effort at writing a fantasy quest novel. He came back to it two more times in The Fellowship of the Talisman and Where the Evil Dwells.

All three send a party of adventures into enchanted lands to make some discovery or thwart some rising evil. I don't remember them being particularly original but nice reads nonetheless.

Wonderful Nonsense and Unearthed America

There are probably all sorts of fascinating reasons that there was a market for UFOs and cryptozoology when I was growing up back in the seventies. I don't really care now and I definitely didn't care when I was eleven. What mattered was that there were lots of books of glorious nonsense for me to read.

The Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film in 1967 and Eric von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods? in 1968. Vincent Gaddis created the idea of the Bermuda Triangle in 1964 and Charles Berlitz popularized it his 1974 book of the same name.

This stuff, especially UFO and Bermuda Triangle themese, worked its way into popular culture. There's a 1975 tv movie called The UFO Incident starring James Earl Jones about the Barney and Betty Hill "abduction" and a tv show called The Fantastic Journey let Roddy McDowall get lost in the Triangle.

Cryptozoology was my favorite of all the bullshit subjects. It was the only one that actually had any sort of track record of

success and therefore the lowest bullshit quotient. Sure, scientists were more likely to uncover something like the coelacanth or a giant peccary and not a sea serpent but even as a kid that was cool enough for me. And I suspected aliens didn't own the Andes and there wasn't a mysterious vortex in the Caribbean.

I loved this stuff (and still do) because I'm a sci-fi/fantasy fan. Secret monsters, aliens, strange disappearances? Those things are at the heart of much of what I was was reading. 

It also seemed to rip the boring mask of reality away and expose all sorts of bizarre things going on in the background. It's cool to know secrets, even if those secrets were available to anybody who bought Chariots of the Gods? from the spinner rack in A&P.  

When I got older my taste for this stuff faded. After you've read one Bermuda Triangle book you've pretty much read them all. Same for Bigfoot and Loch Ness monster.

But I did get hooked on conspiracy and other crazy theories. That's for a whole other post some day. Suffice it to say, I don't believe them (OK, maybe the Business Plot because Smedley Butler's one of my heroes), from JFK's assassination to Nazis in the Antarctic. They are, though, a heck of a lot of fun to read about.

All of this leads me to America Unearthed. It's a History Channel 2 show about supposed lost and hidden pieces of American history. It's without a doubt some of the most magnificent bullshit I have watched in the last year or two.

Scott Wolter, the host, is a forensic geologist, a fine purveyor of grand theories about alternate histories of the settlement of America. In the earliest episodes, he argues for the presence of Mayans, Vikings, and Phoenecians, in the lower forty-eight.

I put the show on out of boredom and quickly was enjoying the silliness for what it is. Wolter brought out the Kensington Stone as proof of real Vikings in Minnesota and claimed Mystery Hill dated back to ancient times. I laughed at how angry he got when the park rangers at Chattahoochee wouldn't let him wander around protected sites or the guide at Roanoke dismised his ideas out of hand. He had heartfelt phone calls with his wife that ended with her telling him about a sudden, recent discovery that could prove his latest wild theory. It was all good, clean fun until he started talking about the Templars and the Holy Grail. 

It's one of the grandest and most debunked conspiracy theories out there. You can look up the details yourself. It's a mishmash of conspiracy theories, new age beliefs, and gnosticism, spawned by one of the most elaborate hoaxes every carried out. Dan Brown rode the hoax to fame and fortune, all the while claiming it was real and that he had discovered it. I don't want to ruin your own discoveries about them. Just start with the Priory of Sion and see where that takes you. 

Four episodes of America Unearthed's first season (the only one I've seen so far) focus on Wolter's theories about the Templars and how some escaped to the New World following their order's destruction in the 14th century. It's a wonderfully nutty web of unbelievable bits strung together with cords of ludicrous theories wrapped in sheets of nonsense. 

Later I found out Wolter has a two-hour show just on the Templars, the Holy Grail and the Kensington Stone. I need to find and watch that next. Then I have to see the second season where he spends at least one episode looking for the Menehune, the little people of Hawaii. 

I look at all of these shows and books as story telling. Maybe the tellers really believe in what they're saying, maybe not. But it doesn't matter. What they are doing is creating tales out of the myths and mysteries that litter our real world and finding patterns in them from which they can make new stories, and I can appreciate and enjoy them for that.