Day Three Of Sobriety

I Don't Care If It Bores You!
If Conrad has to undergo a sober month, then you the audience can most certainly go cold turkey suffer experience it alongside him, and feel vicariously noble and abstemious. 
     Actually there's not a lot to report.  After blogging last night I perused the latest Naval And Military Press catalogue, noting which books I already had - a record high for this issue - and which ones I might care to order.  "The Sieges of Alexander the Great" appeals, especially as I may have already read it. If I recall, one of the trickiest of his siege operations was against the Phoenician city of Tyre, which sat, fortified, off what is now the Lebanese coast.  It took a long, complicated operation to reduce the city, but Alexander did it; that lad would carry on the bitter end once he'd started.
     Oh, a quick Wik reveals Conrad's memory is not defective:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Tyre_(332_BC)

Limned in Orange - already got
Limned in Green  -  about to get

     Warfare in the ancient world.  Fascinating stuff.  Conrad also wonders how these armies coped in the heat of the central Mediterranean.  Consider, if the siege lasted seven months in the year 332, at the earliest it would have started in January, at the latest in May.  Either way they would have been fighting in the summer, wearing armour and carrying weapons.  Conrad, in more northern climes during summer, has been immobilised by the heat wearing nothing more than swimming trunks and suncream.
     One to ponder on, eh?

I think this is a Ron Embleton artwork - Alexander directing the siege

"Bivouac"
I've been trying to include this definition for a week and not had time to add it in, so busy am I with my dense social scheduling commitments*, that and plotting to take over the world.  Oh, and some baking, too.
     Anyway, "Bivouac".  It means "Encampment", as you well-read lot probably already knew.  Where does it come from?  Unusually for the words that BOOJUM! selects, neither Latin nor Greek.  Rather, Old German - "Beiwacht", which translates as "Citizens on Patrol"**, which was then adopted and adapted in Old French as "Bivac", thence to "Bivouac".

Bivouac on Rockall.
World's least busy hotel.

Conrad - Travelling Light
Normally I travel to work with the case as illustrated left below.  This is not only large, it is extremely robust, having been built to shelter a laptop, and it has a steel wire frame.  Were you to encounter both it and Conrad, you would come to a definite stop***.

Hard left, soft right.
Hey, I made a Jeremy-joke!

     So, to accommodate the crowds of shoppers in Manchester, I used the bag on the right, which is smaller and much squishier.
     There you go - Conrad, the considerate apprentice dictator.

"Engines of War" By Christian Wolmar
Christian begins this interesting logistical appreciation of railways in war during the Crimean War, where the British, French, Turks and Sardinians came together to give the Russians a good tatering.  The work then takes in the American Civil War, the Boer War, colonial war in the Sudan, the Franco-Prussian War, the First World War, the Russian Civil War, the Second World War, the Korean War and the Cold War.

A Transporter-Erector-Launcher.
Sigmund Freud eat your heart out ...

     One gloss that Conrad was already aware of was the use of mobile missile trains on the railways in America - an experimental programme scrapped by JFK when he came to power as being far too expensive.  I hadn't realised that the Russians - still smarting after the Crimea War no doubt - also had mobile missile trains.  They kept theirs going until the Eighties when they were scrapped, once again on grounds of expense.

"Conrad, you wag!  We have the Crimea back again!"
"So I won't take offence.  This time."

     Let us once again return to Russia, and the Civil War.  During this period there came about the Czech Legion, whom I am not going to explain as the Russian Civil War is one of the most complicated bits of history ever, herein a link instead:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovak_Legion

     Conrad came across a photo in the book which is quite famous:

Scads of Maxims - but what is that lower right?

     This is the Czech Legion in one of their armoured trains, smashing all Bolshevik resistance before them as they ploughed eastwards to Vladivostok, from where they sailed back to Europe and home.  Quite an epic, and worthy of a film, eh Mister Speilberg? 
     Now, you can see all those big water-cooled Maxim machine guns, yet that one in the lower corner is a Colt 1895 "Potato-digger", an American gun that was the first air-cooled machine gun.  Not altogether successful, and Conrad wondered what an American gun was doing on a train in Russia manned by Czechs.
     Explanation simple - the Russians bought 10,000 of them.

Oh my.  Well over the limit and nowhere near the end of my notes.  Count on a second post later tonight.  I know you can hardly wait!



* Which is not a lie, this week.
** First one to mention "Police Academy" will be SHOT!
*** With bruising