Build A Rocket Gun, Boys!

Yes, I Am Shamelessly Enlisting Elbow -
I can do that since I've liked them since their 1999 debut "Asleep In The Back", long before most of you had ever heard of them.
     Here an aside.  I feel 'Build A Rocket, Boys!' is probably their weakest album, and pales into insignificance beside "The Take Off And Landing Of Everything", an album that doesn't put a foot wrong.  Again, I cannot get that horribly catchy "New York Morning" out of my head.  Damn you, Guy Garvey.  Damn you!

Guy Garvey

A New York morning.
No - hang on -

     Anyway, yes, I am using their name in a facile and superficial way to generate more traffic, because as an Introduction I would like to talk about the Vickers-Crayford Rocket Gun.  Hence the title - I'm hardly going to talk about 'Managed Cultivation For Maximum Mangosteen Yield Per Hectare", am I?

The Mangosteen.  Just so we're clear.

     Okay, the V-C Rocket Gun falls into the category of those weapons that are almost more dangerous to their users than to the supposed enemy.  One is minded of the West Spring Gun and the Leach Trench Catapult <suppresses a shudder of horror>.  Art?

The brute in question

     The VCRG was designed for trench warfare, being short and thus portable, with a low muzzle velocity to make it manageable, which also restricted it's range.  It was practically bolt action, the gunner having to manually pull the expended shell casing out of the breech.  Once the Stokes Gun (i.e. mortar) arrived on the Western Front it was bye bye VCRG, so it was hived off to the Royal Flying Corps, to see if they could use it as an air-to-air or air-to-ground gun.
     Not really.
     For one thing, it took nearly 2 minutes to fire and reload it.  For another, rounds frequently failed to fire, and could 'cook off' up to five minutes after the trigger was pulled, leading to possibly horrendous accidents.  Art?

     That above is the FB25, an aircraft as dangerous to the crew as was the VCRG - with which it was armed.  Quite fitting, really.
     Oh, and one last disappointing thing - it wasn't a rocket gun in any way, shape or form.  The incendiary shell it fired did leave two long streaks of flame in it's wake, which may have led to the name.
     If you are good, or maybe if you are bad, I shall regale you with tales of the West Spring Gun, or the Leach Trench Catapult.
     Okay, time to pin the motley to the middle of the meadow and throw lawn darts at it!*

When The Levee Breaks -
Ha!  Yes, Conrad is now exploiting Led Zeppelin in his pursuit of ever-higher traffic figures, swine that I am.  
     Here an aside.  Robert Plant has managed to stay relevant and creative, when he could just have sat on his duff and lived off royalties for the rest of his days.  There's a lesson for that collection of zombies and cyborgs known as The Rolling Stones!

Robert Plant

A levee, breaking.
DAMN!  No, no, hang on -

     None of this has anything to do with what I really wanted to talk about, which was 'Levee En Masse' or the system of conscription introduced by Revolutionary France in 1793.  The idea of forcibly making a large proportion of your civilian male population serve in the army had been proposed in theoretical works, yet nobody had done it for real.
     This was to have very, very severe consequences in the First Unpleasantness.  All the nations of Europe - with the exception of Perfidious Albion, who didn't regard themselves as being Continental because they never used three exclamation marks where one would do - introduced conscription prior to 1914.  Art?

Teutons on manoeuvres  1913

     This meant that the European states could mobilise gigantic armies that numbered in the millions.  The Tsarist Army was bigger than the population of some of the smaller European nations, as an example.  Even humble Serbia, a third-rate power at the time, could put a bigger army into the field and do it faster than the World's Biggest Empire (Perfidious Albion you know).  The conjecture is that if Perfidious Albion had conscription prior to 1914, enabling her to put an army of 2,000,000 men into the field, the Hohenzollern's (Teutons to you) wouldn't have dared to kick it off.
     You see what you did, Revolutionary France?  Do you see!

The Mangosteen
I thought I'd better explain about this.  It's a fruit from South-East Asia, which is practically unknown here in the West, due to the very local nature of production and the short growing season.  One version that has been exported, principally to South Canada, is the Purple Mangosteen, seen above.  That is the ripe fruit.  Art?

This is the unripe

     Pretty psychedelic colour schemes, eh?  From <ahem> Deep Purple to a gelid yellow, almost - almost <ahem again> a Lemonjelly.




*  Don't worry, we blunted the ends.  I think.  Did we?