How Things Snowball
In the sense that you begin by rolling a snowball at the top of a snowy hill (high potential energy, you see) and by the time it reaches the bottom, it's as big as a car. In fact, were you not careful, it will have crushed that nice neighbours car that he bought only last week.
Here I have a miserable confessional aside. You recall today's earlier post? The one that went on about concrete and plumbing? Art!
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| GRAMMATICAL ERROR! GRAMMATICAL ERROR! |
Of course you can see what I mean, and Conrad can only bleat that he was working at pace and not paying attention. Fortunately I caught it before also posting on Twitter, so the damage is not irreversible. You can see what I'm talking about, can't you? Of course - "Centuries" should be "Century's". The horrible thing is, NOBODY NOTICED. Or if they did, they were kind enough to spare my blushes.
None of which has anything to do with the "Official History of the War: Military Operations; Gallipoli" and the second volume of which I am now reading. We have just reached early June, prior to the Third Battle of Krithia, and the British forces ashore now consist of the ANZAC Corps, 42nd Division, 29th Division, the Royal Naval Division and two French divisions. Quite an increase from the original 29th division and a classic example of 'mission creep'. There was also an Indian brigade, several of whose battalions were diverted to Egypt as they were 'Mahomedans' (as Muslims were known at the time), and the British didn't want to chance them not wishing to fight the Mahomedan Turks. Art!
Before the battle began, at the earnest pleading of their crews, eight Royal Naval Air Service (don't ask, it's a long story) armoured cars were to try and find gainful employment in action. Not sure how that will work out; the Gallipoli battlefields were all very rugged with lots of gulleys and ravines, not to mention hills and mountains. We shall see, although I have a bad feeling about this*.
Then we have the artillery, or, in the case of Perfidious Albion, the lack of it. For this crucial battle there were a total of 56 eighteen-pounders and a whole 4 4.5" howitzers, the workhorses of the Royal Artillery. Hmmm yes. The ANZACs weren't involved in this attack, so we can discount them, so for the other three British divisions we would expect a proper establishment of 108 guns, of which 24 would be 4.5" howitzers. Then there is the 60 pounder, a gun used for counter-battery work, of which there were - waitforitwaitforit - four. Back in Europe each division would have four, with at least two more batteries at corps level, making twenty. Plus (or minus) the artillery was chronically short of shells. Art!
A 60 pounder giving someone the good news
Finally, most of the shells that were available (as this is mid-1915) would have been shrapnel, which you can think of as acting like a giant shotgun shell in mid-air. It was a slayer of men when they were out in the open; if they were comfortably settled in a trench then it wasn't much cop.
The curtain is about to go up and I don't think it's a spoiler to say that things are not going to go well for the Allies**.
"Ortelsburg"
Er quite. Your Humble Scribe is quite used to the odd word popping up in his mind for no good reason, and this above is one such example. Kinda like how "Claes Oldenburg" did, and at first I thought Steve (in charge of memory) had mangled a mental echo.
Not so. Art!
Alte Ortelsburg
You know that feeling you get when watching "Pointless"***, when they show the two matched columns going from 100 to 0, and you don't know if the contestant's guess is correct or not? Yeah, that's how I felt.
The history of Ortelsburg is a long one, up to 1945, when Ruffian tourists with tanks arrived and the Teuton population promptly left - there is probably some obscure causal relationship in action here - and it was renamed "Szczytno", which is a lot harder for Western tongues to pronounce.
I think we'll come back to this topic, it is far deeper and more complex than one might imagine a simple name-change could encapsulate. Art!
Picture-postcard - yes. Politically plural - no!
Superman Or Stuporman - Still A Darwin Award Winner!
Sometimes Your Humble Scribe is utterly flabbergasted at how determinedly stupid Hom. Sap. can be, in manners likely if not guaranteed to cause death and/or radical dismemberment of major body parts.
Take the phenomenon of "Supermanning". Normally - if you can call it that - this is where people with low risk-awareness imitate the Man Of Steel by spoofing the camera outside a moving vehicle. Art!
Enter Brian. Brian was an Air Force non-com in the South Canadian Air Force, not in a combat zone and hence presumably bored (not bored of life), thus looking for thrills. Meet the MH53 Sea Dragon rotochopter - Art!
This puppy was booking it over Bahrain when the pilot and co-pilot, who probably needed a change of underwear, spotted Brian - dangling in mid-air, hanging onto a strap that led back into the cargo bay. Not for long. The autopsy - you knew that word was coming, didn't you? - determined that he'd passed out and fell 125 feet to his death.
You couldn't make it up, and if you did people wouldn't believe you.
Apropos Of Nothing
As you should surely know by now, Conrad used to read "2000AD" up until approximately issue 1,000, when it began to publish stuff that was actively distasteful rather than nihilistic -
ANYWAY all out of nowhere I had a fond memory of "Robo-hunter", a strip that featured Sam Slade, who - hunted robots. The clue is in the title. Art!
Art by Ian Gibson
Sam's adventures were portrayed with a fair amount of wit and satire, unusual in a 2000AD strip at that time. He was 'helped' (some would say 'burdened') with two assistant robots - the idiot Hoagy ("Yup - built from a kit!") and the quite ferocious Stogie, a robot cigar (I'm not making this up!) because IPC Comics were cracking down on depictions of smoking in their comics at the time. Art!
And with that, we are so very done, Borag Thung!
* Hey, that would make a great punchline for a film!
** There was a reason they evacuated the peninsula, after all.
*** Damnably watchable quiz show!
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