NO! That Is Not A Spelling Mistake
If you were here present as Conrad balefully hammers his keyboard into submission, then you would witness his eyes narrowing with either a maleficent squint or a migraine. Probably the former. Possibly both. No, I have not mis-spelled "Beer", although the two words are pronounced the same.
For Lo! we are back with "The War Illustrated" and it's contemporary coverage of the Battle of Gazala. The photographs are frankly rather poor quality, often being retouched via the negative and some end up more like a painting than anything coming from a camera. Wartime expediency, one supposes, and also being nearly 80 years old. Art!
These are the Free French Brigade members at Bir Hakeim, and at top port you have some of the hard-bitten French Foreign Legion (which ironically contained a fair few German left-wing refugees from Herr Schickelgruber's repellent regime). Top starboard are black soldiers from either Chad, Mali or Cote D'Ivoire who probably confounded some racial theories amongst the Teuton attackers. At centre is a 75mm anti-tank gun and crew, at lower port is Susan Travers, a British lady who served in the French Foreign Legion as a nurse and ambulance driver, mistress to General Koenig the French commander at BH and later on as an anti-tank gunner*. And at bottom starboard we have the ubiquitous French 25 mm (sorry for the metric) anti-tank gun with a party of "Fusiliers Marins", French Marines, who must be wondering why they are serving in the middle of a desert. Art!
Of course there's not a lot left of it. The Teutons and Italians were unkind to it with bombs and shells, and the desert is harsh and unkind.
ANYWAY the fort was also defended by 50,000 mines and everyone there had a burrowed funk-hole to hide in. The defenders knew where lanes through the minefields existed, and would come out to raid the Axis supply convoys that travelled south of the fort, trying to get round this southernmost part of the British line. This left Rommel feeling unloved and under-supplied, because he had planned for the fort to get over-run on the first day. The Free French did not agree with this and sent their Italian attackers packing, with many rude Gallic insults hurled at parties sent to negotiate surrender. Art!
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| Under New Management |
To cut a long story short, the FF stood off all the Axis attacks, which included incessant dive-bombing and artillery bombardments as well as infantry assaults, for two weeks. By then, their original 3,700 had dwindled to 2,600, so they were effectively outnumbered by fourteen to one; all their ammunition bar a small supply of small arms ammo had gone; and the Teutons and Italians were poised to storm the fort.
So they withdrew. "Withdrew", because you were literally taking your life in your hand in the bars and restaurants of Cairo afterwards if you use the word "Retreat" in front of the FF - who were now the "Fighting French". Alan Moorehead, the Australian author of that most excellent work "The Desert War", described how he nearly got stabbed by an enraged FF soldier when on the subject of BH.
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| Alan unpunctured. (Though looking a little cocky, frankly) |
You could write a book about Bir Hakeim, and indeed Richard Holmes did, which I have lying around here somewhere. You now have a bit of ammunition against those who hold forth about "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys".
The motley and I are now going to indulge in a little Blindfold Trampolining, back in a minute!
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| - maybe a little longer |
Hoorah!
Good news for Conrad today. So good, in fact, that I went and got a bottle of Prosecco in modest celebration, in order to merge in with the rest of you Hom. Sap. Art!
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| The bottle in question |
Yes, as my annual bonus I got five gallons of fresh human blood AND enough plutonium to build two 5 kiloton warheads, which is jolly handy as The Mansion's atomic arsenal was looking pretty ropey. Since Your Haemovorous Scribe only expected a pint or two of plasma and a pound of radium, this is all good news. There was also a free Seasoning Ticket to Manchester In The City (spelling?) which made a good blotting pad when I spilled some tea. I weep for the spilt tea; a ticket for salt and pepper isn't worth bothering about.
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| Nuclear weapons are big and scary. Have a cuddly bunny instead**. |
Like A Violent Eruption
Well, that's being a bit dramatic. What Conrad refers to is the tendency of his mind to throw up mental detritus, as a volcanic crater hurls molten magma to the four corners of the compass, yet with considerably less reason.
Today's mystery word, pilgrims, is "Chimborazo". This has been echoing around my cranium for a couple of days now, so I finally bit the bullet and Googled it and - good Lord aloft, it's a real thing! Art!
Kind of a Hulkier Mount Fuji
It's an inactive volcano - that snow covering probably gives away the "extinct" bit - in Ecuador, that imaginatively-named country which lies on the equator, whose bestowers came from the "It's New Found Land Therefore We Shall Call It Newfoundland" school of thought. Art!
Note that "inactive" part, since the vulcanologists amongst us reckon that it erupts once every 1,000 years, and the last time it blew it's top was 1,400 years ago. Yellowstone Syndrome ...
Finally -
Conrad has been peripherally aware of the James Webb Space Telescope, which has been under construction for what feels like several decades, so frequently have dates been slipping into the future - hey you know what, that sounds like a lyric from
ANYWAY as I was saying, the whole farrago is intended to launch on, of all dates, Halloween 2021, which sounds kinda like an inverted April Fool's joke. Note that Conrad is making all these jokes long before JWST launches, because once it is spanning the heavens, it will be a quantum level beyond even the Hubble. And you may recall comedians making hilarious quips about one of the HST's cameras not functioning properly when it was launched. You probably don't, the error was fixed by space-walking astronauts working from the Shuttle, and - who were these 'comedians' again?
JWST with puny humans for scale
Are we done with that? Let me check. Yes! Yes we jolly well are! Chin chin, chaps, make it 'definite' and not 'perhaps'.
* One feels she is a bit of an over-achiever, what?
** "Cuddly" as defined by Conrad. Your views may vary. But they're not important because - once again - whose blog is it?
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