The TANK TERROR Of Tulips!

Okay, This Will Take A Little Explaining

Perhaps a lot of explaining.  Don't worry, I've got the time if you have.  Your Humble Scribe is still reading his "The Story Of The Guards Armoured Division" and we are now into April 1945.  The war is obviously at it's fag-end, even if the Guards keep running into desperately determined Teuton paratroop divisions.  

     Pretty obviously a tulip has no military value, or Holland would be World Dictator Forever.  No, what we are talking about here is an unholy marriage of tank and rocket, which I think latterly was described as an 'Unrotated Projectile'.  The Guards had advanced into the land of the Teutons by early 1945, and did not expect a happy welcome.  Right, Art, bring up a Sherman tank.

    Note the unencumbered turret.  This was your standard M4 Sherman, absolutely reliable, robust, not bad in a firefight and available in huge numbers.  Then you have the thuggish-looking Hawker Typhoon, an aircraft the Teuton infantry and armour learned to both hate and fear, because they came equipped with eight 60 pound High Explosive Unrotated Projectiles.  Art!

A 'Tiffy', as they were affectionately known

     Inevitably, someone in the GAD wondered if it was possible to mount one of these beasts on a tank.  It proved eminently possible.  Art!

One on each side to provide balance

     The appellation 'Tulip' was applied to these vehicles, and I have no idea why.  There was no delicacy or nuanced colour scheme about them; they were as equally detested by their Teuton victims as were the ones delivered by the Brylcreem Boys.  One can see their point; a single tank ought not to be able to deliver the equivalent of a six-gun artillery barrage in a single blow.  Art!

     These are Sherman tanks of the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards advancing even further into the land of the Teutons in April 1945, and you can see the rearmost tank has the starboard rocket-launcher rail empty, with the "X" of the port-side rocket being just visible.

     Tulips From Armoured Guardsman?

This Beer Here Is Rather Queer

For Lo! we are back on the subject of Victorian food adulteration, even if the website I am looking at focusses on beer rather than food.  One thing they mention does resound with Your Humble Scribe - the strength of beer.  Art!

     The thing is, before the First Unpleasantness, beers were very strong by current standards.  A 5% beer would have been seen as rather on the weak side, meaning that in those days a Special Brew pint would have been about bog standard.  This rather chimes with Conrad's readings of British soldiers drinking French beer from 1914 onwards; French beer was universally held to be as potent as gnat's <vulgarism redacted> and you'd get bloated beyond belief trying to get a buzz on it.  Pretty sure there's an entry in "The War The Infantry Knew" on this vitally important issue.  Entirely possible if you were drinking beer at 2.5% when used to something three times stronger.

Does Conrad Seethe?  You'd Best Believe!

We are back on the onerous subject of criminally-compliant Codeword compilers, or at least those that survived Remote Nuclear Detonation.  I think they've learned to move around in order to survive. ANYWAY

"BOREAL": No!  Nothing to do with ennui or anomie.  This is, pretty obviously, to do with <thinks> Latin or Greek or both combined, as that means it would be a Bore-All.  

     Okay, okay, it's none of the above.  It means "Northern".  Hence you derive the Aurora Borealis from same.  Lights Northern.  Art!

The Bore All As Is (sp?)

"FARO": WHAT ARE WE ALL GAMBLERS NOW! <sigh> this, gentle reader, is a card game of the nineteenth century, where cards were delivered from a 'shoe' by the dealer, to the gullible fools with more money than sense gamblers.  It was incredibly biased against the players because the shoe was nearly always gimmicked to favour the house. Art!

Faroe.  Close enough

"JUJITSU":  GRRRRR!  Another exotic foreign word as a solution.  Who do they think I were?  How is it fair to have one of the rarest letters present twice, with one of the least-used vowels?  O by the way if you were wondering, no, there is no hyphen.  Presumably because they wrestled it out of existence.

     BAH!

Ha!  Take that, jujitsu!

And Now For The Creepy Denouement

For Lo! we are back into "Tormentor", where we left off Luma realising that a Something was sitting on the foot of his bed, silently, with no rational explanation.  He can't be drunk as his whisky's all gone, and his sleeping tablets disappeared, so - 

His mind stopped functioning, before he decided that a neighbour’s cat had sneaked into the house and set up bed on his duvet.  Had to be.

Whatever it was, it sat silent and still.  Almost as if - waiting.

Trying to keep his breathing in the regular rhythm of sleep, which proved difficult thanks to the effects of fear, he twitched and tried to pretend he was merely shifting restlessly.  Another shift moved him towards the bedside table and the lamp there.  The switch for the lamp was incorporated into the power lead and could easily be turned on by running one’s fingers up the lead until the switch was encountered.

Deftly and quickly to prevent himself from thinking too much, Louis flicked the switch and sat up in bed, and shrieked in fear, a yell torn out of his throat without any conscious realisation.

Jennifer Hargreaves sat on the end of his bed.

Transfixed, Louis shook in fright, before screwing his eyes shut and crushing his palms against them.

‘That’s it.  I’ve finally cracked,’ he gasped.  ‘Jackie and Natasha and now this.  The brain damage finally shows up.’  He threw himself backwards and wrenched the duvet over his head.

Slowly, the duvet was dragged off him by Jennifer Hargreaves, who sat there in her tracksuit bottoms and tee-shirt, staring silently at him.

‘Or this is the world’s worst nightmare,’ continued Louis, talking to himself to try and avoid screaming, still keeping his eyes shut.

‘It’s not a nightmare,’ said Jennifer.  Her voice came out strangely, with a tinge of echo.

‘Okay, you’re a hallucination,’ said Louis, finally daring to squint out of one eye at – whatever had taken on the shape of a murdered schoolgirl. 

In a similar manner to her voice, the body of Jennifer Hargreaves didn’t appear completely real or solid.

‘Then how did I drag the cover off?  And it’s “an” hallucination.’

Louis opened his eyes wide in disbelief at having his grammar corrected by – this.

     It has taken 14 pages to get here, so I hope the background build-up has been worth it.  

Finally -

We who live beyond the shores of South Canada know the residents of said country are frequently beyond the boundaries of safe and sane behaviour. Whilst this truism can have tragic consequences for the locals, it is also a rich source of blog content for creators like Conrad, who has no conscience or scruples.  Art!

     Because the background is a little dark, Your Modest Artisan can confirm that this numpty is travelling along a motorway in a go-kart.  Two cars hovering in the locality were 'friends' along to try to shepherd him in motorway traffic, so that the unholy triumvirate could 'generate blog content'.

     Words don't often fail me, but they do here and now.