Under Siege

NO!  Emphatically Not The Steven Seagall Film

Er - which Conrad somewhat shamefacedly admits to having seen BUT ONLY BECAUSE OF TOMMY LEE JONES and not at all the <ahem> Erika Eleniak topless cake-eruption scene.  Art!

     No, you don't get to see more than that, you slobbering perverts.

     Actually, this is probably the best SS film he made, before he transformed into a 25 stone bucket-head who believed his own publicists.  His woeful pleading to ensure his pies don't burn whilst he's incarcerated is a wonder to behold, but we've probably got the director to thank for that.  O, and that bit where TLJ is on the open deck when the battleship's guns open fire?  Yes, he would have suffered serious concussion and deafness at the very least, most likely the concussion would have killed him outright as his internal organs turned into a thin jelly.  Art!

NOTE EMPTY DECKS

     ANYWAY we're not here to talk about South Canadian battleships, rather we're here to answer a question asked on Quora yesteryon, to wit: "When were ditches, pallisades and trenches used on a large scale in European warfare?"

     Guess who boldly strode into the breach and chuntered forth?  No, not Judge Crater*!  Me.  Conrad.  Allow me to explicate.

"During sieges, of which there were many. Restricting myself to the gunpowder era, a besieging force would establish a ‘line of circumvallation’ around the targeted fortress, cutting it off from supplies or reinforcements."

     A lot of these concepts date back to Roman or even Greek practices, because they were effective and they worked.  Art!

     This is the Spanish city of Badajoz, under siege by the Portuguese in 1658, and here you see their lines of circumvallation.  "This line would be beyond the range of any cannon the fortress possessed. "  because the aim would be to cut the enemy off, rather than indulge in pyrotechnic histrionics (not a phrase you ever expected to hear today).  A canny fortress under siege might well try to eke out their supplies by kicking out all the useless mouths, and an equally canny (and ruthless) besieger might well send them right back inside.

"If the attackers had the time and manpower, they might also construct a ‘line of contravallation’, which was outside the first set of defences and facing outwards, to prevent any relief force from breaking through."

     This is where the Porks above went wrong.  They never built that second encirclement and got bounced by a relief army.  Art!

     These lines were constructed by the Spanish and faced the British garrison in Gibraltar, in order to prevent said garrison from trying it on and invading Spain.  The most famous historical example are Caesar's lines at the siege of Alesia.  Art!

     Siege-works like this allowed the besieger to maximise the effect of their troops, needing far fewer to control territory than if it had not been engineered.  Back to the age of gunpowder.

"The attackers would then ‘sap’ forward from their initial fortifications, using a zig-zag trench so as not to be enfiladed by gunfire from the fortress. Once within cannon range, they would construct battery positions for artillery, and might sap further forward to allow the storming party to get closer to the fortress walls. At that point they would probably also have fascines (big bunches of branches0 to throw into the defensive ditch around the fortress in order to allow close assault."

     I think we can prod Art into an illustration with this white-hot toasting-fork.

     Here you can see the saps approaching the fortress, which is one designed from the sixteenth century onwards as gunpowder artillery and muskets became the instruments of choice for one's enemy's destruction.  The 'star' shape allowed different parts of the garrison to cover approaches with cross-fire, and their angled glacis caused cannonballs to frequently ricochet off rather than causing damage.  Which is where the mortar came into it's own -

     Another story for a different kitchen.

     Notice that, up until this point, no mention of Bakhmut .....

The Money's Gone Funny

Once again, props to Joe Blogs and his Youtube vlogs about Russia's war in Ukraine and how it's affected the global economy.  Joe's latest focuses on the Ruffian gas market and how unremittingly badly their economy is doing.  Art!

     Rather than continue with the arcane Ruffian ruble, allow me to point out that in the last column, for 2021, Ruffian gas exports to the EU totalled $75 billion.  

    This is bad news for Peter The Average.  Why so?  Because his exports to the EU are now down to near zero, which means a budget gap of $75 billion, and there is no way that the EU will ever go back to a dependency on Ruffian gas.  Their alternatives in terms of supply are now Norway The Noble and Algeria The Ally, as well as moving to Liquid Natural Gas rather than the vapourous pipeline variety.  Art!

All is not lost.  This chap alone generates oodles of hot air.

     The Ruffians can either send gas to Asia via pipeline, or liquify it to send it abroad in tankers.  Art!

The 'short' "Power Of Siberia" gas pipeline

     Neither is really sustainable; there is a small gas pipeline to China, which originates in the Siberian gas fields, but to create an efficient gas pipeline would take seven years (!) and cost billions that Ruffia doesn't have, since it would have to come from the Yama fields that used to supply the EU.  Liquification plant is complex and expensive, and would, pre-2022, have been outsourced to the West, which is no longer an option.

     Oooops.  Art!

     Once again the Pest In A Bulletproof Vest appears to have stuffed both feet in his mouth after shooting each of them in turn.

"The Sea Of Sand"

Our disparate band of human survivors are encountering a few problems with communication and remaining on-task.

Oh no, what mischief are those two idiots planning! thought Roger, not daring to speak the words aloud.  On cue, he heard a ragged and uneven engine fire up and begin to run, the sound brought to them on the desert wind.  The engine chugged away, misfiring, until it revved enormously and began to fade audibly.

          ‘They have taken the plane.  They plan to drop spirit-bombs – Molotov cocktails – on the monsters,’ said Dominione, flatly.  He didn’t want to look at Lieutenant Llewellyn, whose face went puce with anger.

          ‘What can they hope to do!’ he raged.  ‘An unarmed aircraft with some bottles of spirit. Damn their eyes, they’re going to call those monsters down around our ears!’

          Nor was that all their misfortune.  Torrevechio came bowling over the desert in the reserve Sahariana, waving and gesturing. 

          The bio-vores were on the move.  En masse.  Once he got to the wadi rendezvous, he had even more unpleasant details.

          ‘There must be nearly a hundred of them, the big black vehicles.  Not only that, they have a rolling barrier of sand in front of them, like a miniature sandstorm, ten metres tall.  At ground level you can’t see a thing.’

          Sarah guessed the truth of this.

          ‘That’s what they’re good at, manipulating sand, isn’t it?  That must be their equivalent of a smokescreen.’

     What can possibly go wrong next?

Conrad's Culinary Concoctions

Yes indeedy Ally Sheedy, today Your Modest Artisan took a stroll into Lesser Sodom, glad that the rains had stopped.  Even gladder were the stallholders on the Thursday market, for I overheard one informing a customer that if the weather was really bad, they'd get no customers and fail to make a profit.  Well, they (the fruit and veg chap) didn't have any golden cherry tomatoes, but they did have these.  Art!

     Weird and wonderful wild mushrooms from Poland.  All I need to do now is find a recipe for them.  Art!

     These ought to have been Aubergine And Tofu Skewers In A Glaze.  In fact, the tofu I had fell apart once impaled on a skewer, so Conrad improvised and used haloumi instead, which held together very well indeed.  Instead of the recipe glaze, I used a small tub of at least three different glaze residues and brushed that over the whole lot repeatedly.

     The consensus is that haloumi works very well as a substitute for extremely-robust tofu, but DOG BUNS! that glaze was spicy.  If I do this again in future the width of the aubergine and the haloumi needs to be co-ordinated.  With a little less chili in the glaze.

Finally -

We have gone WAY over the word count here, so all I have to say is that the M8s Le Clerc main battle tanks have started to arrive in Romania. Art!

     Who's making jokes about French rifles now, hmmmm?

*  South Canadian judge who famously vanished without trace about a century ago.