I Come To Berry Caesar

Stick With Me On This One, Kid

First of all, apologies for invoking the spirit of Billy Shakeshaft and his play "Julius Caesar", because we all know I loathe and detest the Barf Of Avon, but am perfectly willing to rip him off if I think it'll get more blog traffic.  Now, this title is actually quite relevant to the Intro, but it will take a bit of grafting and shafting to get there, so bear with me.  Art!

Jules and Chuck have at it

     You see, what I want to explore in this Intro is the hapless and inept way the Ruffian army performed - yes yes yes, I know my traffic figures fell of a cliff a year ago thanks to my unsubtle yarking on about the war in Ukraine - except in this case we are talking of the events in 1914, when the First Unpleasantness broke out.

     Here a double-barrelled aside.  Yes, already!  You see, the Ruffians long ago took the title 'Caesar' and mangled it into their Cyrillic equivalent, to wit: 'Czar'.  This has been modified into 'Tsar,' one of whom now sits squats in the Kremlin.  Art!

Nicky Two.  He would have made an adequate cavalry colonel.

Dimya One.  He would have made an adequate bank embezzler.

     The second part of this aside is the 'Raspberry', defined by my Collins Concise as "A spluttering noise made with the tongue and lips to express contempt'.  Thus we have the incredibly witty 'Berry' supplanting 'Bury'.  Art!

Bury

    Okay, back to "German Strategy In The Great War" by Philip Neame, which might also have been sub-titled "Ruffian Lack Of Strategy In The Great War", because it's mostly true.  Not completely; the Western Allies owe the Ruffians a debt of honour because Ruffians invaded Prussia at least a month earlier than the Teutons expected, which caused squeaks of fear in Berlin and the recall of a couple of army corps from France.  But there were consequences of attacking before mobilisation had been completed.  Art!

A painting can very easily lie

     Ol' Phil mentions a 'lack of rear services' without mentioning what these might be.  Don't worry, Conrad is here to hold your hand and explicate.  Logistics is one such component, being the transportation of military supplies from the rear, where they are stockpiled, to the front, where they are consumed.  The Teutons having a completely different railway gauge from the Ruffians did not help at all and formed bottlenecks at the frontier.  

     It may not be obvious from this map, but the Ruffians had deliberately left Tsarist Poland deficient in road and railways, the better to prevent any enemy from exploiting same.

     Also, communications: at this time, telephone, telegraph, despatch riders and motor cars bearing messages.  A lack of comms cripples modern armies.  Au contraire, if your opponent can eavesdrop on your mobile phones wireless with impunity they have an immense intelligence advantage, as the Ukrainians Teutons were able to do so.  Art!

???  ART!

     Thank you - that's General ZHILINSKY, who was the Ruffian Chief Of The General Staff.  Thanks to the disastrous campaign in East Prussia, he got the sack, just like the lackeys of a certain modern-day Tsar.  So did three of the Corps commanders under him.

     Why so?  For a couple of reasons.  You remember I mentioned 'rear services'?  Well, as Ol' Phil points out, the Ruffians were woefully deficient in what you might call parallel communications.  Their corps did not speak to each other, in plain English.  O what they would have given for a dozen telex machines!  Art?

     I count ten Ruffian army corps, none of which were informing their neighbours about what they were doing or what the situation on the ground was like.  This is a recipe for disaster.

     Not only that, the Ruffian corps commanders exhibited absolutely no initiative.  They would not undertake any action without orders from above, when 'above' had only the vaguest notion of what was going on.  This is less a recipe for disaster than an entire cook-book of it.

     If you want an interesting and detailed look at this period of military history, I highly recommend Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "August 1914", even if it is about three inches thick.  Art!

     I really must read the sequel someday.

In The Spirit Of East European Cuisine -

As you ought to know by now, Your Humble Scribe is about 500% behind Ukraine in her current time of troubles, which has led, inevitably, to looking up Ukrainian recipes and food.  We have already explored Zharkoe, the beef and potato stew, and Golubtsi, stuffed cabbage rolls, and even Braised Cabbage and Sausage.  Today we say hello to 'Kielbasa Sausage And Potato".  Art!

     Conrad cheated a little here, adding in dill, which seems to be a herb beloved of all Eastern European cooking, and a big dab of soured cream, which despite the name is mild yet tasty.  Also, Ukrainians slather their food in it.  I've eaten that bowlful, which was pretty filling stuff.

     Slava Ukraina!  Or, to pun about it, Slaver Ukraina!

A Hot Pot

You may be forgiven for thinking that this is about that Lancashire staple, Hot Pot, but no.  Not at all.  Art!

     Indeed, a pot that is hot but is not this is about what.  To torment the English language a little. Art!

     This is the vacuum flask I got as a Christmas present, only now being deployed six months later.  I have discovered that a pair of coffee bags, or a trio of Darjeeling tisanes, will allow the consumption of a litre of hot liquid for several hours.  One has to keep one's pipes lubricated, after all, and all the more so for a truculent wretch who is prone to sullen silence at the best of times yet who has to spend hours talking on the phone.

     I do need to be careful if pouring out a drink whilst on a phone call, as the stopper now visible in the picture squeals like a pig in a wallow thanks to the rubber seal.

"City In The Sky"

Don't worry, you haven't missed much, we're still in the Prologomena.

Partly, his response had been dulled by endless unsuccessful meetings across the world.  To date he had met with thirty-two governments, NASA, the UN, the ESA, OPEC, NATO and other acronyms, a veritable word-salad of organisations that either couldn’t or wouldn’t help.  His other colleagues, pushing less expensive or technical solutions, might be doing better, but not by much.

‘Really!  That’s damn short-sighted of them.  Ninety-two per cent of your country dying ought to concentrate the mind wonderfully, I would have thought.’

Both scientists gave the same rueful, woeful sneer.

‘There were governments that were interested – such as Taiwan and Holland and Israel – but unable to help.  There were those that could help but they weren’t interested.’

‘Once we got across the idea that this would take decades, every politician promptly lost interest.  NASA said they might have a window in twenty or thirty years, after M3.’

‘Why me?’ asked Sir Richard.

‘We never considered this as a private business venture.  Until I saw the news article about the White Knight neither of us ever dreamt of approaching an entrepreneur.’

Mark didn’t mention his knowledge of “Spaceshipone” because it simply wasn’t relevant, being rather small and not up to their criteria in any way.

     I wrote this years ago and cannot remember what 'Spaceshipone' is or was.  Given that, it can't have been all that important.

Finally - 

Better sign off, I have a whole season of "Game Of Thrones" to catch up with, not to mention "Misfits" and "Henry V".