The Progress Of March

I Apologise If This Sounds Remotely Cerebral

Perhaps you're thinking this is a typo and I meant 'The March Of Progress', well NO I DID NOT, if Conrad types it that way, that is the way it is meant to be typed.  We do also reflect the march of progress as an incidental, which will get explained later on.

     Okay!  If you're not interested in the development of military logistics and transport over the past two-hundred and twenty five years THE EXIT DOOR IS THAT WAY.  Thank you.  Art!

     This is a painting by the immortal Ronald Embleton, who specialised in military subjects.  The tableaux here is based on real-life: that officer is General Freyberg, the indestructible leader of the New Zealand Division during the Second Unpleasantness, and an officer in the Royal Naval Division in the First Unpleasantness.  The soldiers here are Polite Australians in Italy, and will serve as an illustration of the Progress of March for the First and Second Unpleasantnesses.

     Let us now return in time to 1812, when Napoleon was busy invading Ruffia.  Art!

     The Tsar, proving to be quite astute, took up a Fabian strategy of avoiding open warfare against Nappy, by retreating ever further into the wide open steppes of Ruffia.  This stretched the French supply lines severely, but it also meant the average daily advance of the invaders was between 20 to 30 kilometres per day.  Remember, at this time men marched on foot and supplies and artillery were towed by horses.  Art!

     

     An illo from the South Canadian Civil Unpleasantness of the late-middle nineteenth century, where again tactical movement was by foot or horse.  The great big rangy corn-and-beef fed soldiery could manage up to 16 kilometres per day.

     Jumping forward another fifty years, we come to the First Unpleasantness, and here I am going to confess/admit/revel <delete where applicable> that these examples have been annotated from a drolly satirical vlog by 'Jason Jay Smart' where he chose these examples.  Art!

     This is from the 1916 Battle of Verdun, which looms large in the French psyche as an unparalleled experience of awfulness, and rightly so.  It went on for ten months and is widely regarded as either the zenith or nadir of attritional warfare.  JJS picks out the fact that the French and Teutons were able, at different times, to advance up to 2.4 kilometres per day.  This was at the beginning and end of the campaign, where conditions were markedly different from the rest of the battle.  Art!

    This is my example: the 1916 Battle of the Somme, which occupies a place in the British psyche corresponding to that of Verdun in the French.  Another attritional bloody slogging match, this one epitomises the concept of stalemate.  If we calculate it's beginning as being 24/06/1916, and ending on 18/11/1916, then it lasted for 144 days and the British advanced about 10 kilometres over that period.  Thus they were travelling on average 70 metres per day.

     During the Battle of Amiens, in mid-1918, JayJay puts the Allied advance as up to 11 kilometres per day.  A touch of cherry-picking here as this was at the beginning of the battle, when the Teutons were taken utterly by surprise and overwhelmed, before they began to railroad in reinforcements to prop up the line.  Art!

     Next up is Operation Cobra, the South Canadians breakout from their beach-heads in Normandy, where infantry were motorised or mechanised rather than having to plod around on Shank's Pony.  Those chaps above are out of their vehicles because there's every chance of stray Teutons being about.  Resulting in being able to travel 9 kilometres per day.Per day every day, I should add, not only on their first day.  

     Where am I going with all this?  O I thought you'd never ask!

     JayJ was comparing the performance of the Ruffian army in their war against and in Ukraine, and making comparisons of their - er - 'progress' to date, which were verrrrry unflattering.  Art!

     From July 2024 to July 2025, the orcs have conquered 6,000 km² of Ukraine, which sounds like a lot, until you realise that Ukraine is the size of Texas and all that land amounts to less than 1% of the total land mass.  Art!

     In Mordorvia's ongoing summer offensive, they have captured a whole 600 km² or 19 kilometres per day.  At this rate it will take them 87 years and 34 million casualties to conquer Ukraine.

     On other axes, where you need a magnifying glass to see any movement, things are even less speedy.  At Toretsk the orcs have advanced a whole 60 kilometres since October 2023, or 135 metres per day.  Which is 118 times slower than the troops of the South Canadian Civil Unpleasantness.  On the Kharkiv front their advance is 50 metres per day.  Or, if you will, less than three-quarters of the British advance on the Somme per day.  Comparison with Nappy's troops is embarrassingly bad - 150 to 300 times slower than an army without trucks, APCs or Loaf vans.  Art!

     

Loaf before toasting

     Thus the Ruffians have conquered so far this year an area double the size of Liechtenstein, for well over a quarter million casualties.  Or, if you prefer a different calculus, 426 casualties for every square kilometre.

     It all undercuts their claims to be a modern army if the sweating infantryman of a century or two prior can manage more, faster and better.  Art!

The superpower than is Liechtenstein, compared

Raspberry Hooray

If you follow the blog with any regularity then you know Conrad is a walking sweet tooth, who has to watch his sugar intake THANK YOU SO MUCH DIABETES and eat sugar-free sweeties.  Art!

     This, gentle reader, is Raspberry and Yoghurt ice cream, one of my favourites.  You might be able to guess from the piece dug out of the middle that it's soft to scoop, because this time I used all the sugar, no mucking about with Canderel, and finished off the dregs of that vodka bottle, and added in a tablespoon of liquid glucose.  So, easy to serve, thanks to the sugar content, just in very small amounts thanks to the sugar content.

A Variant On Valid Victual Vengeance

One of the lowest specimens of Hom. Sap. is the Lunch Thief, one of those pikers who go around the office fridge stealing other people's lunches, thanks to a sense of entitlement, greed and laziness.  Art!

     Over on Quora one poster suffered this crime, and got back in almost the way you expect.  Normally people add things like Ghost Chilli peppers or pure capsicum sauce to their sandwich, which usually delivers a stinging rebuke to the thief.

     Imaginative Sandwich Avenger, hereafter ISA, used ammonium nitrate fertiliser as a topping on his sandwich, which HIdeous Lunch Felon, hereafter HILF, stole and partially consumed.

     ISA explained that ingesting AN will cause agonising and explosive wind, which may well end in an involuntary emptying of the bowels.  Not a thing HILF ever expected, and since their mutual employer had a Zero Tolerance policy on theft, they didn't dare report it for fear of being instantly fired.

     No further thefts of ISA's lunch ever occurred again.  Art!

Delicious ANd deadly

Conrad The Cultured

You may be aware that Conrad has a passing interest in Korean culture and civilisation, and has even gone so far as to purchase a Korean recipe book.  Today I have begun watching a Sork genre show called 'Zombieverse' which is all about the fascinating world of heavy vehicle insurance adjusters - no, that was a lie, it's about zombies.  You may have guessed that already.  Art!

     The twist here is that it begins with a series of contestants on a Sork reality show, 'Love Hunters' and has the team try to survive and carry out required tasks.

     Enough people liked it for there to be a second season.  We shall see.

Finally -

You may  be familiar with the art of Ron Embleton already without realising it, because if you pair his name and 'indestructible' then you get - Art!

Throw your hat over it to snuff out the fuse, Captain!