Conrad Is Not Saying It's Wonderful Even Now
Since there are still places where The Mother Tongue, English, is not spoken, and where the primary hot drink is <shudders> coffee rather than tea, and you cannot purchase Marmite. We may get around to civilising these benighted nations by the next century.
ANYWAY I have finally finished Janet Macdonald's 'Supplying The British Army In The First World War', and a jolly interesting read it was, too. The last chapter is about supplying Tommy Atkins, other Commonwealth troops, and native levies abroad. This was a lot harder than supplying the British army in France due to distance, geography, terrain and climate. Now, about the Battle of Basra - Art!
Not what you were expecting, hmmm? Basra, a port city on the Tigris River in Iraq. Iraq was one of the most distant and neglected nations under Ottoman dominion, as far away as it was possible to get from Constantinople, condemned to wretched poverty because the Iraqis were both provincial and Arabic.
After arriving there and either conquering or liberating, dependent on your point of view, the British moved well inland and needed to create a logistics organisation to supply their troops. Art!
Basra @ 1916
One reason the British war effort in Basra succeeded was because they created an extensive infrastructure in place, replacing the squalid underinvestment of the Turks, who cared not one whit for the natives. There was no street lighting in the town and only 2 miles of road, nor did it have sanitary water supplies. What you see in the picture above are some of the wharves constructed to enable freight ships to offload quickly and efficiently, allowing tonnage landed to increase from 43,000 tons in the whole spring of 1916 to 132,000 in January alone in 1918. Unglamourous stuff, yet essential. Art!
The town was subject to flooding in March, July and December due to a combination of tides, high river levels and strong winds. The Royal Engineers build earth levees to mitigate these. The sappers also built pumping stations allowing 1,140 tons of pure potable water to be delivered to the town per day, a complete novelty to the locals. A 1000 kilowatt power station was imported from GREAT BRITAIN*, sufficient to electrify the whole port, thus allowing operations to continue at night. Additionally, 40 miles of roads were laid, permitting the use of motor transport to carry supplies from the port to the interior, in addition to 60 foot bridges used to cross the numerous local creeks and streams. Art!
The above photo shows Indian medical orderlies with a British medical officer treating Turkish casualties, who are probably traumatised by the sight of a Red Cross ambulance bearing a - you may be ahead of me here - red cross. I wanted this illo up to exemplify the health and medical issues in Basra and across wider Mesopotamia.
One of the major problems the British had was the complete lack of sanitation, and no culture of cleanliness, leading to endemic diseases amongst the civilian population. Cholera was prevalent, as was bubonic plague, and malaria, and typhoid, and leishmaniasis. To combat mosquitoes and flies, any standing water was sprayed with petrol, which formed a surface sheet that asphyxiated larvae in the water. I won't go into the details of the sanitary orderlies who were required to dispose of what was euphemistically called 'human waste' via burying or burning, except to say that this was vital to prevent fly-borne infections. Art!
Latrines were set up for the locals to use, whether they liked them or not, under pain of penalties. Ol' Jan doesn't say what these penalties were; confiscation of livestock? Fines? Point and laugh scornfully? ANYWAY to get rid of lice, fleas, ticks and other parasites amongst the troops, a steam disinfector was used on their clothing, which rather leaves the large civilian population unsteamed. Art!
This man is steaming
It ought to be noted that over the course of the campaign in Mesopotamia - the contemporary name for Iraq - 15,000 men were killed in action and 13,000 died from disease, which would have been far higher had not the army taken sanitation and health so seriously.
Okay, enough of The Fertile Crescent in the First Unpleasantness, though we have more to come. I bet you can hardly wait.
"This Book Is Full Of Spiders" By David Wong
I finally finished this bonkers but entertaining novel, which keeps jumping 8 hours or 3 hours or 45 minutes backwards in the next chapter. Also, the cover blurb on the back is complete nonsense that has nothing to do with the actual plot. Art!
In case it's not clear, 'David Wong' is a pseudonym and Jason Pargin is the real author. There are a few plot points that don't get cleared off - you might want to avoid this next because SPOILERS.
David is nearly Victim Zero, but we don't get any explanation about where Spider Prime came from, nor why it targeted him.
This David is actually a copy of the original, created by the evil demi-god Korrock in the first novel, a fact which is never mentioned again. Art!
Plot twist: John doesn't die at the end
Carlos and Anna are introduced, both able to morph into monster form - yet their affliction predates the Giant Spider Invasion and they aren't evil. Then they disappear from the plot, never to be mentioned again.
Why did one bomber deliberately crash into the lunatic asylum? Again, no explanation.
Your Humble Scribe is now on Page 50 of 'What The Hell Did I Just Read?' where a young girl has vanished. The local police, recognising Another Weird Case In The City Of [Undisclosed], instantly pass it over to our incompetent heroes John and David.
Conrad Cavils At Your Clickbaitiness
I am unsure if recognising a war film from a single still frame is a skill or an aspect of being very sad indeed. We shall proceed on the assumption that it's an important life attribute. Art!
This is, of course - obviously! - "A Bridge Too Far" and the attack of the SS Reconnaissance Battalion across the bridge into the defensive positions of Colonel Frost's paratroopers. In real life they reached the built-up area being defended by the British and were then wiped out in 30 minutes of intense combat. Ol' Atty does a decent job of adapting this for the screen.
Bitcoin Busted
AS you ought to know by now, Conrad has been immensely and wisely skeptical of cryptocurrency for Lo! these many years, describing the market as both a combination of a scam and a gamble, hence 'scamble'. Art!
Nothing present on Twitter today that I can see, so the fall-off-cliff may have slowed or stopped. I have more items about this to cover, just not today. We shall see!
Ghoulish Or Foolish?
Conrad caught a clip of 'Wily E. Coyote And The Roadrunner' on Twitter - Maria Drutska had posted a clip of him falling off a cliff as an analogy to the Ruffian economy - and it caused me to wonder. Art!
No matter how many times Wily falls of the cliff, or gets run over by the train, or is blown up on his rocket, he always returns unscathed.
What is going on here? No, he isn't indestructible; look at those expressions on his - er - face. If he was indestructible he'd look resigned or bored, not scared.
Conrad presupposes that there's a cloning factory in these desert hinterlands, and they churn out dozens of completely identical Wily clones every day, possibly recycling the carcases to save on buying in more raw material.
Finally -
About to earn 150 brownie points by walking Edna whilst it's dry. Ta ta!
* Take that, Lavrov!
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