The Professor and Other Writings
Page 36
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* John Keegan on the unhappy exploits of the Portuguese army in World War I: “Portugal, historically Britain’s oldest ally, declared war on Germany and Austria in March 1916. It eventually sent two divisions to the Western Front, armed and equipped by the British. Put into the line at Neuve-Chapelle, in the British sector south of Ypres, they were attacked during the second great German offensive of 9 April 1918, broke and ran. Large numbers of prisoners were taken. The Portuguese, an unsophisticated and rural people, were unsuited to the strains of industrial warfare and it was unwise of the Portuguese Government to have taken sides. It would have been better advised to imitate Spain in standing apart.” An Illustrated History of the First World War (2001).
* Chronicle of Youth: Great War Diary 1913–17, edited by Alan Bishop (Phoenix, 2000).
* Like Sarajevo, Belfast, and Dallas, Compiègne would seem to be one of the strangely doom-laden minor cities in history. My 1920 Guide to Belgium and the Western Front notes that Joan of Arc was captured and turned over to the English there in 1430; Marie Antoinette, aged fifteen, met her future husband the Dauphin there in 1770; and Tsar Nicholas and the Tsarina were received by President Loubet at the famous nearby château in 1901.
* Siegfried Sassoon, in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930): “Markington had gloomily informed me that our [War] Aims were essentially acquisitive, what we were fighting for was the Mesopotamian Oil Wells. A jolly fine swindle it would have been for me, if I’d been killed in April for an Oil Well!”
* Morbid authorial note from 2010: in December 2008 one of these banshee F-18s crashed on my mother’s street less than a block from her house. While the pilot ejected safely, four people were killed on the ground and four houses destroyed.
* David Perry, Jazz Greats (London: Phaidon, 1996), p. 139.
* Author’s note: House and Garden folded in 2007—a casualty of a global economic recession, skyrocketing production costs, and intensifying digital competition.