Seems like a good way to spend ones' time

From Thomas Ayres' A Military Miscellany. Describing how small the US Army was in the years immediately preceding World War II, Ayres lists the following.

* General Douglas MacArthur was the nation's only four-star general. There were no three-star generals.
* As Army Chief of Staff, MacArthur rode around Washington, D.C. in the army's only limousine.
* MacArthur had only one aide - a young major named Dwight Eisenhower.
* Although MacArthur had a limousine, when it was necesary for Eisenhower to get around town, he had to fill out a requisition form for trolley tickets.
* Eisenhower came close to resigning his commission because of boredom. He later admitted he spent his time reading adventure pulp magazines.

Back when the government was small . . .

From Thomas Ayres' A Military Miscellany.

When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, the U.S. Navy consisted of a few aging warships and no one wanted the job of Secretary of the Navy. After being turned down by several potential appointees, Jefferson advertised the position in newspapers. He received only one response, that being from Robert Smith of Maryland. Jefferson hired him, and Smith served as Secretary of the Navy for nine years. In that time, he built the navy into a force that demanded world respect.

Translating Beowulf

H/T to Megan McArdle of the The Atlantic Monthly for bringing attention to this quite interesting site by Victoria Poulakis. Her site explores the challenges of translating ancient texts into modern vernacular. Fascinating. I was in particular taken by the five page section on Beowulf. My youngest son has always been especially enamored with ancient stories such as Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, and Beowulf. He enjoyed each of these being read to him at a relatively young age, probably six to eight years old. I think the primordial nature of these stories is particularly captivating for young children.

Poulakis uses short passages to explore all the considerations that a translator must consider when converting ancient language to modern.

We campaign in poetry . . .

From a speech by Mario Cuomo at the Chubb Fellowship Lecture at Yale University on February 1, 1985, New Haven. While our run of the mill politicians don't excite much except disdain, we have been fortunate to have such a tradition of gifted speakers, from all philosophical angles of the compass, to speak in a fashion that arrests ones attention and makes one think.

We campaign in poetry. But when we're elected we're forced to govern in prose. And when we govern - as distinguished from when we campiagn - we come to understand the difference between a speech and a statute. It's here that the noble aspirations, neat promises and slogans of a campaign get bent out of recognition or even break as you try to nail them down to the Procrustean bed of reality.

Watch out for the booksellers

From Thomas Ayres' A Military Miscellany.

Following the Battle of Bunker Hill, Washington's Continental Army held the heights outside Boston, placing the British Army under siege. From out of the ranks, a young man came to Washington with a plan to fortify the position. The commander was so impressed he placed the soldier in charge of fortifications.

Next he told Washington that, without artillery, the British still might overrun the position. He reminded Washington that the abandoned fort at Ticonderoga in upstate New York had plenty of cannons just sitting there. He volunteered to lead an expedition to bring them to Boston.

Washington was doubtful that the guns could be moved in the dead of winter, much less all the way to Boston. His aides also were skeptical that an overweight city boy could brave the rugged wilderness and accomplish the task. With nothing to lose, Washington approved the expedition. What Washington did not realize was that this was no ordinary city boy.

Everyone called him "Fat Henry." He weighed almost 300 punds and was something of a klutz. He even had two fingers missing from his left hand, the result of a hunting accident. He was a bookworm and, in fact, owned a bookstore. Well read on many subjects, his favorite topic was military history. He had studied all of the great battles of Europe and knew the most minute details about them.

Henry and several volunteers reached the fort in early December 1775. They strapped forty-three cannons and sixteen mortars on hurriedly built barges to float them down Lake George. They had barely departed when a blizzard descended on them. They abandoned the lake, built sleds, and purchased horses and oxen to tug the cannons over the snow.

Through dense wilderness, across frozen streams, and over the rugged Berkshire Mountains they moved southward, sometimes covering no more than a few hundred yards a day. Two more blizzards came, dropping temperatures below zero. Still they trudged on, defying the elements. Finally, two months after they set out on their journey, the party limped into Framingham, Massachusetts.

In the dead of one of the worst New England winters ever, Henry and his men delivered fifty-five artillery pieces weighing 119,000 pounds. Once the cannons were placed in the hills overlooking Boston, the British abandoned the city and sailed for Canada.

Fat Henry's real name was Henry Knox. He was twenty-four at Bunker Hill. By the time he was twenty-five he would be a brigadier general and Washington's artillery officer. He became the nation's first secretary of war, and Fort Knox would be named in his honor. He retired from public life at forty-three. Of all his accomplishments, the least known might be his most important. During the war he started an artillery school that later became the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

True of many traditions and adages

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried - G.K. Chesterton

He is dying in my poor house . . .

Towards the end of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, he is recounting what became of his shipmates after their shared voyage. Some he stayed in touch with and can recount their life journey in some detail; others disappeared completely and he can say nothing of their fate.

Dana relates this sad outcome of one of his shipmates. It is almost Dickensian in atmosphere, pathos and tragedy. It is also an arresting reminder of the intimacy even the most prosperous members of society could share with the lowest members back just 150 years ago.

One cold winter evening, a pull at the bell, and a woman in distress wished to see me. Her poor son George,--George Somerby,--"you remember him, sir; he was a boy in the Alert; he always talks of you,--he is dying in my poor house." I went with her, and in a small room, with the most scanty furniture, upon a mattress on the floor,--emaciated, ashy pale, with hollow voice and sunken eyes,--lay the boy George, whom we took out a small, bright boy of fourteen from a Boston public school, who fought himself into a position on board ship (ante, p. 231), and whom we brought home a tall, athletic youth, that might have been the pride and support of his widowed mother. There he lay, not over nineteen years of age, ruined by every vice a sailor's life absorbs. He took my hand in his wasted feeble fingers, and talked a little with his hollow, death-smitten voice.

I was to leave town the next day for a fortnight's absence, and whom had they to see to them? The mother named her landlord,--she knew no one else able to do much for them. It was the name of a physician of wealth and high social position, well known in the city as the owner of many small tenements, and of whom hard things had been said as to his strictness in collecting what he thought his dues. Be that as it may, my memory associates him only with ready and active beneficence. His name has since been known the civilized world over, from his having been the victim of one of the most painful tragedies in the records of the criminal law. I tried the experiment of calling upon him; and, having drawn him away from the cheerful fire, sofa, and curtains of a luxurious parlor, I told him the simple tale of woe, of one of his tenants, unknown to him even by name.

He did not hesitate; and I well remember how, in that biting, eager air, at a late hour, he drew his cloak about his thin and bent form, and walked off with me across the Common, and to the South End, nearly two miles of an exposed walk, to the scene of misery. He gave his full share, and more, of kindness and material aid; and, as George's mother told me, on my return, had with medical aid and stores, and a clergyman, made the boy's end as comfortable and hopeful as possible.

What was that about the elephant?

From Thomas Ayres' A Military Miscellany.

"They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance."

Union General John Sedgwick just before he was killed by a sharpshooter at Spotsylvania Courthouse.

I guess it might be time to reread . . .

It has been years since I read 1984. I enjoyed it at the time, probably when I was about fifteen or sixteen. I recently came across an interesting little site, Newspeak Dictionary which is a collection of the definitions of neoligisms from George Orwell's 1984. I had completely forgotten about duckspeak. A term that seems of ever greater relevance.

Burma Surgeon

I picked up a book at a library sale a couple of weeks ago, Burma Surgeon by Gordon S. Seagrave. It turns out to be one of those little gems that every haunter of used bookstores anticipates and treasures finding.

Gordon S. Seagrave came from a long line of American Baptist Missionaries serving in Burma from the 1830's onwards. He was born in 1897, learning to speak one of the native languages, Karen, before he spoke English. He returned to the US for his higher education, to receive his training as a doctor at Johns Hopkins and to marry his wife, Marion before returning to Burma in the 1920's.

He ended up serving the peoples of the Shan states in northeastern Burma for four decades. Arriving with his pregnant wife, a young son and a full-hearted commitment to his mission there was not much to be found to give him hope or confidence. Starting with virtually nothing, he built a 100 patient hospital, satellite aid stations, and much later, further expanded the hospital and its services. He trained several generations of Burmese nurses, paying particular attention to try and match nurses in training to the languages and cultures of the patients being served, i.e. he needed to train nurses from among the Burmese people, Chinese, Karen, Shan, Kachin, Taungthu, etc.

With the advent of World War II and the Japanese invasion of Siam and Burma, Seagrave had to abandon his hill hospital and formed a nascent MASH unit to serve the Allied forces in eastern Burma (Chinese Army, British and latterly American forces). The fast moving Japanese invasion rapidly cut off these forces, one from another and each other from natural routes of escape into India. Seagrave gathered up a cadre of his people and eventually managed to escape into British India with General Stilwell by hiking through remote trails in the far north west of Burma.

His biography and adventures are captured in the book I found, Burma Surgeon, published in 1943. As one of the first war memoirs, it was an instant hit in the US and Seagrave followed it up with The Burma Surgeon Returns published in 1946, chronicling his return to the Shan states and the resurrection of his hospital from the war ruins into which it had fallen. This second book was equally well received.

This is not in the same league as such WWII classics as Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (still able to seize the imagination of sixth graders and up) or The Great Escape (more for ninth graders and up).

The narrative flow is choppy; switching from history to autobiography, to travelogue to journal. I would pitch this at eleventh graders and up that have a particular interest in Asia or World War II. Burma Surgeon is an interesting text for other reasons. For one thing, the war and battles in Burma get very short shrift in the world history books so it is interesting simply for providing coverage not otherwise available.

Another aspect is the contrast between our modern over-sensitivity to issues of culture and ethnicity compared to the fairly robust approach to these issues in Seagraves' text. He is at no times demeaning or derogatory of any of the ethnic groups but he is perfectly comfortable retailing the common stereotypes of each group as perceived by the other groups in a fashion which would be anathema today.

Finally there is a disconnectedness between the type of man you think Seagrave must be and the way he comes across in his own text. There is some element that makes you feel that there is a thin patina of false modesty over a very healthy self-regard. I don't think, though, that that is the case. Instead, I suspect it reflects the self-confidence and orientation of an individual who is accustomed to being the solution to everyone's problems. Remove an appendix? Done. Clean the latrines? Done. Build by hand a 100 patient hospital? Done. Perform an operation in the dark, in the rain, on the trail, with no surgical instruments? Done.

I suspect that being the final authority on so many things in that near distant time, in that remote location with that degree of isolation would make anyone have a degree of self-confidence and self-reliance not naturally seen otherwise.

His tale also puts to the lie the romance of natural treatments, herbs and medicines. Looking at what he had to deal with and what he was tackling in terms of depth and breadth of diseases, you realize that natural medicine was 90% misdirected tradition and 10% wisdom in botanical resources. It was not capable of alleviating the bulk of what felled or incapacitated the population and that Seagraves' medicines and surgeries, limited and and unrefined as they were, made a world of difference.

A fascinating little glimpse into a world mostly gone through a book largely now forgotten though once well known.