This jarring discord of nobility

"Here I prophesy: this brawl today, 

Grown to this faction in the Temple garden, 

Shall send, between the red rose and the white, 

A thousand souls to death and deadly night."

- Shakespeare, Henry VI pt 1

Staying in the fifteenth century, today it's the turn of the Wars of the Roses. 

Given the aim of selecting books that bring the past to life I have gone for Anthony Goodman's 'The War of the Roses: The Soldier's Experience', a book whose title pretty much exactly sums up its contents, as my non-fiction choice.

A choice of fiction book has proved much harder. I am no fan of the dynastic romance genre to which this period is extremely prone and which concentrate on the carryings-on of the royals and nobility. Nor, for any period at all (*), am I a fan of the adventure tale (more usually series of tales) featuring a more lowly born protagonist, who has an anachronistically progressive attitude to tactics, man-management, and military science in general and always seems to pop up at crucial points in history at which he comes into closer contact than seems likely with the same royals and nobility who star in the previous type of novels. So instead, I have chosen  Brian Wainwright's 'The Adventures of Alianore Audley', not because I think it is in any way an accurate representation of life at the time, but because it is very funny. It's also worth noting that the explanations given in it for the historical events of 1483 to 1485 are as plausible as any that you will read in many more serious works. 

* With one guilty pleasure exception to which I may return in due course

The siege and 'The Siege'

I've decided that the previous two periods for which I recommended books were insufficiently niche, so today we are going to consider Ottoman sieges of the fifteenth century.

For non-fiction we are going to go for the big one, the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. There are first hand accounts available, but they are not accessible by me or, I suspect, you, so we need someone else's interpretation. Top of my list would be Roger Crowley's 'Constantinople', a very vivid account that brings to life not just the major figures such as the Sultan and the Emperor, but a whole host of supporting characters. Runciman's 'The Fall of Constantinople' is very good as well; treat yourself and read them both.

'The Siege' by Ismail Kadare is a cracking, and literary prize-winning, historical novel about a fictional siege during the Ottoman invasion of what is now Albania, full of detailed descriptions of what was done and how. Narrated by a variety of characters from both besiegers and besieged and ranging from those directing events to those whose only task is to fight and die, the writing really brings alive not just action, but also motivation.

Duck, You Sucker

The reason that this figure will never see tabletop action is that he's pretty much the entire collection. As alluded to here, I have substantially more cacti than I do painted troops.

Tierra y Libertad

I know that you were all expecting your bloggist to have over-promised and under-performed (or "to go off half-Hancock" as we now say in the UK), but despite that here is a second post of period-specific book recommendations. Today it's the turn of the Mexican Revolution. There are many excellent academic and/or popular histories of the period available in English (I would particularly recommend Frank McLynn's 'Villa and Zapata'), but I'm going with memoir once again.

John Reed's 'Insurgent Mexico', is a record of the months the American journalist spent with Pancho Villa's División del Norte in 1913. He is of course the same John Reed who witnessed the Russian Revolution and was buried in Red Square.

Also serving, as a doctor, with Villa was Mariano Azuela, the author of 'The Underdogs'. The blurb on the copy I have sums it up rather well: 'a timeless, authentic portrayal of peasant life, revolutionary zeal, and political disillusionment'.

I'm going to extend the original challenge slightly this time to offer a couple of film suggestions as well. The Mexican revolution has been regularly used as a setting by Hollywood, but the two films that I would start with are:

Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn (who won an Oscar for his performance), screenplay by John Steinbeck; 'Viva Zapata!' is a classic about how the realities of revolutions never live up to the ideals of the great men who lead them.

'And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself' is, on the other hand, about what happens when those who lead revolutions have more ego than they do ideals and, incidentally, a reminder that US interference in other countries at the behest of the oil industry is nothing new. Banderas is good, as is a less obviously cast Jim Broadbent.

I am aware that Sergei Bondarchuk made an adaptation of Reed's book. If ever there was an opportunity to spend time watching a very long Russian film about an American in Mexico then it's now. Sadly, I've not yet been able to track down a copy.

1 Corinthians 15:26

There's an interesting post at the Ragged Soldier blog (which by the way is one of those blogs whose url is completely different to its name) about books. The challenge is to name two different books - one fiction and one non-fiction - that bring the past alive for you; I think that it's implicit that it's military history that we are referring to. The two fiction books recommended therein - which I know is not what I just said - have been downloaded to my kindle and only await the satisfactory conclusion to the current adventures of either the Earl of Emsworth or Lieutenant Alan Lewrie, whichever comes first, before being read.

David pinched the idea from someone else, so my first thought was that I would pinch it from him in turn. My second thought was that given my current struggle for inspiration I would spin the thing out by doing a different such post for each of a number of historical periods. My third thought is that I will probably find great difficulty in keeping that going and it will fizzle out embarrassingly quickly. Despite the third thought almost certainly being accurate I am nevertheless going to go with thought number two, and shall start with the Second World War.

As my non-fiction book I have picked a memoir: 'The Last Enemy' by Richard Hillary. Notwithstanding the cover pictured above, it's about far more than flying in combat. As others have observed, Hillary was a writer who flew, not a flyer who wrote.

Clearly the best fiction written with World War II as its setting is 'Catch-22', but as powerful as that novel's exposure of the futility of war is, I don't think it really speaks to the objective of bringing alive a time and place. So I am going to choose Evelyn Waugh's finest work 'The Sword of Honour' trilogy, which is based on the author's own experiences in the army, but also documents the home front and the changing nature of society during the war years.

Post war general elections

Tin-soldiering Tony wonders whether when the dust has settled on all this we shall see a repeat of the 1945 election where, despite leading the country to success in the war, Winston Churchill was thrown out to be replaced by the 20th century's greatest prime minister, Clement Attlee. Historical parallels are of course very difficult to draw even in hindsight, let alone as one lives through them. Clearly Johnson sees himself as Churchill, cometh the hour cometh the man and all that, but equally clearly an awful lot of us see him as Neville Chamberlain, someone who has left the country unprepared despite all the warning signs being there.

Lloyd George is unhappy at being compared to Boris Johnson

I would suggest that another possible parallel to consider is the 1918 election. In this case the Great War wouldn't represent the pandemic, rather it would represent leaving the EU. The pandemic occurring immediately afterwards would be represented by the pandemic occurring immediately afterwards, if you follow me. So, we have a 'victory' delivered by a charismatic Prime Minister, who has managed to oust his dull predecessor mostly by dint of being more flamboyant and has succeeded to the top job despite being a known liar, womaniser and father of a string of illegitimate children. He wins the subsequent election with a large majority on the basis of 'Britain for the Britons' (one of Lloyd George's actual slogans). Does that sound familiar?

So, how did it play out? Sadly, having won he finds that the great 'victory' has left the country financially prostrate and after a few years, in which not much is achieved domestically and there are disastrous negotiations involving, among others, the French, Germans and Americans, he is deposed by his party which then loses the next election so badly that it never takes office again.

We shall see.

Pot94pouri

When at any time there is a blundering or confusion in a manoeuvre, ride in amongst the soldiers and lay about you from right to left. This will convince people that it is not your fault." 

                                             - Francis Grose, 'Advice to Officers', 1783

The current situation has a few benefits - for example there are far more butterflies than usual to be seen when I go for my allowed daily constitutional - but far more downsides. Among the smallest of these is a lack of inspiration regarding what to post here. I am very reluctant to write directly about the pandemic, mainly because I have nothing worth saying, but also because there are reams and reams already being written, to the exclusion of almost everything else. This blog's Luxembourg correspondent advises that he has largely given up reading and watching the news, which certainly struck a chord with me because so have I. Sadly, for that reason we had both missed the recent publication of the obituary of a mutual acquaintance, but no doubt we had  also avoided the stress of trying to reconcile a whole raft of entirely mutually contradictory explanations and predictions. 

As for the politics, beyond expressing Captain Renault style shock at the inability of Johnson and his cronies to rise to the occasion I have nothing much to add there either. No doubt readers have viewed with the same contempt as me the government's all too obvious focus on trying to shift the blame for their own ideologically fuelled mistakes on to civil servants and others. One factor in their abject performance - on top of their general, inherent inadequacies - may be that not one of them has ever had a proper job running any sort of organisation. I, on the other hand, have many such roles and regular readers will not be at all taken aback when I tell you that inevitably among them was a stint working for a company that makes surgical gowns and masks. I was therefore already aware that the manufacture of them is entirely outsourced to the Middle and Far East. I shan't dwell now on my experiences in the sector (although I do have a mildly amusing anecdote about the condom production line which I may return to in happier times) except to draw one point of similarity with the financial crisis of a dozen years ago. 

What we found on that occasion was that in the case of the banks' profits in the good times all went to the bankers, while losses in the bad times were paid by the rest of us. What we have here is the same thing: the financial benefits of cheap off-shore supply chains have been taken by the owners and managers of the firms involved, and now it's all gone tits up the rest of us have to step back in and pay the price, financially and otherwise, of failure.

“Just as not all butterflies produce a hurricane, not all outbreaks of bubonic plague produce a Renaissance.” - Eric Weiner

In the beginning there was tea...

...and the Biscuit Maker saw that it was good

Let the dunking commence.

Never Judge a Book by its Colour

I've received a couple of questions about William Watson, one of whose poems featured here the other day, mainly along the lines of "Who he?". Well, he is now a somewhat obscure literary figure - deservedly so if the example of his work which I posted is anything to go by - who first came to my notice because he was born in Burley-in-Wharfedale, the village half way between Otley and Ilkley. Sir William, as he apparently was, nearly became Poet Laureate on more than one occasion, but didn't. He did however contribute to The Yellow Book, which is the other reason I had vaguely heard of him. The Yellow Book was a quarterly publication whose contributors included all sorts of fin de siècle luminaries such as Henry James, W.B. Yeats, H.G. Wells and so on; and has cropped up in a number of books that I have read, most recently David Lodge's 'Author, Author' which is about James. It appears that the cover colour and the name was chosen because that was the generic term at the time for salacious French novels - one such features in the story of Dorian Gray's descent into decadence - and they wanted to be cool by association. 

Note the exchange rate

As a bit of research I have dipped into an edition - the one whose cover appears above - and must report that it hasn't aged well. It opens with another terrible poem by Watson - the Lower Wharfe Valley is not to poetry what it is to wargaming - and then moves on to a pretty unreadable essay by James. I am aware that my own prose style is somewhat convoluted, full of ellipses, subordinate clauses and whatnot, but James makes me look like Ernest Hemingway in comparison. On top of that he sprinkles his work with untranslated French phrases in italics; not terribly comme il faut if you ask me.

Their marketing ploy backfired somewhat in the end. Oscar Wilde turned up to one of his trials clutching a racy novel recently arrived from Paris, but the colour of the cover made everyone assume that it was The Yellow Book itself. Given that Wilde was about to go to prison for gross indecency what they found they had actually achieved was to appear débauché by association with him.

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.” - Oscar Wilde

Here's a faux French phrase that might have livened up Henry James' article: A woman walks into a pub and asks for a double entendre, so the barman gives her one.

To A Friend: Chafing At Enforced Idleness From Interrupted Health

Soon may the edict lapse, that on you lays
This dire compulsion of infertile days,
This hardest penal toil, reluctant rest!
Meanwhile I count you eminently blest,
Happy from labours heretofore well done,
Happy in tasks auspiciously begun.
For they are blest that have not much to rue--
That have not oft mis-heard the prompter's cue,
Stammered and stumbled and the wrong parts played,
And life a Tragedy of Errors made.

                               - William Watson

Light relief

"This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers." - P.G. Wodehouse

And also, I would suggest, suited to whatever emotional and psychological state in which we find ourselves. I myself have retreated to the Blandings novels of Wodehouse, from the first of which that quote is taken. I do still read the newspaper, of necessity concentrating on the bits about the various incompetent, delusional and self-obsessed leaders in whose hands we find ourselves, and the not unrelated fact that we're all going to die. However, I also actively seek out those few articles which offer a complete distraction from current worries, and so was extremely pleased to find the story in today's Guardian about Amanda Liberty.

The piece reported that Ms Liberty, a young lady from Leeds who is engaged to a chandelier, had failed in her complaint to the Independent Press Standards Organisation after being nominated for a Dagenham Award by a columnist in one of the tabloids. (For those not familiar with the London Underground, Dagenham is three stops past Barking) It would seem that while the media are forbidden to mock people because of their sexuality, that only applies when the object of the their affection is a person and not, well, an object.

This is all very amusing - except possibly for any innocent light fittings in her vicinity - but what really grabbed my attention was the dawning realisation that I had met the lady in question, and indeed had recorded the event in this very blog. It would seem that she adopted her current surname whilst in a previous relationship with the Statue of Liberty, a period when, as I saw with my own eyes, she would go about her everyday business dressed up as her beloved. The people of Yorkshire are, as they are always pointing out to anyone who will listen, not quite the same as those from elsewhere.

Not Piedmontese

We're going further down the rabbit hole of stuff that will never be used. These are some of the remnants of the long-abandoned War of the Spanish Succession project. What is odd is that I could have sworn that I had built an army from Savoy/Piedmont. However, these are clearly Bavarian:

As is the only commander to survive:

I'm not sure who the cavalry are:

What I do remember is that I was keen to fight some sieges, and decided to build suitable stands in neutral uniform colours so that anyone could besiege anyone:

Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn...

"Drinking is the soldier's pleasure:

Rich the treasure,

Sweet the pleasure,

Sweet is pleasure after pain"

- Dryden

Nashe v Nash

Adieu, farewell earth's bliss!
This world uncertain is:
Fond are life's lustful joys,
Death proves them all but toys.
None from his darts can fly;
I am sick, I must die—
                Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade;
All things to end are made;
The plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, I must die—
                Lord, have mercy on us!

Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen's eye;
I am sick, I must die—
                Lord, have mercy on us!

Strength stoops unto the grave,
Worms feed on Hector brave;
Swords may not fight with fate;
Earth still holds ope her gate;
Come, come! the bells do cry;
I am sick, I must die—
                Lord, have mercy on us!

Wit with his wantonness
Tasteth death's bitterness;
Hell's executioner
Hath no ears for to hear
What vain art can reply;
I am sick, I must die—
                Lord, have mercy on us!

Haste therefore each degree
To welcome destiny;
Heaven is our heritage,
Earth but a player's stage.
Mount we unto the sky;
I am sick, I must die—
                Lord, have mercy on us!

                                        -Thomas Nashe

Go hang yourself, you old M.D.!
You shall not sneer at me.
Pick up your hat and stethoscope,
Go wash your mouth with laundry soap;
I contemplate a joy exquisite
I'm not paying you for your visit.
I did not call you to be told
My malady is a common cold.

By pounding brow and swollen lip;
By fever's hot and scaly grip;
By those two red redundant eyes
That weep like woeful April skies;
By racking snuffle, snort, and sniff;
By handkerchief after handkerchief;
This cold you wave away as naught
Is the damnedest cold man ever caught!

Give ear, you scientific fossil!
Here is the genuine Cold Colossal;
The Cold of which researchers dream,
The Perfect Cold, the Cold Supreme.
This honored system humbly holds
The Super-cold to end all colds;
The Cold Crusading for Democracy;
The Führer of the Streptococcracy.

Bacilli swarm within my portals
Such as were ne'er conceived by mortals,
But bred by scientists wise and hoary
In some Olympic laboratory;
Bacteria as large as mice,
With feet of fire and heads of ice
Who never interrupt for slumber
Their stamping elephantine rumba.

A common cold, gadzooks, forsooth!
Ah, yes. And Lincoln was jostled by Booth;
Don Juan was a budding gallant,
And Shakespeare's plays show signs of talent;
The Arctic winter is fairly coolish,
And your diagnosis is fairly foolish.
Oh what a derision history holds
For the man who belittled the Cold of Colds!

                                            - Ogden Nash

Ottomans - not drums

“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.” Honoré de Balzac

In other words, I am going to keep on posting photos because I have nothing else to do. While I have the boxes out here are some more Ottomans, actual fighting troops this time. These are not so much units as they are arbitrary groups of bases.

The flags carried by my forces probably owe more to watching 'The Wind and the Lion' than they do to the 15th century Ottoman Empire. Returning to figures for which rules writers have not yet made accommodation, the Pasha has brought his falconer on campaign with him:

Black Jack and Black Tom

I posted a couple of weeks ago that I had downloaded 'All Eyes on the Rio Grande', a novel about the US Punitive Expedition into Mexico in 1916, and was expecting it to be an entertaining read. In fact it was terrible: no plot, no sense of place or time, no humour, no nothing really. I sincerely hope that no one else was tempted by me mentioning it.

Black Andy

On a higher literary level is the work of Andrew Marvell.  David in Suffolk (and you should check out his newish blog if you haven't already found it for yourselves) asked following this recent post here if Marvell wrote a poem comparing an army to a garden. I don't know much about Marvell's poetry and it's not the sort of thing that I would read for pleasure. To understand it properly you would need to know more about the political and religious schisms of the seventeenth century than I do, not to mention have a grounding in the works of the classical Roman poets of the type not often featuring in the modern education system. There is a good reason that his work is mainly known through quotations like the one that I used. However, I do have a suggestion as to which might be the poem he's thinking of, namely 'Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax'. The only reason I know the piece at all is because I used to work somewhere mentioned in it, although as I've had several dozen jobs that could apply to lots of poems. Anyway, verse 10 (or verse x as they called it in Marvell's day) starts with the lines:

Him Bishops-Hill, or Denton may,

Or Bilbrough, better hold than they:

Denton - which is a few kilometres up the valley from where I am currently locked down; across on the other side of the river - was the Fairfax family's estate and was the birthplace of the Lord Fairfax to whom the poem is dedicated, and who was of course the commander-in-chief of the Parliamentary forces during the Civil War. The current building on the site is from the late eighteenth century and is now the headquarters of a large engineering company of which I was once Group CFO. Indeed it was while working there that I first became aware that Ilkley was such a hotbed of wargaming and thus made contact with the Ilkley Lads; the rest is history.

Sir Keir Starmer

So, and to nobody's surprise, Sir Keir Starmer has been elected as leader of the Labour Party. It's ironic that Jeremy Corbyn leaves when the economic policies he advocated have never been more needed, to the extent that the Tory government is implementing some rather pale imitations of them. I think that it became clear once the surprise of the 2017 general election result had died down that Jezza should have resigned at that point. I often observed during my business career that when the right man finds himself in the right place at the right time, that he subsequently ascribes all the success to the first part and none to the others. It would seem that it applies to politics as well. That was always going to be peak Jezza and had he gone then he could have handed over to whoever he wanted.

The reindeer's nose is deepest red

I voted for Starmer, and wish him well, especially in the current circumstances which don't seem to contain much upside for anyone, whether in government or opposition. For non-UK readers, one thing you may not know about him is that distinguished human rights lawyer Starmer might have been, but equally might well not have been, the model for distinguished human rights lawyer Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones Diary. Author Helen Fielding - who by the way comes from Leeds - says not, and presumably she would know.

Ottomans - the drums

"The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums."
- Arthur Koestler

My Ottoman collection has quite a few drummers, none of whom have any function in the rules.

If there is rhythm then you might as well dance to it:

And where the denizens of the seraglio dance, can Rudolph Valentino be far away:

Hussites

Back to poor photos of bad stuff. I shall start by saying that when I made these there was a widely held view that the Hussites carried flags with geese on them because Jan Huss' name sounds a bit like goose in the Czech language. Subsequently I think the consensus has changed to the whole goose thing being a term of abuse used by their Catholic opponents because Jan Huss' name sounded a bit like the Czech word for...well you get the picture. In common with my general line of least effort approach to these things I shall not be replacing the flags. On with the photos:

That's Zizka next to the True Cross

I'm not a believer in warwagons rushing round the battlefield like tanks, but I have some on the move just in case. They have never been on the table and neither have the following: