Old Dixieland in France

From the chapter "Old Dixieland in France" in The Last of the Doughboys by Richard Rubin, bottom of page 263.

"African American soldiers were undertrained and underequipped; the first batch of black stevedores sent to France was actually issued blue uniforms left over from the Civil War.  They were assigned worked deemed 'unfit' for white soldiers, and ordered into factories as strikebreakers. They were warned, in the most menacing of terms, to stay far away from French women, not to enter French homes or eat in French cafes. (French citizens, for their part, were asked by American authorities to honor American 'cultural sensitivities' by adopting a policy of racial discrimination for the duration of the war.) They were, as a class, labeled -- in official reports -- as lazy, or simpleminded, or devious, or all three.  Contemporary accounts report that they were subjected to an extraordinary amount of verbal and even physical abuse in camp, just in the course of an ordinary day."

This is all before he gets to the section about "coon songs", which are pretty vile, and period assumptions about mental inferiority.

"Yes, a man with a rifle has power, authority, dignity; but a man who uses that rifle to fight - for you - also has pride.  You owe him your gratitude.  And he knows it.  And when this man comes back home again after putting his life at risk to defend your freedom, perhaps he'll be satisfied to just return to the way things were before.  But perhaps not."

In 2014, countries are still paying off debt from World War One

This is an article from Quartz.

I love the poppy pictures for the 100th anniversary of the war (there's one in this article).  I have some Facebook friends over there right now and they've been posting pictures.  I remember the poppies when I was there back in, um, November 2008?  Nope, 2007.  I guess that's why I have a blog, so I don't have to remember years.  I knew the specific month and date, but not the year.  That strikes me as serious old guy behavior.

I find this absolutely amazing. 300 year old debt!  It's closer to the early modern fiscal prudence of Henry VII (around 1500) - you can read about his extraordinary revenue and ordinary revenue practices at those links - than it is to the present.

"Incredibly, because the 4% Consuls were used to refinance even older debt, some of the debt being repaid in early 2015 goes as far back as the 18th century. “In 1853, then-chancellor Gladstone consolidated, among other things, the capital stock of the South Sea Company originating in 1711, which had collapsed in the infamous South Sea Bubble financial crisis of 1720,” the UK Treasury said. And Chancellor George Goschen converted bonds first issued in 1752 and subsequently used them to finance the Napoleonic and Crimean Wars, as well as the Slavery Abolition Act of 1835."

And the article puts the context of Germany's debt in terms of 96,000 tons of gold.  That's a big pile. I'm having trouble imagining it, just like I had trouble imagining XKCD telling me a supernova was magnitudes larger than setting off an atomic bomb on my eyeball.  I poked around on the internet, and I can't find anything quickly that weights 96,000 tons, but...The George W. Bush Nimitz Class Carrier weight 102,000 tons, and the Enterprise 100,000.  Ignoring any long/short/metric/English conversions and just deciding close enough counts in horseshoes, atom bombs/supernovas, and aircraft carriers, that means a Nimitz-class ACC made out of solid gold.  It would be smaller, because steel is about atomic mass 50 (that's a pure guess based on the atomic mass of iron and then just deciding all those trace strengthening elements take it down 10%) and gold is 196, so it would be roughly a 1/4 scale sold gold air craft carrier.  Probably on the bottom of the ocean.  My guess is that it wouldn't float.  And now I've realized I have my very own question for What If!

Paths of Glory

Ming, Kyle, and I went to Paths of Glory at The Trylon last night, part of their Stanley Kubrick series. It was a very good movie. Exceptionally good.  I was expecting a lot of World War I trench warfare, war-movie fight scenes, but that was only the first part of the movie.  The rest of it centered around three French soldiers being tried as representatives for their comrades, court martialed for cowardice.  Kirk Douglas was exceptional as their colonel and defending lawyer.  It wasn't at all like modern U.S. criminal/court movies.  There wasn't all sorts of surprise and law jargon and twists and a good ending.  Instead it was obvious it was a kangaroo court and the generals were intent on demonstrating to the other soldiers the results of not following orders no matter how insane the objective or the situation.  Even when Kirk Douglas reveals that the commanding general ordered his artillery to fire on his own trenches to force them to move, the three French soldiers are still shot by a firing squad - that twist usually frees the front line soldiers in a US movie.  The only result of the revelation is that the general is tagged for sacrifice - career, not his life - as well.  All the while the generals are partying and drinking and enjoying the French castles.

Just how crazy the generals are is demonstrated by General Broulard who says (the part in bold refers to the general command of superior officers), "Maybe the attack against the Ant Hill was impossible. Perhaps it was an error of judgment on our part. On the other hand, if your men had been a little more daring, you might have taken it. Who knows? Why should we have to bear more criticism and failure than we have to?...These executions will be a perfect tonic for the entire division. There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die...You see, Colonel, troops are like children. Just as a child wants his father to be firm, troops crave discipline. And one way to maintain discipline is to shoot a man now and then."

Way better than a Clint Howard movie.

I strongly recommend reading the Wikipedia article.  Kubrick married the German singer at the end of the movie.  And I didn't realize Blackadder spoofed some of the trial scenes.  The history is fascinating: it wasn't released in France until '75 and Spain until 1986.