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Movie Review: Chevalier
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Finally (!!!!!!), I got the chance to see Chevalier. It was a fantastic film and I highly recommend it. It’s about Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799. He was a noted composer, master violinist, and fencer (he even became an officer in the King’s Guard and later had a military career). He wrote the first string quartets by a French composer and his music likely influenced the work and sound-world of Mozart. One of the real highlights of the film is that the score includes quite a bit of Bologne’s own music which is a true feast for the ears.
Until recently, Bologne was basically erased from history and for a combination of reasons. Not only was he black but he also led a military regiment against Napoleon in 1792 – not something that would have endeared him to the man who reinstituted the code noire. Fortunately, the past few years have seen a growing interest in his life and works and this movie is one outgrowth thereof. It’s currently available on prime or hulu.
This site talks a bit about the fact vs. fiction of the movie. See also here and here. Most significantly, unlike what the movie depicts, Bologne’s father did not abandon him, but moved to Paris along with Bologne’s mother when Joseph was nine. The prodigy received a stellar education though, as the resistance to him becoming head of the Paris Opera showed (musicians refused to work with someone of mixed race and his candidacy had to be withdrawn), he did have to confront racism and prejudice, even while having access to the highest echelons of French society.
Anyway, the movie is really gripping, well-paced, well-acted, and richly shot: both the costumes and the music are lush. I highly, highly recommend it.
Here is a list of Bologne’s surviving works. You can listen to one of his quartet’s here.
Today is the Anniversary of D-Day
Today we remember those who fought and those who died on the beaches of Normandy. This is the anniversary of D-Day, when Allied troops launched the invasion (of the largest invasion force ever assembled) that would eventually liberate Europe from actual Nazis. Read about it here and here. May these brave soldiers be remembered. Always.
Learning New Things: the Defense of Saraghari in 1897
I just watched an awesome movie “Kesari,” a retelling (with some embellishment) of the 1897 Battle of Saraghari where (and this is historical fact NOT embellishment) 21 (yes, twenty-one) Sikh soldiers defended the fort for over six hours against more than 10,000 (ten thousand, possibly as many as twelve thousand) Pashtun tribesmen. This past September 12 was the 122ndanniversary of the defense of Saraghari. All twenty-one defenders were awarded the equivalent of a Victoria Cross by the British Crown. May they always be remembered. Learn more here.
The twenty-one men are as follows:
Havildar Ishar Singh (regimental number 165)
Naik Lal Singh (332)
Lance Naik Chanda Singh (546)
Sepoy Sundar Singh (1321)
Sepoy Ram Singh (287)
Sepoy Uttar Singh (492)
Sepoy Sahib Singh (182)
Sepoy Hira Singh (359)
Sepoy Daya Singh (687)
Sepoy Jivan Singh (760)
Sepoy Bhola Singh (791)
Sepoy Narayan Singh (834)
Sepoy Gurmukh Singh (814)
Sepoy Jivan Singh (871)
Sepoy Gurmukh Singh (1733)
Sepoy Ram Singh (163)
Sepoy Bhagwan Singh (1257)
Sepoy Bhagwan Singh (1265)
Sepoy Buta Singh (1556)
Sepoy Jivan Singh (1651)
Sepoy Nand Singh (1221)
There’s another good link here.
Desecration in London
Vandals in London have desecrated a memorial to WWII RAF fighters. This is in wake of a black studies professor calling these heroes war criminals (you know, the men who fought actual nazis. I guess they’ll give PhDs to anyone these days). This is the result of people who have zero respect for the dead, and who see western identity as a problem to be solved. I hope they catch the criminals. I would like to see them drawn and quartered, though of course in these ‘civilized’ times such punishments are no longer given. Pity. One who desecrates the military dead deserves nothing else.
(photo “Lest We Forget” by G. Krasskova)
Thank you!
I would like to thank all of you, my readers, who chose November to shop at my etsy store. 100% of my proceeds have been donated to Paralyzed Veterans of America. Last year, we made, iirc, $611 and change, which was also donated to PVA. This year, thanks to you, that amount doubled and I was able to donate $1300. Hail the military dead and let us honor those veterans living.
Veteran’s Day/Remembrance Day 2017
Called Remembrance Day in the UK and Veterans Day here, today is a day to honor those who died in WWI and, in the US, all those who served (within the US, it has become a day to honor veterans of all our wars). Generations of men and women were lost. Even more came home destroyed. WWI utterly transformed our world and we are the children of that devastation.
There are no veterans alive anymore from WWI (or very, very, very few). Each year there are fewer and fewer veterans of WWII alive. We’ve never paid heed to our veterans from Vietnam, and Korea is all but forgotten. Then there are our more recent wars. It is our duty and obligation to speak for our dead, our honor and privilege to listen to our living. We can, at the very least, give them one day, if nothing else.
Today, I remember particularly my cousin Wesley Heffner. He was part of Pershing’s Expeditionary Force, part of the first American forces to go to Europe in WWI. He was eighteen when he enlisted and never returned home. He died from wounds taken on a bloody field in France. He never made it to twenty. He enlisted out of a deep sense of patriotism and desire to do good in the world.
This is perhaps the only extant photo of Wesley. I’ve visited his grave, in a cemetery where I”m related to at least 98% of the dead lying there, and I’ve left offerings. I wonder what the world of our family would have been like had he returned, had he lived. With each person dead, a whole universe was obliterated, and the generations they would have touched. The least we can do is to remember them.
Today is also the birthday of my favorite WWII general, George S. Patton. He fought in WWI. He designed a sword, nearly medaled in the Olympics (and would have by modern scoring rubrics), was a brilliant tank tactician, and he saved the world. He was largely responsible for Allied Victory during the Battle of the Bulge (Patton and this Third Army).
So hail them. Pour out offerings. Visit their graves. Take your living veterans out to lunch. Remember them and their sacrifices throughout the year. Look for opportunities to honor them. We have built our world on their blood, bone, and suffering.
One of my favorite WWI poems
DULCE ET DECORUM EST(1)
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares(2) we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest(3) began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots(4)
Of tired, outstripped(5) Five-Nines(6) that dropped behind.
Gas!(7) Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets(8) just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime(9) . . .
Dim, through the misty panes(10) and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering,(11) choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud(12)
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest(13)
To children ardent(14) for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.(15)
Wilfred Owen
Thought to have been written between 8 October 1917 and March, 1918
Notes on Dulce et Decorum Est
1. DULCE ET DECORUM EST – the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode by Horace). The words were widely understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean “It is sweet and right.” The full saying ends the poem: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – it is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country.
2. Flares – rockets which were sent up to burn with a brilliant glare to light up men and other targets in the area between the front lines (See illustration, page 118 of Out in the Dark.)
3. Distant rest – a camp away from the front line where exhausted soldiers might rest for a few days, or longer
4. Hoots – the noise made by the shells rushing through the air
5. Outstripped – outpaced, the soldiers have struggled beyond the reach of these shells which are now falling behind them as they struggle away from the scene of battle
6. Five-Nines – 5.9 calibre explosive shells
7. Gas! – poison gas. From the symptoms it would appear to be chlorine or phosgene gas. The filling of the lungs with fluid had the same effects as when a person drowned
8. Helmets – the early name for gas masks
9. Lime – a white chalky substance which can burn live tissue
10. Panes – the glass in the eyepieces of the gas masks
11. Guttering – Owen probably meant flickering out like a candle or gurgling like water draining down a gutter, referring to the sounds in the throat of the choking man, or it might be a sound partly like stuttering and partly like gurgling
12. Cud – normally the regurgitated grass that cows chew usually green and bubbling. Here a similar looking material was issuing from the soldier’s mouth
13. High zest – idealistic enthusiasm, keenly believing in the rightness of the idea
14. ardent – keen
15. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – see note 1 above.
These notes are taken from the book, Out in the Dark, Poetry of the First World War, where other war poems that need special explanations are similarly annotated. The ideal book for students getting to grips with the poetry of the First World War.
Taken from this site.
Honoring our Military Medical Corps
One of the things that I’ve been noticing this year is an increased awareness of the role the medical corps played in military life and combat. I’ve seen a lot more recognition of nurses and doctors this year in remembrance pieces than at any other time and I think that is good and necessary. When I honor my military dead, I try to honor those doctors and nurses and other medical people who served too. They all too often get forgotten and they shouldn’t be.(1)
One group of veterans that often get completely forgotten in WWI history is African American (or other nationality) nurses. I will admit to never having really thought about this myself (and I should have. I typically parse out military groups like the Tuskeegee Airmen in my veneration, for special recognition, because of how hard they had to fight just to be permitted to fight!); then I started seeing this movie coming up on my amazon and Netflix suggestions feed: “Searching for Augusta: the Forgotten Angel of Bastogne” about a Belgian, bi-racial nurse during WWII, and I thought: why the hell are we forgetting these women?(2) It occurs to me this happens to female military veterans in general…even now.
I don’t think that those of us who honor the military dead necessarily consciously think to include medical personnel, yet they are veterans too, every bit as much as non-medical personnel and they are the ones working on or near the front lines in many cases, to get our soldiers home, and they suffer every bit as much as any other soldier. They should be remembered too. They should be honored.
Here are a few good articles:
Women in the military (general)
African Americans in medicine in Civil War
https://www.ncpedia.org/wwi-medicine-battlefield
How WWI changed the way we treat injuries
Here are a couple of places that I often donate to, often as an offering to Asklepios or other Healing Deities (like Eir or Hygeia) that I honor, or sometimes for the military medical dead in general:
And here is a whole list of military charities, most of them in some way connected to medical care.
Here is the documentary I noted above — definitely worth the watch!
Notes:
- Nurses especially take the brunt of this when they showed every bit as much valor as the men (and sometimes women – there were always women who fought one way or another, even if they had to disguise themselves to do so) who fought. They saw daily the results of combat and in many cases, like Vietnam, nurses were damn near on the front lines unarmed. In Vietnam, my understanding is that they weren’t issued weapons of any sort and it is not unknown for medical encampments to be targeted.
- I see it happening in my first career field too, ballet. There were African American ballet dancers with Balanchine’s first company for instance, and one of them, Raven Wilkenson was truly extraordinary. They too often get erased from ballet history which leads to the bullshit that I have heard often in my career “well, no one will want to watch a [black, Asian, etc.] Swan in Swan Lake,” or “ballet doesn’t really want [insert minority of choice] dancers” and it’s utter bullshit. Tell it to Misty Copeland, Maria Tallchief, Jose Manuel Carreno, Carlos Acosta, Yuan Yuan Tan, Evelyn Cisneros, and Shiori Kase to note a few. Talent is talent. Period. This of course has nothing to do with WWI or WWII history or the military dead, but I’ve been thinking about this recently and the erasure really pisses me off. When I was training as a dancer one of the most incredibly gifted women I had the privilege of working with was an African American girl (We were young when we trained together in the first company with which I worked). Even then, I occasionally overheard the parents of other dancers saying things like “she’s the best dancer there” – she really was. Claire, to this day I envy your extensions! – “ but don’t you think it would look strange to have a black ballerina?” No, bitch, I don’t. STFU. It’s called ‘acting’ and ‘performance’ for a reason and the only prerequisite is talent. Fortunately, our director wasn’t amongst those who thought in this backward way, but I wonder at how many people were encouraged out of the field (and art and music too) by such nonsense, how much talent and genius and artistry we’ve lost because of our stupidity.
(apologies for any typos. I have a bitter migraine right now. I’m sitting here waiting for the migraine meds to kick in…)
(While I can’t find a definitive source for this image, I see it listed repeatedly as combat nurse Valya Gribkova retrieving a wounded soldier from the battlefield, WWII)
Gangleri's Grove 