Maggie's Farm

The facts must fit the narrative. What's depressing is that I'm sure the professors & students are automatically thinking that in perfect good faith. I would be happier if it was conscious bull.

And heck we have no idea yet what their motivation really was. But no matter how bizarre and unexpected it may turn out to be, the facts will be made to serve this, and innumerable other, narratives.

Hmm. It was a trainer. Is an aircraft that can take off by itself a good characteristic for a trainer, or a bad one?

I've a bit of Australian (made) military hardware behind me in the closet: a No. 1 Mk III Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifle made at the Lithgow arsenal in 1918. Stamps on the butt, IIRC, indicate it was issued to the Civilian Military Force which I gather was like a home guard or army reserve. There's even a kangaroo stamped on there.

I bought it at a pawnshop just south of Atlanta; went there to interview a witness to a crime and they had a rack of old military surplus on sale. Always wanted a Lee-Enfield and it was only $75.00, so what the heck. Plus I was sort of tickled where it had ended up, so far away from home, in a pawn shop stuffed mostly with gaudy jewelry and cheap electronics.

Well mine has "epic" written all over it - it's very battered and worn. I doubt it saw action in WWI but thereafter who knows. I didn't expect it was safe to shoot at all, but the markings show it got re-arsenaled at least once; the barrel's newer than the rest of the rifle & the headspace turned out to be okay. Shoots fine.

I need to get my hands on the appropriate bayonet. Then it will look extra-epic. That "pigsticker" bayonet - talk about all business. Brrrr.

I've wanted to read Quartered Safe for a while. Recently I read Barbara Tuchman's Stillwell and the American Experience in China, which reminded me to look for Fraser's book.

Goodbye To All That is a good read, but yes the emotional filter throws up a caution. It's the matter-of-fact memoirs I find most interesting and I think they can be more revealing. For instance, I find Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel (the original version), with its matter-of-fact account of the fighting on the Western Front in WWI, to be a more powerful indictment of war than the consciously moralistic All Quiet On The Western Front.

On the other hand, Eugene Sledge's With The Old Breed is interesting because you get what is at once a very matter-of-fact and very emotional account of a soldier's experiences.

Didn't know that about Goodbye . . . getting revised. Mine is the Anchor paperback version you always see and yeah it's the 2nd Revised Edition.

I bought that book for a course I took in college; Professor was a born teacher who infected his students with his enthusiasm. He probably knew there was a first edition and he probably told us to look out for it if we could find it; I remember his required and recommended reading lists footnoted with that kind of detail, practically apologizing for not being able to find the version he wanted that the bookstore would stock!

That was an interesting course; a sprawling loosely defined seminar on Expressionism / Determinism in late 19th / early 20th C. literature. I am remembering now, in the clutch of WWI related things we read, that there were a few short stories by William Faulkner. I'm going to have to go re-read them to see if they're any good. I liked them at the time but I was a callow youth. They were presented as pure fiction, not memoir. IIRC Faulkner got turned down by the U.S. Army, joined some British (probably Canadian) reserve unit, never got posted right at the front and may or may not have been attached to the Royal Flying Corps. But apparently he absorbed enough from the ready-made spectacle of a wasteland to write a few evocative stories.