Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
It was not an accident. The 1960s did this and did so knowingly. If you put together the forgetfulness of brutalism (the name is not an accident) + lack of talent + building on the cheap + the dominance of the car + greed + 'government knows best' you can see the result.
A list of the places not so terribly afflicted is short, but longer than the list of places people love because brutalism worked well. Most were too small to bother with wrecking; some places so large you could not wreck it all. Stamford is my personal favourite.
Brutalism is a French name - it comes from “brute” or raw & generally exposes the raw materials the building is constructed from. You can have a brutalist wooden building just as you can a concrete one.
The problem is not brutalism per se (although it can lead to something of a “one-note” texture to buildings which doesn’t always work) but the god-awful concrete monstrosities that were built & then (crucially) not maintained properly afterwards.
The Barbican is a brutalist building, but remains a well regarded, popular place that people are keen to live in. Other tower blocks built around the same time are ... not as popular as the Barbican.
So you're saying British architects committed their urban atrocities as a result of a mistranslation ?
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Things must have changed dramatically since last June.
When we arrived last year in late afternoon Paris was heaving which was a pain because people kept walking into the pavement based bike lanes which caused some serious braking not to hit people.
The next morning (can't remember what day) we cycled from near Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnesse and again it was heaving. We were grateful for the number of reverse one way streets to protect cyclists which were safe (it is a great safety idea discussed here before and doesn't impede drivers). Solid traffic and buzzing pavements, van drivers opening their doors onto you and drivers cutting you up and trying to kill you. At the Place de la Concorde there was really only a choice between death and walking.
On the return (an afternoon) Paris was at a stand still with traffic (with the mandatory leaning on horns) so it was quicker to walk on the pavement and pick up bike lanes where we could.
I must say though cycling through the countryside in France, particularly between 12 and 2 you could be forgiven for thinking you were the only humans left.
“start the week” on R4 this morning was called “living in Cities” and discussed the development of London and Paris regarding things such as being cycle friendly and urban layout etc. it appears that less than a third of Parisians have a car, which is the lowest proportion in a Western European city, compared to about 50% in London and so has been a lot easier and less resistance for Hidalgo to introduce less car friendly policies.
Also discussed how London 2012 has influenced Paris Olympic planners with the development of St Dennis as and Olympic village and business district.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Things must have changed dramatically since last June.
When we arrived last year in late afternoon Paris was heaving which was a pain because people kept walking into the pavement based bike lanes which caused some serious braking not to hit people.
The next morning (can't remember what day) we cycled from near Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnesse and again it was heaving. We were grateful for the number of reverse one way streets to protect cyclists which were safe (it is a great safety idea discussed here before and doesn't impede drivers). Solid traffic and buzzing pavements, van drivers opening their doors onto you and drivers cutting you up and trying to kill you. At the Place de la Concorde there was really only a choice between death and walking.
On the return (an afternoon) Paris was at a stand still with traffic (with the mandatory leaning on horns) so it was quicker to walk on the pavement and pick up bike lanes where we could.
I must say though cycling through the countryside in France, particularly between 12 and 2 you could be forgiven for thinking you were the only humans left.
“start the week” on R4 this morning was called “living in Cities” and discussed the development of London and Paris regarding things such as being cycle friendly and urban layout etc. it appears that less than a third of Parisians have a car, which is the lowest proportion in a Western European city, compared to about 50% in London and so has been a lot easier and less resistance for Hidalgo to introduce less car friendly policies.
Also discussed how London 2012 has influenced Paris Olympic planners with the development of St Dennis as and Olympic village and business district.
So is this clear evidence that the BBC ISN'T dominated by Oxbridge graduates? Or that the BBC's over powerful Oxonians are either too lazy to check their assertions with ONS, or so innumerate they don't realise Oxonians are less likely to have a car that Parisians?
Or that Oxford's a city too?
What a bizarre response. Firstly it wasn’t a BbC journalist making the statement. Secondly they said “under a third”, which was a generalised point to illustrate what they were discussing (low car ownership in Paris making the opposition to “car unfriendly schemes” less of a thing) and frankly could be 33.29 or be 31% - who really sodding cares.
Now I don’t know if you work for some organisation in Oxford where you are very proud of delivering low car ownership rates or just incredibly pedantic but I hope you aren’t too put out by them not quickly correcting matters to point out that actually Oxford is the winningest city in low car numbers.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
It was not an accident. The 1960s did this and did so knowingly. If you put together the forgetfulness of brutalism (the name is not an accident) + lack of talent + building on the cheap + the dominance of the car + greed + 'government knows best' you can see the result.
A list of the places not so terribly afflicted is short, but longer than the list of places people love because brutalism worked well. Most were too small to bother with wrecking; some places so large you could not wreck it all. Stamford is my personal favourite.
Brutalism is a French name - it comes from “brute” or raw & generally exposes the raw materials the building is constructed from. You can have a brutalist wooden building just as you can a concrete one.
The problem is not brutalism per se (although it can lead to something of a “one-note” texture to buildings which doesn’t always work) but the god-awful concrete monstrosities that were built & then (crucially) not maintained properly afterwards.
The Barbican is a brutalist building, but remains a well regarded, popular place that people are keen to live in. Other tower blocks built around the same time are ... not as popular as the Barbican.
The Barbican is a very interesting piece of urbanism - fascinating to visit, and I can understand why people like it there - it's well located, and from what I understand the flats are very nice* inside. It shows what brutalism is *supposed* to be. But even at its best, it can be rather bleak. I'm glad all of our cities don't look like this.
A facet of architecture which never really gets considered in enough detail is the albedo of the building. The taller the building, the more light it cuts out, so the more important it is to be reflective. This is why glass skyscrapers can add rather than detract to the urban landscape, whereas concrete ones tend to have the opposite effect.
*One thing flats like this got right is the amount of light they tended to let in. I remember staying the night on the 12th floor of a horrible building in inner East London - but inside, the light filled up the place and the views were amazing.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Well, it wouldn't have happened.
Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is another question.
Sure, the generalship of the Somme was inept, but that's partly because the generals were wrestling with a new type of warfare. And while their errors came at a terrible human cost, the lessons learned in that battle (particularly by the likes of Currie, watching closely from the reserve trenches) ultimately paved the way for the breaking of the German army in 1918.
"Mud, Blood and Poppycock" by Gordon Corrigan is a useful corrective to the Blackadder depiction of British and Imperial Generalship.
The main cheerleader for Haig and the other British WW1 commanders for many years was John Terraine. But he was just as biased in favour of Haig as Clarke had been against him. Indeed he descibed Haig as "the man who led the British Army in its most majestic series of victories", which I would politely suggest marks him as something of a fucking lunatic.
The Hundred Days at the end of the war was an impressive achievement.
Against an enemy that was effectively already defeated, starved of supplies and facing collapse behind the lines.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Things must have changed dramatically since last June.
When we arrived last year in late afternoon Paris was heaving which was a pain because people kept walking into the pavement based bike lanes which caused some serious braking not to hit people.
The next morning (can't remember what day) we cycled from near Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnesse and again it was heaving. We were grateful for the number of reverse one way streets to protect cyclists which were safe (it is a great safety idea discussed here before and doesn't impede drivers). Solid traffic and buzzing pavements, van drivers opening their doors onto you and drivers cutting you up and trying to kill you. At the Place de la Concorde there was really only a choice between death and walking.
On the return (an afternoon) Paris was at a stand still with traffic (with the mandatory leaning on horns) so it was quicker to walk on the pavement and pick up bike lanes where we could.
I must say though cycling through the countryside in France, particularly between 12 and 2 you could be forgiven for thinking you were the only humans left.
It is decidedly odd. I noticed it yesterday - away from the absolutely main tourist areas - a peculiar quietness. I ascribed it to Sunday but today it’s the same. Part of it is the replacement of ICE cars with electric. You can hear the same evolution in london. Its good. But in Paris it also a sheer lack of traffic
Maybe nothing
I'll be there in June again so it will be interesting to see. I will be cycling from Gare du Nord to the Latin Qtr for the night and then leaving from Gare d'Austerlitz the next day and returning to Gare Montparnesse and cycling to Gare du Nord a week and a bit later. 3 different workdays.
After your recent posts I was working out how much time I have spent in Paris and France and it is huge. It runs into many years, although never longer than 3 weeks at any one time. I wasn't taught French in school and have never been there long enough to pick it up to my real regret. I have spent the equivalent of a year skiing on French slopes, I have spent the equivalent of a year touring with my family when my children were young. I have worked on and off in Paris and Nice at times. I spent 3 weeks touring with a girlfriend in the 70s and I now cycle all over France every year. I have been to Disneyland 3 times which is 2 times more than I wanted to go, but kids eh.
You probably know it better than me. Tho I must have been here 20-30 times or so
I know it all pretty well - except a few corners of the east (Alsace) and Brittany/Normandy where I am headed now. I intend to see as much as possible. I’ve never been to mont st Michel. Never seen the bayeux tapestry. Never seen a d day beach
And I’ve never eaten oysters in cancale. This must change! Life is short
It is not often one can say that considering your travel experiences and you might well have a good point that a 5 year break gives you a better perspective re Paris because I probably won't notice subtle changes each year which build up to big changes over 5 years.
I cycled past Mont St Michael 2 years ago. It is very impressive. I assumed it would be the same size as ours. It is very commercialised though, but they have done the commercialisation quite well.
PS Oh I forgot I have been house hunting in France as well (Dordogne and Pau area).
PPS I have been on holiday in Brittany once, and cycled it once. other than passing through Normandy many times I have only stayed once 2 years ago when I cycled around it.
Mon dieu. The upper Loire is dull. I shall spare you photographs of endless flat and vasty fields
Ah, the Paris basin. The inescapable prettiness vortex surrounding the capital in all directions. Broken only by the champagne vineyards to the East and a few nice gothic cathedrals. And some of the most desperate losses of biodiversity in Europe.
In large parts of Northern France Carson’s silent spring has already arrived. Insect life is virtually gone, save for wasps.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
Yes, generals did need to be kept away from the front line but it did not help that they arrived in staff cars and uniforms that enemy snipers could easily identify, just like Nelson at Trafalgar.
Not just Trafalgar. There were reasons he arrived there with one eye, one arm and one leg.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Things must have changed dramatically since last June.
When we arrived last year in late afternoon Paris was heaving which was a pain because people kept walking into the pavement based bike lanes which caused some serious braking not to hit people.
The next morning (can't remember what day) we cycled from near Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnesse and again it was heaving. We were grateful for the number of reverse one way streets to protect cyclists which were safe (it is a great safety idea discussed here before and doesn't impede drivers). Solid traffic and buzzing pavements, van drivers opening their doors onto you and drivers cutting you up and trying to kill you. At the Place de la Concorde there was really only a choice between death and walking.
On the return (an afternoon) Paris was at a stand still with traffic (with the mandatory leaning on horns) so it was quicker to walk on the pavement and pick up bike lanes where we could.
I must say though cycling through the countryside in France, particularly between 12 and 2 you could be forgiven for thinking you were the only humans left.
It is decidedly odd. I noticed it yesterday - away from the absolutely main tourist areas - a peculiar quietness. I ascribed it to Sunday but today it’s the same. Part of it is the replacement of ICE cars with electric. You can hear the same evolution in london. Its good. But in Paris it also a sheer lack of traffic
Maybe nothing
It may just be that people don't walk to travel round Paris when it's 8 degrees in late April.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
It was not an accident. The 1960s did this and did so knowingly. If you put together the forgetfulness of brutalism (the name is not an accident) + lack of talent + building on the cheap + the dominance of the car + greed + 'government knows best' you can see the result.
A list of the places not so terribly afflicted is short, but longer than the list of places people love because brutalism worked well. Most were too small to bother with wrecking; some places so large you could not wreck it all. Stamford is my personal favourite.
WG Hoskins on Stamford vs Nottingham is a good read. (The Victorian railway went to one and not the other).
Stamford is, though, one of those towns that’s both pretty and eerily dull and placeless. There’s a strange lacuna there, not through lack of business - the shops seem to do reasonably well - but something. Hard to put a finger on. The other town that always gives me that same vibe is Dorchester.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
The slaughter of officers in Austria-Hungarian army is astonishing in early part of war in eastern front. Not the most senior ranks but anything below.
When my father was serving in Northern Ireland some officers insisted on going on patrol with their pistols, presumably to give the IRA a clue who to shoot. My father always took a regulation rifle. He found their attitude bewildering but it is a long tradition of stupidity dressed up as bravery in all forces.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
The slaughter of officers in Austria-Hungarian army is astonishing in early part of war in eastern front. Not the most senior ranks but anything below.
When my father was serving in Northern Ireland some officers insisted on going on patrol with their pistols, presumably to give the IRA a clue who to shoot. My father always took a regulation rifle. He found their attitude bewildering but it is a long tradition of stupidity dressed up as bravery in all forces.
What was the life expectancy of an infantry 2nd Lt. in 1915 or so? Two weeks?
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
It was not an accident. The 1960s did this and did so knowingly. If you put together the forgetfulness of brutalism (the name is not an accident) + lack of talent + building on the cheap + the dominance of the car + greed + 'government knows best' you can see the result.
A list of the places not so terribly afflicted is short, but longer than the list of places people love because brutalism worked well. Most were too small to bother with wrecking; some places so large you could not wreck it all. Stamford is my personal favourite.
Brutalism is a French name - it comes from “brute” or raw & generally exposes the raw materials the building is constructed from. You can have a brutalist wooden building just as you can a concrete one.
The problem is not brutalism per se (although it can lead to something of a “one-note” texture to buildings which doesn’t always work) but the god-awful concrete monstrosities that were built & then (crucially) not maintained properly afterwards.
The Barbican is a brutalist building, but remains a well regarded, popular place that people are keen to live in. Other tower blocks built around the same time are ... not as popular as the Barbican.
So you're saying British architects committed their urban atrocities as a result of a mistranslation ?
Not really - I think British architects would have been perfectly well aware of the origins of the term.
The problem (imo) is a combination of Brutalist design with Corbusian ideas about how buildings should look. Le Corbusier’s buildings are (imo) sterile & unattractive, without the texture on the small scale that makes buildings human.
Combine that with a refusal to spend the money on these buildings to make them work even on their own terms & we end up where we are - with a lot of the public estate built with lip service to an architectural fashion that enabled them to build on the cheap. Then they skip the necessary maintenance & we end up with shoddy buildings that look awful & leak everywhere.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Well, it wouldn't have happened.
Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is another question.
Sure, the generalship of the Somme was inept, but that's partly because the generals were wrestling with a new type of warfare. And while their errors came at a terrible human cost, the lessons learned in that battle (particularly by the likes of Currie, watching closely from the reserve trenches) ultimately paved the way for the breaking of the German army in 1918.
"Mud, Blood and Poppycock" by Gordon Corrigan is a useful corrective to the Blackadder depiction of British and Imperial Generalship.
The main cheerleader for Haig and the other British WW1 commanders for many years was John Terraine. But he was just as biased in favour of Haig as Clarke had been against him. Indeed he descibed Haig as "the man who led the British Army in its most majestic series of victories", which I would politely suggest marks him as something of a fucking lunatic.
The Hundred Days at the end of the war was an impressive achievement.
Against an enemy that was effectively already defeated, starved of supplies and facing collapse behind the lines.
It seems to me that the German experience in both world wars was very similar in that their initial early successes were always ultimately going to prove futile thanks to their lack of resources and manpower once their enemies had got their shit together and their industrial might was simply too big to be defeated.
Very much a view of 20/20 hindsight, admittedly.
But the Schlieffen Plan failed. Ok, they got France and the rest in 1940, but Barbarossa failed too. And once they’d got themselves embroiled in trying to defend vast tracts of territory, despite their undoubted military skill and tenacious defence, they didn’t have the resources, logistics or manpower to win. Though the spring 1918 offensive caused some squeaky bums, it was a last roll of the dice and couldn’t realistically succeed. Same with the Battle of the Bulge too, for example.
A guy called Rob Thompson, who sadly died last year in his 50s of cancer, has done some fascinating work on Allied logistics in WW1 - the Germans had no chance ultimately in competing with that output. It’s mind boggling the resources the allied side had by 1917 and 1918. A similar tale by 1943 onwards. Fascinating stuff.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
This is a great summary of Chester. You have to close your eyes for 10 minutes as you walk from the train station to the Cathedral.
The most extreme version of this was the coach ride into Bologna from the airport.
The outer areas of Bologna vary from hideous to just-nuke-it-now-for-the-love-of-god. Then you arrive at the mile square in the middle - the medieval town. Makes Florence look as if it was built yesterday…
According to considerable quantities of publicly available information, politics in the UK *is* populated by the weird and the wealthy.
Politics used to be a part time job, generally done by the upper middle classes. The problem with the change to professional, full time politics is that it isn’t a career - more moderately paid social work and greasy poll climbing. There’s no professional development and after 10 years in Parliament, you have no career to return to - unless you’ve created a lobbying network instead of trying to do the job.
Further, the gao between what an MP does and what we expect a Minister to do is staggering. To go from running a half dozen, very junior direct reports (with direct hire and fire), to running a department. 100ks of people, with all the internal systems and politics. And a weird, rather convoluted definition of responsibility - meaning you can’t fire civil servants if they literally lie to you.
It’s not surprising that many ministers just sign the huge piles of paper they are given. They have no idea how to do anything else.
The only way we are going to fix this is either dramatically devolve some things away from Parliament (eg set up an English Parliament as well as Westminster), or dramatically increase the number of MPs (I'd go with at least 900), or both.
Malmesbury puts his case very eloquently, but in my experience it's not quite as sharp-edged as that. MPs do have a degree of influence in Ministerial decisions, if only in the sense that the Minister has to buy their consent with concessions, and PPSs - the normal route to a Ministerial role - do see things from the inside, if only as bag-carriers. In the two Ministries where I was involved (Energy and Defra), there was the same sort of division of labour with the civil service as you get in a Council executive - the Minister set out the things that most concerned him or her, the civil service delivered a report weith option, and the Minister made choices. There was little to no personnel management.
The Yes, Minister idea that civil servants essentially run the show is true of weak Ministers, but if they come in with a clear agenda the civil service generally take a professional pride in trying to make it work, unless it's Triss-level craziness leading to formal notifications of dissent. I can't see that having another layer of government (e.g. an English Parliament) would help any of this, but separating the social work side might if every constituency had an elected Ombudsman who was expected to do just that, and MPs were banned from any official role in casework.
What policy do you find particularly crazy about Truss's time that warranted such a rebellion?
Not allowing the OBR to look at the unfunded tax cuts?
It wasn't that she instructed the Civil Service that there was a policy to be implemented, that it would be implemented, and she wanted realistic plans for doing so. She decided pretty well without consultation with civil service, financial markets, OBR, or even her own Cabinet colleagues that she was going to radically change direction, and announced it as a fait accompli.
Except US voters have already elected a President with a felony conviction. George W Bush had a conviction for DUI and was elected in 2000 and re elected in 2004.
Ted Kennedy ran for President in 1980 despite having received a suspended sentence in 1973 for fleeing the scene of an accident after killing his passenger. Although Carter beat him in the primaries he still won a lot of states.
So a conviction alone may not be fatal for Trump, although it would hit him with Independents. Jail time though likely would be beyond his core vote
Surely Bush's DUI was a misdemeanor rather than a felony?
And Kennedy's suspended sentence was for 2 months, so again a misdemeanor, not a felony.
I don't know the details, but surely leaving the scene of an accident where someone dies IS a felony, even if he got off with a light sentence?
Anyway he wasn't elected president.
Yes, in the US a felony is a crime that can be punished by death or one or more years in prison which may well have applied to what Ted Kennedy was convicted of even if his sentence was at the lower end of the range for what he was charged with and convicted of.
Ted Kennedy was of course re elected multiple times as a Senator despite his conviction and got 38% of the vote and won 13 states (including New York and California) in the 1980 Democratic primaries even if Carter beat him
Mon dieu. The upper Loire is dull. I shall spare you photographs of endless flat and vasty fields
A lot of France is like that in my experience. A good 70% of the country is Lincolnshire.
(Not that there's anything inherently wrong with Lincolnshire, in moderation. But France offers just such a dizzyingly vast amount of it.)
Around Chartres is desperately boringly flat. SW France is also very very flat but I cycled Bordeaux to Biarritz 3 years ago (I think) and that was stunning even though flat (a lot of pine forests). It was our best trip I think. Dune of Pilat is something to behold.
I did Poitier to the West coast and back to Angouleme. That is pretty flat (I pick flat places to cycle, I'm not daft) and that was really nice. I don't get this area. House prices are dirt cheap. It is pretty and it apparently (bizarrely) has the greatest amount of sunshine in France except for the Mediterranean area. So why is it cheap to buy a house there?
The funny thing about Rwanda is - even if the flights go - it won’t stop the boats at all. Will be funny if the numbers go up 😂
This is where election timing is tricky. Early autumn and Sunak may face the issue of having started flights but seen small boat numbers rebound after last year’s Albania-led decline. If the deterrent effect does exist (who knows) it will probably take months to filter through.
But go early and there’s no chance of it having achieved anything, and the economy won’t have had a chance to pick up either.
Mr. Monkey, been a while since I read whichever book it was in, but it was suggested that if Hitler had listened to Guderian[sp] and gone properly for Moscow/Stalin he might have won.
The funny thing about Rwanda is - even if the flights go - it won’t stop the boats at all. Will be funny if the numbers go up 😂
This is where election timing is tricky. Early autumn and Sunak may face the issue of having started flights but seen small boat numbers rebound after last year’s Albania-led decline. If the deterrent effect does exist (who knows) it will probably take months to filter through.
But go early and there’s no chance of it having achieved anything, and the economy won’t have had a chance to pick up either.
Do you trust the Home Office to report accurate figures after the planes start ?
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
It was not an accident. The 1960s did this and did so knowingly. If you put together the forgetfulness of brutalism (the name is not an accident) + lack of talent + building on the cheap + the dominance of the car + greed + 'government knows best' you can see the result.
A list of the places not so terribly afflicted is short, but longer than the list of places people love because brutalism worked well. Most were too small to bother with wrecking; some places so large you could not wreck it all. Stamford is my personal favourite.
Brutalism is a French name - it comes from “brute” or raw & generally exposes the raw materials the building is constructed from. You can have a brutalist wooden building just as you can a concrete one.
The problem is not brutalism per se (although it can lead to something of a “one-note” texture to buildings which doesn’t always work) but the god-awful concrete monstrosities that were built & then (crucially) not maintained properly afterwards.
The Barbican is a brutalist building, but remains a well regarded, popular place that people are keen to live in. Other tower blocks built around the same time are ... not as popular as the Barbican.
The Barbican isn’t Brutalist architecture, corners have been rounded and the finish was hand carved
Mon dieu. The upper Loire is dull. I shall spare you photographs of endless flat and vasty fields
A lot of France is like that in my experience. A good 70% of the country is Lincolnshire.
(Not that there's anything inherently wrong with Lincolnshire, in moderation. But France offers just such a dizzyingly vast amount of it.)
I wouldn’t say 70%. More like 30-40%?
Anyway near the coast is usually but not always nice. They have far fewer hideous tacky resort towns, or they hide them better. And superior weather helps
Meanwhile all the alps and Pyrenees are impressive and sometimes spectacular. Corsica just edges the Isle of Wight. The Dordogne, the Basque Country, burgundy, Provence, languedoc, savoie, Jura, the Rhone valley - the majority of France is appealing
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Given the technologies available (industrial mass production, and weapons of mass killing like the machine gun), and the lack of means for rapid manoeuvre outside of fixed infrastructure like rail, battles like the Somme and Verdun were pretty well inevitable if neither side was prepared to sue for peace.
The real tragedy was that the war started in the first place.
What was that quote - WWI started because no one could be bothered not to go to war.
Or somesuch.
I read my Moltke and Causes of the First World War like everyone else and about all i could get out of it was that everyone expected everyone else to go to war and hence "we" might as well/had better do it now as later.
I know it is probably an oversimplification but I have always like AJP Taylor's Railway Timetables theory for one of the causes of WW1.
I think there's great merit in the thinking that it was a technological watershed or coming of age. And something had to be done with it all.
I must have another read of my wife's grandfathers WWI diary. He wasn't a general, just an Other Rank, turned down as unfit in 1914 (IIRC), then passed as fit two years later. He wasn't at the Somme but he got involved in some very unpleasant situations. As I recall he felt it was his 'patriotic duty' to try again.
It's such an alien world to us, I think. People's motivations, that love of empire and a deep, almost unthinking, patriotism that, to me at least, seems hard to understand. I had one great-grandad volunteer in 1914 and get sent to Gallipoli and then France (missing his division going over the top in the latter stages of the Somme because he was on leave) before getting his leg shot off in 1917, thus avoiding Passchendaele but having a stump that never properly healed, and another who resisted until being conscripted in 1917 and seemingly never seeing anything too sticky.
My paternal grandfather tried to sign up and would have gone to the Somme but was rejected for flat feet. Several other boys from his village did go and were killed.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Well, it wouldn't have happened.
Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is another question.
Sure, the generalship of the Somme was inept, but that's partly because the generals were wrestling with a new type of warfare. And while their errors came at a terrible human cost, the lessons learned in that battle (particularly by the likes of Currie, watching closely from the reserve trenches) ultimately paved the way for the breaking of the German army in 1918.
"Mud, Blood and Poppycock" by Gordon Corrigan is a useful corrective to the Blackadder depiction of British and Imperial Generalship.
The main cheerleader for Haig and the other British WW1 commanders for many years was John Terraine. But he was just as biased in favour of Haig as Clarke had been against him. Indeed he descibed Haig as "the man who led the British Army in its most majestic series of victories", which I would politely suggest marks him as something of a fucking lunatic.
The Hundred Days at the end of the war was an impressive achievement.
Against an enemy that was effectively already defeated, starved of supplies and facing collapse behind the lines.
The influence of WWI generals is perhaps overrated. The outcome was always likely to be pretty well what it was, once France and England had determined to fight.
I would have taken something quite extraordinary to change the outcome - or the terrible costs - for either side.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Things must have changed dramatically since last June.
When we arrived last year in late afternoon Paris was heaving which was a pain because people kept walking into the pavement based bike lanes which caused some serious braking not to hit people.
The next morning (can't remember what day) we cycled from near Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnesse and again it was heaving. We were grateful for the number of reverse one way streets to protect cyclists which were safe (it is a great safety idea discussed here before and doesn't impede drivers). Solid traffic and buzzing pavements, van drivers opening their doors onto you and drivers cutting you up and trying to kill you. At the Place de la Concorde there was really only a choice between death and walking.
On the return (an afternoon) Paris was at a stand still with traffic (with the mandatory leaning on horns) so it was quicker to walk on the pavement and pick up bike lanes where we could.
I must say though cycling through the countryside in France, particularly between 12 and 2 you could be forgiven for thinking you were the only humans left.
It is decidedly odd. I noticed it yesterday - away from the absolutely main tourist areas - a peculiar quietness. I ascribed it to Sunday but today it’s the same. Part of it is the replacement of ICE cars with electric. You can hear the same evolution in london. Its good. But in Paris it also a sheer lack of traffic
Maybe nothing
I'll be there in June again so it will be interesting to see. I will be cycling from Gare du Nord to the Latin Qtr for the night and then leaving from Gare d'Austerlitz the next day and returning to Gare Montparnesse and cycling to Gare du Nord a week and a bit later. 3 different workdays.
After your recent posts I was working out how much time I have spent in Paris and France and it is huge. It runs into many years, although never longer than 3 weeks at any one time. I wasn't taught French in school and have never been there long enough to pick it up to my real regret. I have spent the equivalent of a year skiing on French slopes, I have spent the equivalent of a year touring with my family when my children were young. I have worked on and off in Paris and Nice at times. I spent 3 weeks touring with a girlfriend in the 70s and I now cycle all over France every year. I have been to Disneyland 3 times which is 2 times more than I wanted to go, but kids eh.
You probably know it better than me. Tho I must have been here 20-30 times or so
I know it all pretty well - except a few corners of the east (Alsace) and Brittany/Normandy where I am headed now. I intend to see as much as possible. I’ve never been to mont st Michel. Never seen the bayeux tapestry. Never seen a d day beach
And I’ve never eaten oysters in cancale. This must change! Life is short
I was particularly taken with your exquisite reference to "Victorian" architecture in Paris.[*] Clearly a man of the world. No tourist you. Pas de poseur. Watch out for the Tudor and Georgian stuff in Brittany.
*Admittedly posted on your hero's birthday 20 April. Perhaps you overdid celebrating?
Mon dieu. The upper Loire is dull. I shall spare you photographs of endless flat and vasty fields
A lot of France is like that in my experience. A good 70% of the country is Lincolnshire.
(Not that there's anything inherently wrong with Lincolnshire, in moderation. But France offers just such a dizzyingly vast amount of it.)
Around Chartres is desperately boringly flat. SW France is also very very flat but I cycled Bordeaux to Biarritz 3 years ago (I think) and that was stunning even though flat (a lot of pine forests). It was our best trip I think. Dune of Pilat is something to behold.
I did Poitier to the West coast and back to Angouleme. That is pretty flat (I pick flat places to cycle, I'm not daft) and that was really nice. I don't get this area. House prices are dirt cheap. It is pretty and it apparently has the greatest amount of sunshine in France except for the Mediterranean area. So why is it cheap to buy a house there?
It’s cheap to buy a house almost everywhere. There are spare houses. Rural depopulation. Our house is in the far South of Burgundy, only an hour from Lyon and 2 hours from Geneva. Beautiful rolling hills, Romanesque churches, hundreds of mediaeval chateaux dotting the landscape.
You can still pick up an old golden stone village house with 2 bedrooms and a little garden for €90k.
In London it feels like most cyclists exercise common sense so that when they see a pedestrian crossing the road or cycle path they slow down slightly to make life easier for the pedestrian. But in Paris they seemed to make a deliberate point of not slowing down at all because technically they were entitled to carry on cycling and not give way to pedestrians.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
The slaughter of officers in Austria-Hungarian army is astonishing in early part of war in eastern front. Not the most senior ranks but anything below.
When my father was serving in Northern Ireland some officers insisted on going on patrol with their pistols, presumably to give the IRA a clue who to shoot. My father always took a regulation rifle. He found their attitude bewildering but it is a long tradition of stupidity dressed up as bravery in all forces.
What was the life expectancy of an infantry 2nd Lt. in 1915 or so? Two weeks?
I don’t know the exact figure off the top of my head, but it wasn’t long. Even if going over the top was relatively rare in reality, they’d be leading trench raids and the like.
One theory of why we have the impression of WW1 that we do is that the young, aristocratic or upper-middle class public schoolboy types, who were killed in disproportionate numbers because they were these frontline officers has, because their peers were the war poets and people like Rupert Graves and the like, and their families were from a literate class who left memoirs and reflections, like Vera Brittain for example, has given the impression that most soldiers were killed. When in reality most soldiers survived, but working class rankers rarely left memoirs.
On topic it doesn't seem like Trump will be locked up before the election? It seems like the charges in the business records case wouldn't normally produce a jail sentence even if he's convicted on all charges. Meanwhile the Georgia one isn't yet scheduled, the Florida one is in the hands of a loyal Trump hack and the DC case is stalled until such time as SCOTUS see fit to unstall it.
The banter heuristic would dictate that he win the election, then go to jail shortly afterwards.
It seems unlikely that any trials other than the present one are likely to be held before the election. Having delayed matters with numerous tactics, appeals, ridiculous arguments and the like Trump is now arguing the delay is so he cannot campaign. Like almost everything else he says this is nonsense.
The problem in the present one is that the actual charges are misdemeanours and therefore time barred unless they can be upgraded to felonies. The basis for doing so is that these false entries were crimes for some other purpose, also criminal. The bases for this are somewhat problematic with the possible exception of tax fraud because Trump appears to have claimed the reimbursements of Cohen as legitimate legal expenses for his businesses. I think proving these particular payments were in the legal expenses claimed is not going to be easy.
The other bases for claiming a criminal purpose do not seem to me to get off the ground. Trying to influence an election is not a crime: believe it or not that is what our politicians are trying to do every day, no matter how ineptly. Paying for silence is not a crime either.
So, I fear that Trump has a good chance with this trial. If he is acquitted there is a real risk that this boosts him which in a tight election could be extremely concerning.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
Yes, generals did need to be kept away from the front line but it did not help that they arrived in staff cars and uniforms that enemy snipers could easily identify, just like Nelson at Trafalgar.
Not just Trafalgar. There were reasons he arrived there with one eye, one arm and one leg.
But Nelson very likely made a significant, perhaps decisive difference to the outcome of the naval conflict with France.
^ This sounds much more interesting than the usual Oxfordian or Baconian guff. Perhaps I will have to reconsider my Stratfordianism?
Maybe Enoch Powell (Oxfordian) got one thing right, despite what seemed to be his obnoxious reasoning that amounted to "no son of a glovemaker could know so much about high politics"?
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
This is a great summary of Chester. You have to close your eyes for 10 minutes as you walk from the train station to the Cathedral.
The most extreme version of this was the coach ride into Bologna from the airport.
The outer areas of Bologna vary from hideous to just-nuke-it-now-for-the-love-of-god. Then you arrive at the mile square in the middle - the medieval town. Makes Florence look as if it was built yesterday…
That seems to be Italian towns generally. Awful suburbs (with a few obvious exceptions), beautiful centro storico, with the target pattern road sign.
Vs many British towns: pretty suburbs, godawful town centre with chip wrappers blowing across the pedestrian precinct between Poundland and help the aged.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Things must have changed dramatically since last June.
When we arrived last year in late afternoon Paris was heaving which was a pain because people kept walking into the pavement based bike lanes which caused some serious braking not to hit people.
The next morning (can't remember what day) we cycled from near Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnesse and again it was heaving. We were grateful for the number of reverse one way streets to protect cyclists which were safe (it is a great safety idea discussed here before and doesn't impede drivers). Solid traffic and buzzing pavements, van drivers opening their doors onto you and drivers cutting you up and trying to kill you. At the Place de la Concorde there was really only a choice between death and walking.
On the return (an afternoon) Paris was at a stand still with traffic (with the mandatory leaning on horns) so it was quicker to walk on the pavement and pick up bike lanes where we could.
I must say though cycling through the countryside in France, particularly between 12 and 2 you could be forgiven for thinking you were the only humans left.
It is decidedly odd. I noticed it yesterday - away from the absolutely main tourist areas - a peculiar quietness. I ascribed it to Sunday but today it’s the same. Part of it is the replacement of ICE cars with electric. You can hear the same evolution in london. Its good. But in Paris it also a sheer lack of traffic
Maybe nothing
I'll be there in June again so it will be interesting to see. I will be cycling from Gare du Nord to the Latin Qtr for the night and then leaving from Gare d'Austerlitz the next day and returning to Gare Montparnesse and cycling to Gare du Nord a week and a bit later. 3 different workdays.
After your recent posts I was working out how much time I have spent in Paris and France and it is huge. It runs into many years, although never longer than 3 weeks at any one time. I wasn't taught French in school and have never been there long enough to pick it up to my real regret. I have spent the equivalent of a year skiing on French slopes, I have spent the equivalent of a year touring with my family when my children were young. I have worked on and off in Paris and Nice at times. I spent 3 weeks touring with a girlfriend in the 70s and I now cycle all over France every year. I have been to Disneyland 3 times which is 2 times more than I wanted to go, but kids eh.
You probably know it better than me. Tho I must have been here 20-30 times or so
I know it all pretty well - except a few corners of the east (Alsace) and Brittany/Normandy where I am headed now. I intend to see as much as possible. I’ve never been to mont st Michel. Never seen the bayeux tapestry. Never seen a d day beach
And I’ve never eaten oysters in cancale. This must change! Life is short
I was particularly taken with your exquisite reference to "Victorian" architecture in Paris.[*] Clearly a man of the world. No tourist you. Pas de poseur. Watch out for the Tudor and Georgian stuff in Brittany.
*Admittedly posted on your hero's birthday 20 April. Perhaps you overdid celebrating?
Les Halles. This is the lovely stuff they knocked down:
“In the 1850s, Victor Baltard designed the famous glass and iron structure which would house les Halles for over a century and became one of the sights of Paris; this would last until the 1970s. Having become entirely a food market, the remodeled market was known as the "Belly of Paris", as Émile Zola called it in his 1873 novel Le Ventre de Paris, which is set in the busy marketplace of the 19th century.”
The 1850s. In the Anglosphere - and indeed most of the world - that is the Victorian era. Because Britain was the superpower and occupied a quarter of the planet
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
It was not an accident. The 1960s did this and did so knowingly. If you put together the forgetfulness of brutalism (the name is not an accident) + lack of talent + building on the cheap + the dominance of the car + greed + 'government knows best' you can see the result.
A list of the places not so terribly afflicted is short, but longer than the list of places people love because brutalism worked well. Most were too small to bother with wrecking; some places so large you could not wreck it all. Stamford is my personal favourite.
Brutalism is a French name - it comes from “brute” or raw & generally exposes the raw materials the building is constructed from. You can have a brutalist wooden building just as you can a concrete one.
The problem is not brutalism per se (although it can lead to something of a “one-note” texture to buildings which doesn’t always work) but the god-awful concrete monstrosities that were built & then (crucially) not maintained properly afterwards.
The Barbican is a brutalist building, but remains a well regarded, popular place that people are keen to live in. Other tower blocks built around the same time are ... not as popular as the Barbican.
The Barbican is a very interesting piece of urbanism - fascinating to visit, and I can understand why people like it there - it's well located, and from what I understand the flats are very nice* inside. It shows what brutalism is *supposed* to be. But even at its best, it can be rather bleak. I'm glad all of our cities don't look like this.
A facet of architecture which never really gets considered in enough detail is the albedo of the building. The taller the building, the more light it cuts out, so the more important it is to be reflective. This is why glass skyscrapers can add rather than detract to the urban landscape, whereas concrete ones tend to have the opposite effect.
*One thing flats like this got right is the amount of light they tended to let in. I remember staying the night on the 12th floor of a horrible building in inner East London - but inside, the light filled up the place and the views were amazing.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
It was not an accident. The 1960s did this and did so knowingly. If you put together the forgetfulness of brutalism (the name is not an accident) + lack of talent + building on the cheap + the dominance of the car + greed + 'government knows best' you can see the result.
A list of the places not so terribly afflicted is short, but longer than the list of places people love because brutalism worked well. Most were too small to bother with wrecking; some places so large you could not wreck it all. Stamford is my personal favourite.
Brutalism is a French name - it comes from “brute” or raw & generally exposes the raw materials the building is constructed from. You can have a brutalist wooden building just as you can a concrete one.
The problem is not brutalism per se (although it can lead to something of a “one-note” texture to buildings which doesn’t always work) but the god-awful concrete monstrosities that were built & then (crucially) not maintained properly afterwards.
The Barbican is a brutalist building, but remains a well regarded, popular place that people are keen to live in. Other tower blocks built around the same time are ... not as popular as the Barbican.
The Barbican is a very interesting piece of urbanism - fascinating to visit, and I can understand why people like it there - it's well located, and from what I understand the flats are very nice* inside. It shows what brutalism is *supposed* to be. But even at its best, it can be rather bleak. I'm glad all of our cities don't look like this.
A facet of architecture which never really gets considered in enough detail is the albedo of the building. The taller the building, the more light it cuts out, so the more important it is to be reflective. This is why glass skyscrapers can add rather than detract to the urban landscape, whereas concrete ones tend to have the opposite effect.
*One thing flats like this got right is the amount of light they tended to let in. I remember staying the night on the 12th floor of a horrible building in inner East London - but inside, the light filled up the place and the views were amazing.
Oddly, my news feed has just given me a related story about memories of Sharston Baths in Manchester, designed by the architect L.C. Howitt - a man who did brutalism well. As well as Sharston Baths, he gave us Manchester Crown Court, the Toast Rack in Fallowfield (not everyone's cup of tea, but I quite liked it) and Blackley Crematorium.
Now if the area outside the walls of Chester was typified by this sort of architecture - well, it would clash slightly with the Roman core, but it wouldn't be actively ugly. But most brutalism is just brutal.
On topic it doesn't seem like Trump will be locked up before the election? It seems like the charges in the business records case wouldn't normally produce a jail sentence even if he's convicted on all charges. Meanwhile the Georgia one isn't yet scheduled, the Florida one is in the hands of a loyal Trump hack and the DC case is stalled until such time as SCOTUS see fit to unstall it.
The banter heuristic would dictate that he win the election, then go to jail shortly afterwards.
It seems unlikely that any trials other than the present one are likely to be held before the election. Having delayed matters with numerous tactics, appeals, ridiculous arguments and the like Trump is now arguing the delay is so he cannot campaign. Like almost everything else he says this is nonsense.
The problem in the present one is that the actual charges are misdemeanours and therefore time barred unless they can be upgraded to felonies. The basis for doing so is that these false entries were crimes for some other purpose, also criminal. The bases for this are somewhat problematic with the possible exception of tax fraud because Trump appears to have claimed the reimbursements of Cohen as legitimate legal expenses for his businesses. I think proving these particular payments were in the legal expenses claimed is not going to be easy.
The other bases for claiming a criminal purpose do not seem to me to get off the ground. Trying to influence an election is not a crime: believe it or not that is what our politicians are trying to do every day, no matter how ineptly. Paying for silence is not a crime either.
So, I fear that Trump has a good chance with this trial. If he is acquitted there is a real risk that this boosts him which in a tight election could be extremely concerning.
I don’t see any chance of an acquittal but a hung jury .
According to considerable quantities of publicly available information, politics in the UK *is* populated by the weird and the wealthy.
Politics used to be a part time job, generally done by the upper middle classes. The problem with the change to professional, full time politics is that it isn’t a career - more moderately paid social work and greasy poll climbing. There’s no professional development and after 10 years in Parliament, you have no career to return to - unless you’ve created a lobbying network instead of trying to do the job.
Further, the gao between what an MP does and what we expect a Minister to do is staggering. To go from running a half dozen, very junior direct reports (with direct hire and fire), to running a department. 100ks of people, with all the internal systems and politics. And a weird, rather convoluted definition of responsibility - meaning you can’t fire civil servants if they literally lie to you.
It’s not surprising that many ministers just sign the huge piles of paper they are given. They have no idea how to do anything else.
The only way we are going to fix this is either dramatically devolve some things away from Parliament (eg set up an English Parliament as well as Westminster), or dramatically increase the number of MPs (I'd go with at least 900), or both.
Malmesbury puts his case very eloquently, but in my experience it's not quite as sharp-edged as that. MPs do have a degree of influence in Ministerial decisions, if only in the sense that the Minister has to buy their consent with concessions, and PPSs - the normal route to a Ministerial role - do see things from the inside, if only as bag-carriers. In the two Ministries where I was involved (Energy and Defra), there was the same sort of division of labour with the civil service as you get in a Council executive - the Minister set out the things that most concerned him or her, the civil service delivered a report weith option, and the Minister made choices. There was little to no personnel management.
The Yes, Minister idea that civil servants essentially run the show is true of weak Ministers, but if they come in with a clear agenda the civil service generally take a professional pride in trying to make it work, unless it's Triss-level craziness leading to formal notifications of dissent. I can't see that having another layer of government (e.g. an English Parliament) would help any of this, but separating the social work side might if every constituency had an elected Ombudsman who was expected to do just that, and MPs were banned from any official role in casework.
What policy do you find particularly crazy about Truss's time that warranted such a rebellion?
Not allowing the OBR to look at the unfunded tax cuts?
It wasn't that she instructed the Civil Service that there was a policy to be implemented, that it would be implemented, and she wanted realistic plans for doing so. She decided pretty well without consultation with civil service, financial markets, OBR, or even her own Cabinet colleagues that she was going to radically change direction, and announced it as a fait accompli.
WIth predictable consequences.
And all of that with no mandate other than from 80k tory members.
Mr. Monkey, been a while since I read whichever book it was in, but it was suggested that if Hitler had listened to Guderian[sp] and gone properly for Moscow/Stalin he might have won.
Yeah Hitler diverted resources to the south in summer 41, against the generals' wishes, halting the drive to Moscow for a crucial few weeks.
Though I don't think, even if Moscow had fallen, Stalin would have sought for peace. Moscow, like Stalingrad, though valuable psychologically, wasn't in and of itself crucial, I don't think. I could be wrong.
Halder, despite initial optimism in the early stages of Barbarossa, knew by August or September '41, something like that, that they could not defeat the Soviets. For one because they had huge reserves the Germans hadn't know about. So Hitler got rid of him.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Well, it wouldn't have happened.
Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is another question.
Sure, the generalship of the Somme was inept, but that's partly because the generals were wrestling with a new type of warfare. And while their errors came at a terrible human cost, the lessons learned in that battle (particularly by the likes of Currie, watching closely from the reserve trenches) ultimately paved the way for the breaking of the German army in 1918.
"Mud, Blood and Poppycock" by Gordon Corrigan is a useful corrective to the Blackadder depiction of British and Imperial Generalship.
The main cheerleader for Haig and the other British WW1 commanders for many years was John Terraine. But he was just as biased in favour of Haig as Clarke had been against him. Indeed he descibed Haig as "the man who led the British Army in its most majestic series of victories", which I would politely suggest marks him as something of a fucking lunatic.
The Hundred Days at the end of the war was an impressive achievement.
Against an enemy that was effectively already defeated, starved of supplies and facing collapse behind the lines.
We are risking a re-enactment in the Ukraine unless those munitions get there seriously fast. Thankfully, logistics is something the Americans have always been spectacularly good at.
A hand carved finish doesn’t prevent something being Brutalist.
It’s a pretty strict definition of brutalist, which depends on the finish of the concrete. I get that the word comes from “raw concrete”, but still
I agree with you. The Barbican is brutalist. One of the few successful examples of it in the UK. Preston bus shelter is another; The national theatre on a good day
According to considerable quantities of publicly available information, politics in the UK *is* populated by the weird and the wealthy.
Politics used to be a part time job, generally done by the upper middle classes. The problem with the change to professional, full time politics is that it isn’t a career - more moderately paid social work and greasy poll climbing. There’s no professional development and after 10 years in Parliament, you have no career to return to - unless you’ve created a lobbying network instead of trying to do the job.
Further, the gao between what an MP does and what we expect a Minister to do is staggering. To go from running a half dozen, very junior direct reports (with direct hire and fire), to running a department. 100ks of people, with all the internal systems and politics. And a weird, rather convoluted definition of responsibility - meaning you can’t fire civil servants if they literally lie to you.
It’s not surprising that many ministers just sign the huge piles of paper they are given. They have no idea how to do anything else.
The only way we are going to fix this is either dramatically devolve some things away from Parliament (eg set up an English Parliament as well as Westminster), or dramatically increase the number of MPs (I'd go with at least 900), or both.
Malmesbury puts his case very eloquently, but in my experience it's not quite as sharp-edged as that. MPs do have a degree of influence in Ministerial decisions, if only in the sense that the Minister has to buy their consent with concessions, and PPSs - the normal route to a Ministerial role - do see things from the inside, if only as bag-carriers. In the two Ministries where I was involved (Energy and Defra), there was the same sort of division of labour with the civil service as you get in a Council executive - the Minister set out the things that most concerned him or her, the civil service delivered a report weith option, and the Minister made choices. There was little to no personnel management.
The Yes, Minister idea that civil servants essentially run the show is true of weak Ministers, but if they come in with a clear agenda the civil service generally take a professional pride in trying to make it work, unless it's Triss-level craziness leading to formal notifications of dissent. I can't see that having another layer of government (e.g. an English Parliament) would help any of this, but separating the social work side might if every constituency had an elected Ombudsman who was expected to do just that, and MPs were banned from any official role in casework.
What policy do you find particularly crazy about Truss's time that warranted such a rebellion?
Not allowing the OBR to look at the unfunded tax cuts?
It wasn't that she instructed the Civil Service that there was a policy to be implemented, that it would be implemented, and she wanted realistic plans for doing so. She decided pretty well without consultation with civil service, financial markets, OBR, or even her own Cabinet colleagues that she was going to radically change direction, and announced it as a fait accompli.
WIth predictable consequences.
And all of that with no mandate other than from 80k tory members.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
Yes, generals did need to be kept away from the front line but it did not help that they arrived in staff cars and uniforms that enemy snipers could easily identify, just like Nelson at Trafalgar.
Not just Trafalgar. There were reasons he arrived there with one eye, one arm and one leg.
But Nelson very likely made a significant, perhaps decisive difference to the outcome of the naval conflict with France.
It's hard to think the same of any WWI general.
Indeed he did. Doesn't mean that standing still on the quarterdeck fully exposed in full regalia was not suicidal.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
The slaughter of officers in Austria-Hungarian army is astonishing in early part of war in eastern front. Not the most senior ranks but anything below.
When my father was serving in Northern Ireland some officers insisted on going on patrol with their pistols, presumably to give the IRA a clue who to shoot. My father always took a regulation rifle. He found their attitude bewildering but it is a long tradition of stupidity dressed up as bravery in all forces.
What was the life expectancy of an infantry 2nd Lt. in 1915 or so? Two weeks?
Six weeks, iirc. Yes, the subalterns straight from university or public school fared badly; Lieutenant George in Blackadder has a speech about how all his pals are now dead.
Mr. Monkey, been a while since I read whichever book it was in, but it was suggested that if Hitler had listened to Guderian[sp] and gone properly for Moscow/Stalin he might have won.
Yeah Hitler diverted resources to the south in summer 41, against the generals' wishes, halting the drive to Moscow for a crucial few weeks.
Though I don't think, even if Moscow had fallen, Stalin would have sought for peace. Moscow, like Stalingrad, though valuable psychologically, wasn't in and of itself crucial, I don't think. I could be wrong.
Halder, despite initial optimism in the early stages of Barbarossa, knew by August or September '41, something like that, that they could not defeat the Soviets. For one because they had huge reserves the Germans hadn't know about. So Hitler got rid of him.
Agreed. Hitler got distracted by Yugoslavia but had Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad all fallen the likelihood is the Soviets would have stopped the Germans further east.
On topic it doesn't seem like Trump will be locked up before the election? It seems like the charges in the business records case wouldn't normally produce a jail sentence even if he's convicted on all charges. Meanwhile the Georgia one isn't yet scheduled, the Florida one is in the hands of a loyal Trump hack and the DC case is stalled until such time as SCOTUS see fit to unstall it.
The banter heuristic would dictate that he win the election, then go to jail shortly afterwards.
It seems unlikely that any trials other than the present one are likely to be held before the election. Having delayed matters with numerous tactics, appeals, ridiculous arguments and the like Trump is now arguing the delay is so he cannot campaign. Like almost everything else he says this is nonsense.
The problem in the present one is that the actual charges are misdemeanours and therefore time barred unless they can be upgraded to felonies. The basis for doing so is that these false entries were crimes for some other purpose, also criminal. The bases for this are somewhat problematic with the possible exception of tax fraud because Trump appears to have claimed the reimbursements of Cohen as legitimate legal expenses for his businesses. I think proving these particular payments were in the legal expenses claimed is not going to be easy.
The other bases for claiming a criminal purpose do not seem to me to get off the ground. Trying to influence an election is not a crime: believe it or not that is what our politicians are trying to do every day, no matter how ineptly. Paying for silence is not a crime either.
So, I fear that Trump has a good chance with this trial. If he is acquitted there is a real risk that this boosts him which in a tight election could be extremely concerning.
I don’t see any chance of an acquittal but a hung jury .
That's an acquittal, or at least that is the way Trump will present it.
Mon dieu. The upper Loire is dull. I shall spare you photographs of endless flat and vasty fields
A lot of France is like that in my experience. A good 70% of the country is Lincolnshire.
(Not that there's anything inherently wrong with Lincolnshire, in moderation. But France offers just such a dizzyingly vast amount of it.)
Around Chartres is desperately boringly flat. SW France is also very very flat but I cycled Bordeaux to Biarritz 3 years ago (I think) and that was stunning even though flat (a lot of pine forests). It was our best trip I think. Dune of Pilat is something to behold.
I did Poitier to the West coast and back to Angouleme. That is pretty flat (I pick flat places to cycle, I'm not daft) and that was really nice. I don't get this area. House prices are dirt cheap. It is pretty and it apparently has the greatest amount of sunshine in France except for the Mediterranean area. So why is it cheap to buy a house there?
It’s cheap to buy a house almost everywhere. There are spare houses. Rural depopulation. Our house is in the far South of Burgundy, only an hour from Lyon and 2 hours from Geneva. Beautiful rolling hills, Romanesque churches, hundreds of mediaeval chateaux dotting the landscape.
You can still pick up an old golden stone village house with 2 bedrooms and a little garden for €90k.
Whenever I hear these things I always hear an internal voice saying Ooh that’s tempting
And then I think of the practicalities. What do I actually gain from owning a property abroad. I will have to maintain it. I will have to worry about it when it’s empty. I will have to go there lots to justify the ownership and I love seeing NEW places - and indeed it’s half my job. I will quickly tire of the same old place in France and rural France can be deadly dull, especially in winter
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
This old stick again? The first world war generals are generally rather unfairly maligned. At the time of his death Haig was a national hero and many of the generals were innovative, and cared deeply for their men. Even on the first day of the Somme, much of what happened was down to generals trying to help their men. Recall that most of the troops were green volunteers - Kitchener's men. lacking the experience of the pre-war army. Most expected that the long pre-battle bombardment of the German lines would have killed everything, leaving the troops to just occupy land. Of course this proved not to be the case for the bulk of the British and Commonwealth attack, but was very much true for the French, attacking on the same day in the southern sector, and for the British adjacent. British success in the south even led to the cavalry being called up, but nothing came of the opportunity.
What did for generals in the first world war was that there was no way to communicate to the front line during battles. Just 25 years later radio allowed instant contact and everything that followed (artilliary strikes, fighter-bombers targetting tanks etc). Prior to the first world war the battle fields were smaller and thus if not in direct sight, as galloper could be send quickly with a message. The poor benighted general in the first word war could do neither - once battle was joined it was down to the men at the front.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
It was not an accident. The 1960s did this and did so knowingly. If you put together the forgetfulness of brutalism (the name is not an accident) + lack of talent + building on the cheap + the dominance of the car + greed + 'government knows best' you can see the result.
A list of the places not so terribly afflicted is short, but longer than the list of places people love because brutalism worked well. Most were too small to bother with wrecking; some places so large you could not wreck it all. Stamford is my personal favourite.
Brutalism is a French name - it comes from “brute” or raw & generally exposes the raw materials the building is constructed from. You can have a brutalist wooden building just as you can a concrete one.
The problem is not brutalism per se (although it can lead to something of a “one-note” texture to buildings which doesn’t always work) but the god-awful concrete monstrosities that were built & then (crucially) not maintained properly afterwards.
The Barbican is a brutalist building, but remains a well regarded, popular place that people are keen to live in. Other tower blocks built around the same time are ... not as popular as the Barbican.
The Barbican is a very interesting piece of urbanism - fascinating to visit, and I can understand why people like it there - it's well located, and from what I understand the flats are very nice* inside. It shows what brutalism is *supposed* to be. But even at its best, it can be rather bleak. I'm glad all of our cities don't look like this.
A facet of architecture which never really gets considered in enough detail is the albedo of the building. The taller the building, the more light it cuts out, so the more important it is to be reflective. This is why glass skyscrapers can add rather than detract to the urban landscape, whereas concrete ones tend to have the opposite effect.
*One thing flats like this got right is the amount of light they tended to let in. I remember staying the night on the 12th floor of a horrible building in inner East London - but inside, the light filled up the place and the views were amazing.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
It was not an accident. The 1960s did this and did so knowingly. If you put together the forgetfulness of brutalism (the name is not an accident) + lack of talent + building on the cheap + the dominance of the car + greed + 'government knows best' you can see the result.
A list of the places not so terribly afflicted is short, but longer than the list of places people love because brutalism worked well. Most were too small to bother with wrecking; some places so large you could not wreck it all. Stamford is my personal favourite.
Brutalism is a French name - it comes from “brute” or raw & generally exposes the raw materials the building is constructed from. You can have a brutalist wooden building just as you can a concrete one.
The problem is not brutalism per se (although it can lead to something of a “one-note” texture to buildings which doesn’t always work) but the god-awful concrete monstrosities that were built & then (crucially) not maintained properly afterwards.
The Barbican is a brutalist building, but remains a well regarded, popular place that people are keen to live in. Other tower blocks built around the same time are ... not as popular as the Barbican.
The Barbican is a very interesting piece of urbanism - fascinating to visit, and I can understand why people like it there - it's well located, and from what I understand the flats are very nice* inside. It shows what brutalism is *supposed* to be. But even at its best, it can be rather bleak. I'm glad all of our cities don't look like this.
A facet of architecture which never really gets considered in enough detail is the albedo of the building. The taller the building, the more light it cuts out, so the more important it is to be reflective. This is why glass skyscrapers can add rather than detract to the urban landscape, whereas concrete ones tend to have the opposite effect.
*One thing flats like this got right is the amount of light they tended to let in. I remember staying the night on the 12th floor of a horrible building in inner East London - but inside, the light filled up the place and the views were amazing.
Oddly, my news feed has just given me a related story about memories of Sharston Baths in Manchester, designed by the architect L.C. Howitt - a man who did brutalism well. As well as Sharston Baths, he gave us Manchester Crown Court, the Toast Rack in Fallowfield (not everyone's cup of tea, but I quite liked it) and Blackley Crematorium.
(pictures snipped.)
Now if the area outside the walls of Chester was typified by this sort of architecture - well, it would clash slightly with the Roman core, but it wouldn't be actively ugly. But most brutalism is just brutal.
The value of traditional educational architecture — along with aesthetic delight — is how it inculcates a sense of heritage, belonging, and responsibility in students.
The second broad category is what we might call Experimental.
Universities and schools are not just about learning things by rote — they are also about discovering new ideas, challenging old ones, and searching for novel approaches to old problems.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Given the technologies available (industrial mass production, and weapons of mass killing like the machine gun), and the lack of means for rapid manoeuvre outside of fixed infrastructure like rail, battles like the Somme and Verdun were pretty well inevitable if neither side was prepared to sue for peace.
The real tragedy was that the war started in the first place.
What was that quote - WWI started because no one could be bothered not to go to war.
Or somesuch.
I read my Moltke and Causes of the First World War like everyone else and about all i could get out of it was that everyone expected everyone else to go to war and hence "we" might as well/had better do it now as later.
I know it is probably an oversimplification but I have always like AJP Taylor's Railway Timetables theory for one of the causes of WW1.
I think there's great merit in the thinking that it was a technological watershed or coming of age. And something had to be done with it all.
I must have another read of my wife's grandfathers WWI diary. He wasn't a general, just an Other Rank, turned down as unfit in 1914 (IIRC), then passed as fit two years later. He wasn't at the Somme but he got involved in some very unpleasant situations. As I recall he felt it was his 'patriotic duty' to try again.
It's such an alien world to us, I think. People's motivations, that love of empire and a deep, almost unthinking, patriotism that, to me at least, seems hard to understand. I had one great-grandad volunteer in 1914 and get sent to Gallipoli and then France (missing his division going over the top in the latter stages of the Somme because he was on leave) before getting his leg shot off in 1917, thus avoiding Passchendaele but having a stump that never properly healed, and another who resisted until being conscripted in 1917 and seemingly never seeing anything too sticky.
Ah yes, your relative was on leave. As shown in Oh What a Lovely War, soldiers on leave from France could return to Britain for a short holiday. Those simply rotated out of the front lines tended to be kept busy with drills as the top brass feared they'd forget how to hold a rifle or some such.
Thanks for your reply of a few nights ago @luckyguy1983. I have not been on PB much over the last few days (I have been leading a proper life for a change) and just been dipping in and out occasionally so sorry for the late response to your nice reply. Although our conversation wasn't too heated compared to others I do like to be polite at all times and I definitely fell below my standards the other night and it was entirely my fault. I made what I thought was a witty piece of sarcasm (which it clearly wasn't as I got no likes) and I went a bit downhill from there.
Actually it wasn't a case of Trump Deranged Syndrome on my part (I think you probably know that and were making a general point, with which I agree), but it was a case of me being a logic pedant. I don't know why because although it is an area I specialised in at University I still make as many cockups as the next person. Also I am rubbish at expressing myself in plain English.
Obviously I don't want to revisit that discussion, but I would like to revisit my logic by expressing it in logical terms. I won't use logic notation (mainly because I haven't a clue where the keys are on this damn keyboard).
So: In response to someone else's post you posted
Statement A (An accepted fact) Statement B (A sincerely held and well researched opinion)
I posted
Statement C (Another accepted fact)
My argument was that C showed that A and B were inconsistent (And I only did so because I was being an arse)
You responded that you did not deduce B from A and made that point by saying you used an 'AND' not a 'THEREFORE' to prove that point
I accept that but that wasn't the point I was raising. My logic had more than 1 step.
Here it is:
A and C had a one to one relationship. If you are relying on A in an argument you must also be willing to rely on C.
However if C is true then B is false because they directly contradicted one another.
Hence the same goes for A.
So you can rely on A but if you do so B will not be true.
Or you can have B but then you mustn't rely on A.
I've probably cocked up again somewhere in there, as usual. Anyway I just posted to show my thought processes.
My memory of the discussion is somewhat hazy, but you must remember that in a criminal trial the crime must be proven beyond all reasonable doubt. The same is not true of whatever the process was that found DT liable for damages. The two have greatly differing levels of credibility - if the second had the weight of the first, Trump would not still be a free man.
As part of my occasional series to cheer up the people of Britain about the state of their country, by way of comparison with another, I present this story about a rather special achievement by the gardaí. They've managed to seize the same shotgun from criminals twice!
"A shotgun that was supposed to be in the possession of gardaí since 2009 was seized for a second time last year during an operation into a feud between two organised crime groups."
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Given the technologies available (industrial mass production, and weapons of mass killing like the machine gun), and the lack of means for rapid manoeuvre outside of fixed infrastructure like rail, battles like the Somme and Verdun were pretty well inevitable if neither side was prepared to sue for peace.
The real tragedy was that the war started in the first place.
What was that quote - WWI started because no one could be bothered not to go to war.
Or somesuch.
I read my Moltke and Causes of the First World War like everyone else and about all i could get out of it was that everyone expected everyone else to go to war and hence "we" might as well/had better do it now as later.
I know it is probably an oversimplification but I have always like AJP Taylor's Railway Timetables theory for one of the causes of WW1.
I think there's great merit in the thinking that it was a technological watershed or coming of age. And something had to be done with it all.
I must have another read of my wife's grandfathers WWI diary. He wasn't a general, just an Other Rank, turned down as unfit in 1914 (IIRC), then passed as fit two years later. He wasn't at the Somme but he got involved in some very unpleasant situations. As I recall he felt it was his 'patriotic duty' to try again.
It's such an alien world to us, I think. People's motivations, that love of empire and a deep, almost unthinking, patriotism that, to me at least, seems hard to understand. I had one great-grandad volunteer in 1914 and get sent to Gallipoli and then France (missing his division going over the top in the latter stages of the Somme because he was on leave) before getting his leg shot off in 1917, thus avoiding Passchendaele but having a stump that never properly healed, and another who resisted until being conscripted in 1917 and seemingly never seeing anything too sticky.
Ah yes, your relative was on leave. As shown in Oh What a Lovely War, soldiers on leave from France could return to Britain for a short holiday. Those simply rotated out of the front lines tended to be kept busy with drills as the top brass feared they'd forget how to hold a rifle or some such.
I've not seen that film, I must watch it.
I think it was generally something like a few days in the trenches, maybe a week, then they'd be rotated out for a couple of weeks or so. But as you say, when out of the frontline they were either training or very often doing fatigues - someone had to repair the roads and trenches and lug all the ammo, shells, food, water and other supplies hither and thither. Physically hard work often done by the 'resting' infantry.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Given the technologies available (industrial mass production, and weapons of mass killing like the machine gun), and the lack of means for rapid manoeuvre outside of fixed infrastructure like rail, battles like the Somme and Verdun were pretty well inevitable if neither side was prepared to sue for peace.
The real tragedy was that the war started in the first place.
What was that quote - WWI started because no one could be bothered not to go to war.
Or somesuch.
I read my Moltke and Causes of the First World War like everyone else and about all i could get out of it was that everyone expected everyone else to go to war and hence "we" might as well/had better do it now as later.
I know it is probably an oversimplification but I have always like AJP Taylor's Railway Timetables theory for one of the causes of WW1.
I think there's great merit in the thinking that it was a technological watershed or coming of age. And something had to be done with it all.
I must have another read of my wife's grandfathers WWI diary. He wasn't a general, just an Other Rank, turned down as unfit in 1914 (IIRC), then passed as fit two years later. He wasn't at the Somme but he got involved in some very unpleasant situations. As I recall he felt it was his 'patriotic duty' to try again.
It's such an alien world to us, I think. People's motivations, that love of empire and a deep, almost unthinking, patriotism that, to me at least, seems hard to understand. I had one great-grandad volunteer in 1914 and get sent to Gallipoli and then France (missing his division going over the top in the latter stages of the Somme because he was on leave) before getting his leg shot off in 1917, thus avoiding Passchendaele but having a stump that never properly healed, and another who resisted until being conscripted in 1917 and seemingly never seeing anything too sticky.
Ah yes, your relative was on leave. As shown in Oh What a Lovely War, soldiers on leave from France could return to Britain for a short holiday. Those simply rotated out of the front lines tended to be kept busy with drills as the top brass feared they'd forget how to hold a rifle or some such.
I've not seen that film, I must watch it.
I think it was generally something like a few days in the trenches, maybe a week, then they'd be rotated out for a couple of weeks or so. But as you say, when out of the frontline they were either training or very often doing fatigues - someone had to repair the roads and trenches and lug all the ammo, shells, food, water and other supplies hither and thither. Physically hard work often done by the 'resting' infantry.
It’s an absolutely brilliant movie, a work of art
The ending is one of the most moving codas in the history of cinema
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
Yes, generals did need to be kept away from the front line but it did not help that they arrived in staff cars and uniforms that enemy snipers could easily identify, just like Nelson at Trafalgar.
Not just Trafalgar. There were reasons he arrived there with one eye, one arm and one leg.
But Nelson very likely made a significant, perhaps decisive difference to the outcome of the naval conflict with France.
It's hard to think the same of any WWI general.
Indeed he did. Doesn't mean that standing still on the quarterdeck fully exposed in full regalia was not suicidal.
Because of the way naval battles worked, back then, there was nothing for the Admiral to do, really, after the fleets had joined action.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
The slaughter of officers in Austria-Hungarian army is astonishing in early part of war in eastern front. Not the most senior ranks but anything below.
When my father was serving in Northern Ireland some officers insisted on going on patrol with their pistols, presumably to give the IRA a clue who to shoot. My father always took a regulation rifle. He found their attitude bewildering but it is a long tradition of stupidity dressed up as bravery in all forces.
What was the life expectancy of an infantry 2nd Lt. in 1915 or so? Two weeks?
Six weeks, iirc. Yes, the subalterns straight from university or public school fared badly; Lieutenant George in Blackadder has a speech about how all his pals are now dead.
Trying to source this without success. Seldon & Walsh give six weeks as the life expectancy of a pilot (20 minutes in Blackadder). Now I must hasten to Sainsbury's. S&W give one reason for high officer death rates at the front: they were a lot taller than working class privates, and their heads would stick up above shallow trenches!
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
It was not an accident. The 1960s did this and did so knowingly. If you put together the forgetfulness of brutalism (the name is not an accident) + lack of talent + building on the cheap + the dominance of the car + greed + 'government knows best' you can see the result.
A list of the places not so terribly afflicted is short, but longer than the list of places people love because brutalism worked well. Most were too small to bother with wrecking; some places so large you could not wreck it all. Stamford is my personal favourite.
Brutalism is a French name - it comes from “brute” or raw & generally exposes the raw materials the building is constructed from. You can have a brutalist wooden building just as you can a concrete one.
The problem is not brutalism per se (although it can lead to something of a “one-note” texture to buildings which doesn’t always work) but the god-awful concrete monstrosities that were built & then (crucially) not maintained properly afterwards.
The Barbican is a brutalist building, but remains a well regarded, popular place that people are keen to live in. Other tower blocks built around the same time are ... not as popular as the Barbican.
The Barbican is a very interesting piece of urbanism - fascinating to visit, and I can understand why people like it there - it's well located, and from what I understand the flats are very nice* inside. It shows what brutalism is *supposed* to be. But even at its best, it can be rather bleak. I'm glad all of our cities don't look like this.
A facet of architecture which never really gets considered in enough detail is the albedo of the building. The taller the building, the more light it cuts out, so the more important it is to be reflective. This is why glass skyscrapers can add rather than detract to the urban landscape, whereas concrete ones tend to have the opposite effect.
*One thing flats like this got right is the amount of light they tended to let in. I remember staying the night on the 12th floor of a horrible building in inner East London - but inside, the light filled up the place and the views were amazing.
Defending brutalism on the basis that we're not spending enough on polishing the pebble dash is rather daft. The buildings are fundamentally not good to look at. The brutalists deliberately eschewed long-held notions of architectural beauty - and lo, their buildings were fuck ugly. None should remain on the planet. We have the ability to document them in great detail without having to live amongst them.
The problem in the present one is that the actual charges are misdemeanours and therefore time barred unless they can be upgraded to felonies. The basis for doing so is that these false entries were crimes for some other purpose, also criminal. The bases for this are somewhat problematic with the possible exception of tax fraud because Trump appears to have claimed the reimbursements of Cohen as legitimate legal expenses for his businesses. I think proving these particular payments were in the legal expenses claimed is not going to be easy.
IANAL but just reading what the prosecution say it seems like proving that these particular payments were in the legal expenses claimed is going to be easy because not only will the recipient testify to it, they've got a tape of him and Trump setting up the scheme.
The other bases for claiming a criminal purpose do not seem to me to get off the ground. Trying to influence an election is not a crime: believe it or not that is what our politicians are trying to do every day, no matter how ineptly. Paying for silence is not a crime either.
Right so it wouldn't have been a crime if Trump had sent the money to Stormy Daniels himself then declared it to the Federal Elections Commission. But IIUC it is a crime to fail to declare it, assuming it's done for the purposes of the campaign. What Trump can try to persuade the court is that he didn't do it for the purposes of the campaign, he did it for some other purpose, like preventing his wife from finding out, so it wasn't a campaign-related expense. But this is going to be complicated for Trump because he apparently asked Cohen to try to stall Daniels until after the election then renege on the deal.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
The slaughter of officers in Austria-Hungarian army is astonishing in early part of war in eastern front. Not the most senior ranks but anything below.
When my father was serving in Northern Ireland some officers insisted on going on patrol with their pistols, presumably to give the IRA a clue who to shoot. My father always took a regulation rifle. He found their attitude bewildering but it is a long tradition of stupidity dressed up as bravery in all forces.
What was the life expectancy of an infantry 2nd Lt. in 1915 or so? Two weeks?
Six weeks, iirc. Yes, the subalterns straight from university or public school fared badly; Lieutenant George in Blackadder has a speech about how all his pals are now dead.
I have often wondered whether the significant thinning out of the upper and upper middle classes in WW1 played a role in the startling social mobility observed in the 1950s and 1960s, when they would have been occupying senior positions and their children rising through the professions. Their absence must have created spaces for others to fill. I remember visiting a National Trust house and reading the note accompanying the pre-WW1 photo of the large aristocratic family who had lived there - the boys and girls in their starched collars and crinoline dresses became a long list of unmarried daughters and sons killed in the Great War.
I expect if the boats keep coming Sunak will say that the migrants think Labour might form the next government and have said they’ll scrap the policy so it’s their fault .
Thanks for your reply of a few nights ago @luckyguy1983. I have not been on PB much over the last few days (I have been leading a proper life for a change) and just been dipping in and out occasionally so sorry for the late response to your nice reply. Although our conversation wasn't too heated compared to others I do like to be polite at all times and I definitely fell below my standards the other night and it was entirely my fault. I made what I thought was a witty piece of sarcasm (which it clearly wasn't as I got no likes) and I went a bit downhill from there.
Actually it wasn't a case of Trump Deranged Syndrome on my part (I think you probably know that and were making a general point, with which I agree), but it was a case of me being a logic pedant. I don't know why because although it is an area I specialised in at University I still make as many cockups as the next person. Also I am rubbish at expressing myself in plain English.
Obviously I don't want to revisit that discussion, but I would like to revisit my logic by expressing it in logical terms. I won't use logic notation (mainly because I haven't a clue where the keys are on this damn keyboard).
So: In response to someone else's post you posted
Statement A (An accepted fact) Statement B (A sincerely held and well researched opinion)
I posted
Statement C (Another accepted fact)
My argument was that C showed that A and B were inconsistent (And I only did so because I was being an arse)
You responded that you did not deduce B from A and made that point by saying you used an 'AND' not a 'THEREFORE' to prove that point
I accept that but that wasn't the point I was raising. My logic had more than 1 step.
Here it is:
A and C had a one to one relationship. If you are relying on A in an argument you must also be willing to rely on C.
However if C is true then B is false because they directly contradicted one another.
Hence the same goes for A.
So you can rely on A but if you do so B will not be true.
Or you can have B but then you mustn't rely on A.
I've probably cocked up again somewhere in there, as usual. Anyway I just posted to show my thought processes.
My memory of the discussion is somewhat hazy, but you must remember that in a criminal trial the crime must be proven beyond all reasonable doubt. The same is not true of whatever the process was that found DT liable for damages. The two have greatly differing levels of credibility - if the second had the weight of the first, Trump would not still be a free man.
Not wanting to get into it again, but yes I know the difference between 'beyond reasonable doubt ' and 'balance of probability ' and the fact that he may fall fail of one and not the other, but that wasn't the point I was making. If you want to see the logic flow (to be honest I wouldn't if I was you 😁) look at the logic flow in my post and the 3 statements made and see if there is a fail in the logic
I didn't have an issue with either of your individual statements. As I said I was just being an arse by being a pedant.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
The slaughter of officers in Austria-Hungarian army is astonishing in early part of war in eastern front. Not the most senior ranks but anything below.
When my father was serving in Northern Ireland some officers insisted on going on patrol with their pistols, presumably to give the IRA a clue who to shoot. My father always took a regulation rifle. He found their attitude bewildering but it is a long tradition of stupidity dressed up as bravery in all forces.
What was the life expectancy of an infantry 2nd Lt. in 1915 or so? Two weeks?
Six weeks, iirc. Yes, the subalterns straight from university or public school fared badly; Lieutenant George in Blackadder has a speech about how all his pals are now dead.
Trying to source this without success. Seldon & Walsh give six weeks as the life expectancy of a pilot (20 minutes in Blackadder). Now I must hasten to Sainsbury's. S&W give one reason for high officer death rates at the front: they were a lot taller than working class privates, and their heads would stick up above shallow trenches!
For my undergrad dissertation I did a lot of research in the Liddle Collection at Leeds, and I came across the papers of one officer who said something along the lines of 'when you see the poor physical condition of the working-class soldiers it is absolutely shocking' - not those exact words but that was certainly the gist of it.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
It was not an accident. The 1960s did this and did so knowingly. If you put together the forgetfulness of brutalism (the name is not an accident) + lack of talent + building on the cheap + the dominance of the car + greed + 'government knows best' you can see the result.
A list of the places not so terribly afflicted is short, but longer than the list of places people love because brutalism worked well. Most were too small to bother with wrecking; some places so large you could not wreck it all. Stamford is my personal favourite.
Brutalism is a French name - it comes from “brute” or raw & generally exposes the raw materials the building is constructed from. You can have a brutalist wooden building just as you can a concrete one.
The problem is not brutalism per se (although it can lead to something of a “one-note” texture to buildings which doesn’t always work) but the god-awful concrete monstrosities that were built & then (crucially) not maintained properly afterwards.
The Barbican is a brutalist building, but remains a well regarded, popular place that people are keen to live in. Other tower blocks built around the same time are ... not as popular as the Barbican.
The Barbican is a very interesting piece of urbanism - fascinating to visit, and I can understand why people like it there - it's well located, and from what I understand the flats are very nice* inside. It shows what brutalism is *supposed* to be. But even at its best, it can be rather bleak. I'm glad all of our cities don't look like this.
A facet of architecture which never really gets considered in enough detail is the albedo of the building. The taller the building, the more light it cuts out, so the more important it is to be reflective. This is why glass skyscrapers can add rather than detract to the urban landscape, whereas concrete ones tend to have the opposite effect.
*One thing flats like this got right is the amount of light they tended to let in. I remember staying the night on the 12th floor of a horrible building in inner East London - but inside, the light filled up the place and the views were amazing.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
It was not an accident. The 1960s did this and did so knowingly. If you put together the forgetfulness of brutalism (the name is not an accident) + lack of talent + building on the cheap + the dominance of the car + greed + 'government knows best' you can see the result.
A list of the places not so terribly afflicted is short, but longer than the list of places people love because brutalism worked well. Most were too small to bother with wrecking; some places so large you could not wreck it all. Stamford is my personal favourite.
Brutalism is a French name - it comes from “brute” or raw & generally exposes the raw materials the building is constructed from. You can have a brutalist wooden building just as you can a concrete one.
The problem is not brutalism per se (although it can lead to something of a “one-note” texture to buildings which doesn’t always work) but the god-awful concrete monstrosities that were built & then (crucially) not maintained properly afterwards.
The Barbican is a brutalist building, but remains a well regarded, popular place that people are keen to live in. Other tower blocks built around the same time are ... not as popular as the Barbican.
The Barbican is a very interesting piece of urbanism - fascinating to visit, and I can understand why people like it there - it's well located, and from what I understand the flats are very nice* inside. It shows what brutalism is *supposed* to be. But even at its best, it can be rather bleak. I'm glad all of our cities don't look like this.
A facet of architecture which never really gets considered in enough detail is the albedo of the building. The taller the building, the more light it cuts out, so the more important it is to be reflective. This is why glass skyscrapers can add rather than detract to the urban landscape, whereas concrete ones tend to have the opposite effect.
*One thing flats like this got right is the amount of light they tended to let in. I remember staying the night on the 12th floor of a horrible building in inner East London - but inside, the light filled up the place and the views were amazing.
Oddly, my news feed has just given me a related story about memories of Sharston Baths in Manchester, designed by the architect L.C. Howitt - a man who did brutalism well. As well as Sharston Baths, he gave us Manchester Crown Court, the Toast Rack in Fallowfield (not everyone's cup of tea, but I quite liked it) and Blackley Crematorium.
(pictures snipped.)
Now if the area outside the walls of Chester was typified by this sort of architecture - well, it would clash slightly with the Roman core, but it wouldn't be actively ugly. But most brutalism is just brutal.
The value of traditional educational architecture — along with aesthetic delight — is how it inculcates a sense of heritage, belonging, and responsibility in students.
The second broad category is what we might call Experimental.
Universities and schools are not just about learning things by rote — they are also about discovering new ideas, challenging old ones, and searching for novel approaches to old problems.
I like that guy on Twitter. You kind of always know what he’s going to say, but he says it rather well and uses excellent examples and photos
That last building is quite a shocker
I was wondering this morning what it is like to be an architect of something hideously dull and drab - like that - or actually hideous and marring - like the Tour Montparnasse which I passed under at 10am
It’s so ugly and intrusive and everyone hates it and would love to knock it down. It is an obvious blemish on a beautiful cityscape
So what do the architects think of themselves when they commit such a vile sin? We all have to live with the results of their incompetence or greed or stupidity, it’s not like a crappy novel or rubbish movie you can ignore
Indeed it might be fun to interview one of these architects and interrogate them on this. Don’t you feel SHAME?
I sincerely wonder if some do, they can’t all be arrogant sociopathic twats
On topic it doesn't seem like Trump will be locked up before the election? It seems like the charges in the business records case wouldn't normally produce a jail sentence even if he's convicted on all charges. Meanwhile the Georgia one isn't yet scheduled, the Florida one is in the hands of a loyal Trump hack and the DC case is stalled until such time as SCOTUS see fit to unstall it.
The banter heuristic would dictate that he win the election, then go to jail shortly afterwards.
It seems unlikely that any trials other than the present one are likely to be held before the election. Having delayed matters with numerous tactics, appeals, ridiculous arguments and the like Trump is now arguing the delay is so he cannot campaign. Like almost everything else he says this is nonsense.
The problem in the present one is that the actual charges are misdemeanours and therefore time barred unless they can be upgraded to felonies. The basis for doing so is that these false entries were crimes for some other purpose, also criminal. The bases for this are somewhat problematic with the possible exception of tax fraud because Trump appears to have claimed the reimbursements of Cohen as legitimate legal expenses for his businesses. I think proving these particular payments were in the legal expenses claimed is not going to be easy.
The other bases for claiming a criminal purpose do not seem to me to get off the ground. Trying to influence an election is not a crime: believe it or not that is what our politicians are trying to do every day, no matter how ineptly. Paying for silence is not a crime either.
So, I fear that Trump has a good chance with this trial. If he is acquitted there is a real risk that this boosts him which in a tight election could be extremely concerning.
I don’t see any chance of an acquittal but a hung jury .
There are 34 charges Trump faces in NY, so it only takes 1 or 2 of those for a conviction.
The problem for Trump is that this trial is held in overwhelmingly Democrat NY, while juries should be impartial inevitably that may have an impact. If the trial was in Texas or Ohio or even Michigan or Arizona he would be on safer ground
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
The slaughter of officers in Austria-Hungarian army is astonishing in early part of war in eastern front. Not the most senior ranks but anything below.
When my father was serving in Northern Ireland some officers insisted on going on patrol with their pistols, presumably to give the IRA a clue who to shoot. My father always took a regulation rifle. He found their attitude bewildering but it is a long tradition of stupidity dressed up as bravery in all forces.
What was the life expectancy of an infantry 2nd Lt. in 1915 or so? Two weeks?
Six weeks, iirc. Yes, the subalterns straight from university or public school fared badly; Lieutenant George in Blackadder has a speech about how all his pals are now dead.
Trying to source this without success. Seldon & Walsh give six weeks as the life expectancy of a pilot (20 minutes in Blackadder). Now I must hasten to Sainsbury's. S&W give one reason for high officer death rates at the front: they were a lot taller than working class privates, and their heads would stick up above shallow trenches!
For my undergrad dissertation I did a lot of research in the Liddle Collection at Leeds, and I came across the papers of one officer who said something along the lines of 'when you see the poor physical condition of the working-class soldiers it is absolutely shocking' - not those exact words but that was certainly the gist of it.
IIRC a fair bit of interest in the early beginnings of the welfare state came from concerns about the physical condition of the working class for military service.
Incidentally, apropos earlier discussion about French suburbs: Jonathan Meades made a series “On France”, the third episode of which is entitled “Just a Few Debts France Owes to America” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rc_vHYk7jY & touches a lot of these topics.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Things must have changed dramatically since last June.
When we arrived last year in late afternoon Paris was heaving which was a pain because people kept walking into the pavement based bike lanes which caused some serious braking not to hit people.
The next morning (can't remember what day) we cycled from near Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnesse and again it was heaving. We were grateful for the number of reverse one way streets to protect cyclists which were safe (it is a great safety idea discussed here before and doesn't impede drivers). Solid traffic and buzzing pavements, van drivers opening their doors onto you and drivers cutting you up and trying to kill you. At the Place de la Concorde there was really only a choice between death and walking.
On the return (an afternoon) Paris was at a stand still with traffic (with the mandatory leaning on horns) so it was quicker to walk on the pavement and pick up bike lanes where we could.
I must say though cycling through the countryside in France, particularly between 12 and 2 you could be forgiven for thinking you were the only humans left.
It is decidedly odd. I noticed it yesterday - away from the absolutely main tourist areas - a peculiar quietness. I ascribed it to Sunday but today it’s the same. Part of it is the replacement of ICE cars with electric. You can hear the same evolution in london. Its good. But in Paris it also a sheer lack of traffic
Maybe nothing
I'll be there in June again so it will be interesting to see. I will be cycling from Gare du Nord to the Latin Qtr for the night and then leaving from Gare d'Austerlitz the next day and returning to Gare Montparnesse and cycling to Gare du Nord a week and a bit later. 3 different workdays.
After your recent posts I was working out how much time I have spent in Paris and France and it is huge. It runs into many years, although never longer than 3 weeks at any one time. I wasn't taught French in school and have never been there long enough to pick it up to my real regret. I have spent the equivalent of a year skiing on French slopes, I have spent the equivalent of a year touring with my family when my children were young. I have worked on and off in Paris and Nice at times. I spent 3 weeks touring with a girlfriend in the 70s and I now cycle all over France every year. I have been to Disneyland 3 times which is 2 times more than I wanted to go, but kids eh.
You probably know it better than me. Tho I must have been here 20-30 times or so
I know it all pretty well - except a few corners of the east (Alsace) and Brittany/Normandy where I am headed now. I intend to see as much as possible. I’ve never been to mont st Michel. Never seen the bayeux tapestry. Never seen a d day beach
And I’ve never eaten oysters in cancale. This must change! Life is short
I was particularly taken with your exquisite reference to "Victorian" architecture in Paris.[*] Clearly a man of the world. No tourist you. Pas de poseur. Watch out for the Tudor and Georgian stuff in Brittany.
*Admittedly posted on your hero's birthday 20 April. Perhaps you overdid celebrating?
In fairness to @leon I might not agree with everything he says, but if I wanted advice on travel he would be my go to.
An extremely well traveled friend has just emailed and said he had all the exact same thoughts as me when he went to Paris last weekend. So I’m REALLY not imagining it
If you want to see why Le Pen might win, go to Paris
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
The slaughter of officers in Austria-Hungarian army is astonishing in early part of war in eastern front. Not the most senior ranks but anything below.
When my father was serving in Northern Ireland some officers insisted on going on patrol with their pistols, presumably to give the IRA a clue who to shoot. My father always took a regulation rifle. He found their attitude bewildering but it is a long tradition of stupidity dressed up as bravery in all forces.
What was the life expectancy of an infantry 2nd Lt. in 1915 or so? Two weeks?
Six weeks, iirc. Yes, the subalterns straight from university or public school fared badly; Lieutenant George in Blackadder has a speech about how all his pals are now dead.
Trying to source this without success. Seldon & Walsh give six weeks as the life expectancy of a pilot (20 minutes in Blackadder). Now I must hasten to Sainsbury's. S&W give one reason for high officer death rates at the front: they were a lot taller than working class privates, and their heads would stick up above shallow trenches!
For my undergrad dissertation I did a lot of research in the Liddle Collection at Leeds, and I came across the papers of one officer who said something along the lines of 'when you see the poor physical condition of the working-class soldiers it is absolutely shocking' - not those exact words but that was certainly the gist of it.
See the earlier report by Almeric FitzRoy after the Boer War.
We think train prices are expensive because we compare them with the marginal cost of a car journey that doesn’t include the most expensive parts of owning a car (for most): depreciation, interest costs on borrowing & maintenance.
By comparison with the full cost of ownership, the train is cheap. The problem is that for people who already own a car, the comparison is with that marginal cost - they’ve already incurred the fixed costs & the train can’t compete.
Car clubs that make occasional car usage feasible really ram this home if you’re able to book a car ahead of time - so much cheaper than 24/7 car ownership.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
The slaughter of officers in Austria-Hungarian army is astonishing in early part of war in eastern front. Not the most senior ranks but anything below.
When my father was serving in Northern Ireland some officers insisted on going on patrol with their pistols, presumably to give the IRA a clue who to shoot. My father always took a regulation rifle. He found their attitude bewildering but it is a long tradition of stupidity dressed up as bravery in all forces.
What was the life expectancy of an infantry 2nd Lt. in 1915 or so? Two weeks?
Six weeks, iirc. Yes, the subalterns straight from university or public school fared badly; Lieutenant George in Blackadder has a speech about how all his pals are now dead.
Trying to source this without success. Seldon & Walsh give six weeks as the life expectancy of a pilot (20 minutes in Blackadder). Now I must hasten to Sainsbury's. S&W give one reason for high officer death rates at the front: they were a lot taller than working class privates, and their heads would stick up above shallow trenches!
For my undergrad dissertation I did a lot of research in the Liddle Collection at Leeds, and I came across the papers of one officer who said something along the lines of 'when you see the poor physical condition of the working-class soldiers it is absolutely shocking' - not those exact words but that was certainly the gist of it.
IIRC a fair bit of interest in the early beginnings of the welfare state came from concerns about the physical condition of the working class for military service.
Yes, I think that's right. Toward the end of both wars we were struggling for young frontline, physically strong, manpower.
Wars need young men. I read a book by a Vietnam vet called Karl Marlentes who was a young marine out there, he wrote a fictionalised account of his experiences. He made the point that 18 and 19 year-olds can be relatively easily persuaded to fling themselves at a machinegun post. Late 20s/early 30s guys, not so much. A point that has stayed with me.
We think train prices are expensive because we compare them with the marginal cost of a car journey that doesn’t include the most expensive parts of owning a car (for most): depreciation, interest costs on borrowing & maintenance.
By comparison with the full cost of ownership, the train is cheap. The problem is that for people who already own a car, the comparison is with that marginal cost - they’ve already incurred the fixed costs & the train can’t compete.
Car clubs that make occasional car usage feasible really ram this home if you’re able to book a car ahead of time - so much cheaper than 24/7 car ownership.
It is the volatility and mystery with train prices that is the problem and puts casual users off, not the average price.
The same journey seemingly might be £30 one week then £200 another. We have been conditioned to expect that with half term flights but not yet train travel.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
The slaughter of officers in Austria-Hungarian army is astonishing in early part of war in eastern front. Not the most senior ranks but anything below.
When my father was serving in Northern Ireland some officers insisted on going on patrol with their pistols, presumably to give the IRA a clue who to shoot. My father always took a regulation rifle. He found their attitude bewildering but it is a long tradition of stupidity dressed up as bravery in all forces.
What was the life expectancy of an infantry 2nd Lt. in 1915 or so? Two weeks?
Six weeks, iirc. Yes, the subalterns straight from university or public school fared badly; Lieutenant George in Blackadder has a speech about how all his pals are now dead.
Trying to source this without success. Seldon & Walsh give six weeks as the life expectancy of a pilot (20 minutes in Blackadder). Now I must hasten to Sainsbury's. S&W give one reason for high officer death rates at the front: they were a lot taller than working class privates, and their heads would stick up above shallow trenches!
And also honour bound, though probably terrified, to lead the troop so first target. They had some officer training before going to France but automatically an officer because of background not aptitude
Mon dieu. The upper Loire is dull. I shall spare you photographs of endless flat and vasty fields
A lot of France is like that in my experience. A good 70% of the country is Lincolnshire.
(Not that there's anything inherently wrong with Lincolnshire, in moderation. But France offers just such a dizzyingly vast amount of it.)
I wouldn’t say 70%. More like 30-40%?
Anyway near the coast is usually but not always nice. They have far fewer hideous tacky resort towns, or they hide them better. And superior weather helps
Meanwhile all the alps and Pyrenees are impressive and sometimes spectacular. Corsica just edges the Isle of Wight. The Dordogne, the Basque Country, burgundy, Provence, languedoc, savoie, Jura, the Rhone valley - the majority of France is appealing
Fair enough. France is huge and I've been to relatively little of it. Obviously the nice bits of it like the Alps are spectacular. I was thinking for example of my trip from Toulouse Airport to Andorra: the Pyrenees were splendid, but the first hour and a half of flat, unspectacular landscape and small, dead, unremarkable towns was not. And my trip from La Rochelle airport to whatever Eurocamp it was two hours to the north: mile after mile of very slightly rolling agricultural landscape. Not in any way unpleasant. But like a massive Lincolnshire wolds. And the train from the tunnel to Paris: 170 miles of flat.
But I am far from well-travelled in France and will happily bow to the experience of kjh and TimS and Leon on this.
According to considerable quantities of publicly available information, politics in the UK *is* populated by the weird and the wealthy.
Politics used to be a part time job, generally done by the upper middle classes. The problem with the change to professional, full time politics is that it isn’t a career - more moderately paid social work and greasy poll climbing. There’s no professional development and after 10 years in Parliament, you have no career to return to - unless you’ve created a lobbying network instead of trying to do the job.
Further, the gao between what an MP does and what we expect a Minister to do is staggering. To go from running a half dozen, very junior direct reports (with direct hire and fire), to running a department. 100ks of people, with all the internal systems and politics. And a weird, rather convoluted definition of responsibility - meaning you can’t fire civil servants if they literally lie to you.
It’s not surprising that many ministers just sign the huge piles of paper they are given. They have no idea how to do anything else.
The only way we are going to fix this is either dramatically devolve some things away from Parliament (eg set up an English Parliament as well as Westminster), or dramatically increase the number of MPs (I'd go with at least 900), or both.
Malmesbury puts his case very eloquently, but in my experience it's not quite as sharp-edged as that. MPs do have a degree of influence in Ministerial decisions, if only in the sense that the Minister has to buy their consent with concessions, and PPSs - the normal route to a Ministerial role - do see things from the inside, if only as bag-carriers. In the two Ministries where I was involved (Energy and Defra), there was the same sort of division of labour with the civil service as you get in a Council executive - the Minister set out the things that most concerned him or her, the civil service delivered a report weith option, and the Minister made choices. There was little to no personnel management.
The Yes, Minister idea that civil servants essentially run the show is true of weak Ministers, but if they come in with a clear agenda the civil service generally take a professional pride in trying to make it work, unless it's Triss-level craziness leading to formal notifications of dissent. I can't see that having another layer of government (e.g. an English Parliament) would help any of this, but separating the social work side might if every constituency had an elected Ombudsman who was expected to do just that, and MPs were banned from any official role in casework.
What policy do you find particularly crazy about Truss's time that warranted such a rebellion?
Not allowing the OBR to look at the unfunded tax cuts?
It wasn't that she instructed the Civil Service that there was a policy to be implemented, that it would be implemented, and she wanted realistic plans for doing so. She decided pretty well without consultation with civil service, financial markets, OBR, or even her own Cabinet colleagues that she was going to radically change direction, and announced it as a fait accompli.
WIth predictable consequences.
And all of that with no mandate other than from 80k tory members.
Last 6 words redundant.
Rishi wasn’t elected by Tory members - he was rejected by them as they preferred Liz Truss
An extremely well traveled friend has just emailed and said he had all the exact same thoughts as me when he went to Paris last weekend. So I’m REALLY not imagining it
If you want to see why Le Pen might win, go to Paris
My Albanian Uber driver said exactly the same - blamed it on all those damn woke AI aliens.
On topic it doesn't seem like Trump will be locked up before the election? It seems like the charges in the business records case wouldn't normally produce a jail sentence even if he's convicted on all charges. Meanwhile the Georgia one isn't yet scheduled, the Florida one is in the hands of a loyal Trump hack and the DC case is stalled until such time as SCOTUS see fit to unstall it.
The banter heuristic would dictate that he win the election, then go to jail shortly afterwards.
It seems unlikely that any trials other than the present one are likely to be held before the election. Having delayed matters with numerous tactics, appeals, ridiculous arguments and the like Trump is now arguing the delay is so he cannot campaign. Like almost everything else he says this is nonsense.
The problem in the present one is that the actual charges are misdemeanours and therefore time barred unless they can be upgraded to felonies. The basis for doing so is that these false entries were crimes for some other purpose, also criminal. The bases for this are somewhat problematic with the possible exception of tax fraud because Trump appears to have claimed the reimbursements of Cohen as legitimate legal expenses for his businesses. I think proving these particular payments were in the legal expenses claimed is not going to be easy.
The other bases for claiming a criminal purpose do not seem to me to get off the ground. Trying to influence an election is not a crime: believe it or not that is what our politicians are trying to do every day, no matter how ineptly. Paying for silence is not a crime either.
So, I fear that Trump has a good chance with this trial. If he is acquitted there is a real risk that this boosts him which in a tight election could be extremely concerning.
I don’t see any chance of an acquittal but a hung jury .
There are 34 charges Trump faces in NY, so it only takes 1 or 2 of those for a conviction.
The problem for Trump is that this trial is held in overwhelmingly Democrat NY, while juries should be impartial inevitably that may have an impact. If the trial was in Texas or Ohio or even Michigan or Arizona he would be on safer ground
So basically you are saying that the facts of the case don’t matter - the result comes down to whether the jury members like you or not.
That isn’t saying much about American justice, the jury nor anyone else
Mon dieu. The upper Loire is dull. I shall spare you photographs of endless flat and vasty fields
A lot of France is like that in my experience. A good 70% of the country is Lincolnshire.
(Not that there's anything inherently wrong with Lincolnshire, in moderation. But France offers just such a dizzyingly vast amount of it.)
I wouldn’t say 70%. More like 30-40%?
Anyway near the coast is usually but not always nice. They have far fewer hideous tacky resort towns, or they hide them better. And superior weather helps
Meanwhile all the alps and Pyrenees are impressive and sometimes spectacular. Corsica just edges the Isle of Wight. The Dordogne, the Basque Country, burgundy, Provence, languedoc, savoie, Jura, the Rhone valley - the majority of France is appealing
Fair enough. France is huge and I've been to relatively little of it. Obviously the nice bits of it like the Alps are spectacular. I was thinking for example of my trip from Toulouse Airport to Andorra: the Pyrenees were splendid, but the first hour and a half of flat, unspectacular landscape and small, dead, unremarkable towns was not. And my trip from La Rochelle airport to whatever Eurocamp it was two hours to the north: mile after mile of very slightly rolling agricultural landscape. Not in any way unpleasant. But like a massive Lincolnshire wolds. And the train from the tunnel to Paris: 170 miles of flat.
But I am far from well-travelled in France and will happily bow to the experience of kjh and TimS and Leon on this.
If you want staggering French loveliness, go to Corsica. It’s called the “Ile de beaute” for a reason - it’s a stunner. Also really good cheeses, many of them not exported
Paradoxically the people are some of the most unpleasant I’ve ever met. Phenomenally rude. Even the French (mainland) think corsicans are rude. Even the Parisians think corsicans are rude
Apparently it comes from centuries of vendettas and mistrust - Dorothy Carrington talks about Corsican rudeness in her travel classic “Granite Island”
We think train prices are expensive because we compare them with the marginal cost of a car journey that doesn’t include the most expensive parts of owning a car (for most): depreciation, interest costs on borrowing & maintenance.
By comparison with the full cost of ownership, the train is cheap. The problem is that for people who already own a car, the comparison is with that marginal cost - they’ve already incurred the fixed costs & the train can’t compete.
Car clubs that make occasional car usage feasible really ram this home if you’re able to book a car ahead of time - so much cheaper than 24/7 car ownership.
The problem is that for most people (i.e. 90% of people who live outside of central london) car ownership - and hence the fixed costs that come with it - are a necessity. You can't take the East Coast Main Line to Sainsbury's, or drop the kids off at the local primary, or visit your nan with ease two towns across without a car.
So it's not an either/or equation. You already have the car, plus the fixed costs associated with it, which makes the marginal cost of using the train that much worse.
On topic it doesn't seem like Trump will be locked up before the election? It seems like the charges in the business records case wouldn't normally produce a jail sentence even if he's convicted on all charges. Meanwhile the Georgia one isn't yet scheduled, the Florida one is in the hands of a loyal Trump hack and the DC case is stalled until such time as SCOTUS see fit to unstall it.
The banter heuristic would dictate that he win the election, then go to jail shortly afterwards.
It seems unlikely that any trials other than the present one are likely to be held before the election. Having delayed matters with numerous tactics, appeals, ridiculous arguments and the like Trump is now arguing the delay is so he cannot campaign. Like almost everything else he says this is nonsense.
The problem in the present one is that the actual charges are misdemeanours and therefore time barred unless they can be upgraded to felonies. The basis for doing so is that these false entries were crimes for some other purpose, also criminal. The bases for this are somewhat problematic with the possible exception of tax fraud because Trump appears to have claimed the reimbursements of Cohen as legitimate legal expenses for his businesses. I think proving these particular payments were in the legal expenses claimed is not going to be easy.
The other bases for claiming a criminal purpose do not seem to me to get off the ground. Trying to influence an election is not a crime: believe it or not that is what our politicians are trying to do every day, no matter how ineptly. Paying for silence is not a crime either.
So, I fear that Trump has a good chance with this trial. If he is acquitted there is a real risk that this boosts him which in a tight election could be extremely concerning.
I don’t see any chance of an acquittal but a hung jury .
There are 34 charges Trump faces in NY, so it only takes 1 or 2 of those for a conviction.
The problem for Trump is that this trial is held in overwhelmingly Democrat NY, while juries should be impartial inevitably that may have an impact. If the trial was in Texas or Ohio or even Michigan or Arizona he would be on safer ground
So basically you are saying that the facts of the case don’t matter - the result comes down to whether the jury members like you or not.
That isn’t saying much about American justice, the jury nor anyone else
Juries should ideally be purely factual, fact based and objective in deciding guilt under the law.
In reality we know juries there and here are not immune from human emotion and their inner feelings and prejudices.
See the excellent Jury: Murder Trial programme experiment on C4 recently where 2 different juries reached different verdicts on the same case with the same facts, one of murder and one of manslaughter https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-jury-murder-trial
Looks like Sunak will have a couple of refugees on each flight but more flights so that he can wank on about how many flights have gone .
"The Rwanda scheme was announced two years ago this month. Since then more Home Secretaries than asylum seekers have been sent to Kigali."
Yvette Cooper.
Sunak has committed to regular flights to Rwanda by the Autumn and clearly lays the blame for the delay on Labour peers
I reserve judgement on this scheme, but it had 48/35% support in November 23 you gov poll and until it is operational its success or otherwise remains an unknown
I would suggest however that today's announcement by Sunak with flights due by June/July that an election before November- December is unlikely and I expect it to be on the 14th November or 12th December
An extremely well traveled friend has just emailed and said he had all the exact same thoughts as me when he went to Paris last weekend. So I’m REALLY not imagining it
If you want to see why Le Pen might win, go to Paris
My Albanian Uber driver said exactly the same - blamed it on all those damn woke AI aliens.
Even as I relayed my instant impression of sketchy and tatty Paris on PB, and suffered mockery like yours because of it - turns out this was happening 2km away - I had no idea. I just sensed it. The Jay Rayner of Place - that’s me
We think train prices are expensive because we compare them with the marginal cost of a car journey that doesn’t include the most expensive parts of owning a car (for most): depreciation, interest costs on borrowing & maintenance.
By comparison with the full cost of ownership, the train is cheap. The problem is that for people who already own a car, the comparison is with that marginal cost - they’ve already incurred the fixed costs & the train can’t compete.
Car clubs that make occasional car usage feasible really ram this home if you’re able to book a car ahead of time - so much cheaper than 24/7 car ownership.
It is the volatility and mystery with train prices that is the problem and puts casual users off, not the average price.
The same journey seemingly might be £30 one week then £200 another. We have been conditioned to expect that with half term flights but not yet train travel.
Yes. I'm yet to find a skyscanner-like service for trains, that will find me the cheapest option within a few days of a particular date. Often travel is fixed, but I take train journeys down to see my parents (my mum being fairly unwell) between the big family trips by car in school holidays and have pretty good flexibility of dates (I work remotely from my parents' house for a few days). But all I can do, it seems, is play with different dates in the search.
Comments
Now I don’t know if you work for some organisation in Oxford where you are very proud of delivering low car ownership rates or just incredibly pedantic but I hope you aren’t too put out by them not quickly correcting matters to point out that actually Oxford is the winningest city in low car numbers.
A facet of architecture which never really gets considered in enough detail is the albedo of the building. The taller the building, the more light it cuts out, so the more important it is to be reflective. This is why glass skyscrapers can add rather than detract to the urban landscape, whereas concrete ones tend to have the opposite effect.
*One thing flats like this got right is the amount of light they tended to let in. I remember staying the night on the 12th floor of a horrible building in inner East London - but inside, the light filled up the place and the views were amazing.
I cycled past Mont St Michael 2 years ago. It is very impressive. I assumed it would be the same size as ours. It is very commercialised though, but they have done the commercialisation quite well.
PS Oh I forgot I have been house hunting in France as well (Dordogne and Pau area).
PPS I have been on holiday in Brittany once, and cycled it once. other than passing through Normandy many times I have only stayed once 2 years ago when I cycled around it.
In large parts of Northern France Carson’s silent spring has already arrived. Insect life is virtually gone, save for wasps.
https://twitter.com/BetfairExchange/status/1782079196321206551
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(Not that there's anything inherently wrong with Lincolnshire, in moderation. But France offers just such a dizzyingly vast amount of it.)
Stamford is, though, one of those towns that’s both pretty and eerily dull and placeless. There’s a strange lacuna there, not through lack of business - the shops seem to do reasonably well - but something. Hard to put a finger on. The other town that always gives me that same vibe is Dorchester.
The problem (imo) is a combination of Brutalist design with Corbusian ideas about how buildings should look. Le Corbusier’s buildings are (imo) sterile & unattractive, without the texture on the small scale that makes buildings human.
Combine that with a refusal to spend the money on these buildings to make them work even on their own terms & we end up where we are - with a lot of the public estate built with lip service to an architectural fashion that enabled them to build on the cheap. Then they skip the necessary maintenance & we end up with shoddy buildings that look awful & leak everywhere.
Sometimes architects are to blame of course - in particular when they forget to make it possible to maintain a building except at great expense: think Portcullis house with it’s impossible to repair roof:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/06/plagued-by-roof-defects-mps-portcullis-house-faces-more-hefty-repair-bills
Very much a view of 20/20 hindsight, admittedly.
But the Schlieffen Plan failed. Ok, they got France and the rest in 1940, but Barbarossa failed too. And once they’d got themselves embroiled in trying to defend vast tracts of territory, despite their undoubted military skill and tenacious defence, they didn’t have the resources, logistics or manpower to win. Though the spring 1918 offensive caused some squeaky bums, it was a last roll of the dice and couldn’t realistically succeed. Same with the Battle of the Bulge too, for example.
A guy called Rob Thompson, who sadly died last year in his 50s of cancer, has done some fascinating work on Allied logistics in WW1 - the Germans had no chance ultimately in competing with that output. It’s mind boggling the resources the allied side had by 1917 and 1918. A similar tale by 1943 onwards. Fascinating stuff.
The outer areas of Bologna vary from hideous to just-nuke-it-now-for-the-love-of-god. Then you arrive at the mile square in the middle - the medieval town. Makes Florence look as if it was built yesterday…
The precipitate and unmerited sacking of Tom Scholar from the Treasury
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/sep/08/tom-scholar-permanent-secretary-to-the-treasury-sacked-by-liz-truss
Not consulting Cabinet on her tax plans
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-pm-truss-says-cabinet-was-not-informed-plans-scrap-top-rate-tax-2022-10-02/
Ignoring the warnings of her own economist advisers like Gerard Lyons that unfunded tax cuts would alarm the financial markets (only for Kwarteng to say he’d never been warned)
https://www.independent.co.uk/business/pm-s-economic-adviser-insists-he-warned-her-on-minibudget-in-spat-with-kwarteng-b2191466.html
It wasn't that she instructed the Civil Service that there was a policy to be implemented, that it would be implemented, and she wanted realistic plans for doing so.
She decided pretty well without consultation with civil service, financial markets, OBR, or even her own Cabinet colleagues that she was going to radically change direction, and announced it as a fait accompli.
WIth predictable consequences.
Ted Kennedy was of course re elected multiple times as a Senator despite his conviction and got 38% of the vote and won 13 states (including New York and California) in the 1980 Democratic primaries even if Carter beat him
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
I did Poitier to the West coast and back to Angouleme. That is pretty flat (I pick flat places to cycle, I'm not daft) and that was really nice. I don't get this area. House prices are dirt cheap. It is pretty and it apparently (bizarrely) has the greatest amount of sunshine in France except for the Mediterranean area. So why is it cheap to buy a house there?
But go early and there’s no chance of it having achieved anything, and the economy won’t have had a chance to pick up either.
Anyway near the coast is usually but not always nice. They have far fewer hideous tacky resort towns, or they hide them better. And superior weather helps
Meanwhile all the alps and Pyrenees are impressive and sometimes spectacular. Corsica just edges the Isle of Wight. The Dordogne, the Basque Country, burgundy, Provence, languedoc, savoie, Jura, the Rhone valley - the majority of France is appealing
The outcome was always likely to be pretty well what it was, once France and England had determined to fight.
I would have taken something quite extraordinary to change the outcome - or the terrible costs - for either side.
*Admittedly posted on your hero's birthday 20 April. Perhaps you overdid celebrating?
You can still pick up an old golden stone village house with 2 bedrooms and a little garden for €90k.
One theory of why we have the impression of WW1 that we do is that the young, aristocratic or upper-middle class public schoolboy types, who were killed in disproportionate numbers because they were these frontline officers has, because their peers were the war poets and people like Rupert Graves and the like, and their families were from a literate class who left memoirs and reflections, like Vera Brittain for example, has given the impression that most soldiers were killed. When in reality most soldiers survived, but working class rankers rarely left memoirs.
https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/architecture/our-building
A hand carved finish doesn’t prevent something being Brutalist.
The problem in the present one is that the actual charges are misdemeanours and therefore time barred unless they can be upgraded to felonies. The basis for doing so is that these false entries were crimes for some other purpose, also criminal. The bases for this are somewhat problematic with the possible exception of tax fraud because Trump appears to have claimed the reimbursements of Cohen as legitimate legal expenses for his businesses. I think proving these particular payments were in the legal expenses claimed is not going to be easy.
The other bases for claiming a criminal purpose do not seem to me to get off the ground. Trying to influence an election is not a crime: believe it or not that is what our politicians are trying to do every day, no matter how ineptly. Paying for silence is not a crime either.
So, I fear that Trump has a good chance with this trial. If he is acquitted there is a real risk that this boosts him which in a tight election could be extremely concerning.
It's hard to think the same of any WWI general.
^ This sounds much more interesting than the usual Oxfordian or Baconian guff.
Perhaps I will have to reconsider my Stratfordianism?
Maybe Enoch Powell (Oxfordian) got one thing right, despite what seemed to be his obnoxious reasoning that amounted to "no son of a glovemaker could know so much about high politics"?
Vs many British towns: pretty suburbs, godawful town centre with chip wrappers blowing across the pedestrian precinct between Poundland and help the aged.
“In the 1850s, Victor Baltard designed the famous glass and iron structure which would house les Halles for over a century and became one of the sights of Paris; this would last until the 1970s. Having become entirely a food market, the remodeled market was known as the "Belly of Paris", as Émile Zola called it in his 1873 novel Le Ventre de Paris, which is set in the busy marketplace of the 19th century.”
The 1850s. In the Anglosphere - and indeed most of the world - that is the Victorian era. Because Britain was the superpower and occupied a quarter of the planet
Now if the area outside the walls of Chester was typified by this sort of architecture - well, it would clash slightly with the Roman core, but it wouldn't be actively ugly. But most brutalism is just brutal.
Though I don't think, even if Moscow had fallen, Stalin would have sought for peace. Moscow, like Stalingrad, though valuable psychologically, wasn't in and of itself crucial, I don't think. I could be wrong.
Halder, despite initial optimism in the early stages of Barbarossa, knew by August or September '41, something like that, that they could not defeat the Soviets. For one because they had huge reserves the Germans hadn't know about. So Hitler got rid of him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI7mJyRL-8A
I agree with you. The Barbican is brutalist. One of the few successful examples of it in the UK. Preston bus shelter is another; The national theatre on a good day
You soon start to run out
And then I think of the practicalities. What do I actually gain from owning a property abroad. I will have to maintain it. I will have to worry about it when it’s empty. I will have to go there lots to justify the ownership and I love seeing NEW places - and indeed it’s half my job. I will quickly tire of the same old place in France and rural France can be deadly dull, especially in winter
I’m just not Homo domesticus. Many are, of course
Of course this proved not to be the case for the bulk of the British and Commonwealth attack, but was very much true for the French, attacking on the same day in the southern sector, and for the British adjacent. British success in the south even led to the cavalry being called up, but nothing came of the opportunity.
What did for generals in the first world war was that there was no way to communicate to the front line during battles. Just 25 years later radio allowed instant contact and everything that followed (artilliary strikes, fighter-bombers targetting tanks etc). Prior to the first world war the battle fields were smaller and thus if not in direct sight, as galloper could be send quickly with a message. The poor benighted general in the first word war could do neither - once battle was joined it was down to the men at the front.
https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1782036222619025673
The value of traditional educational architecture — along with aesthetic delight — is how it inculcates a sense of heritage, belonging, and responsibility in students.
Something like the Patio de Escuelas, at the University of Salamanca, makes you feel part of something bigger...
https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1782036256320266323
The second broad category is what we might call Experimental.
Universities and schools are not just about learning things by rote — they are also about discovering new ideas, challenging old ones, and searching for novel approaches to old problems.
Architecture can embody that.
https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1782036272157970856
Experimental buildings can be divisive, of course, like Frank Gehry's Business School at the University of Technology Sydney, inspired by a paper bag.
But what you cannot deny, even if you don't like it, is that it has something to say — it is interesting and characterful...
..Because the third broad category falls between the other two — it is neither here nor there.
What to call it? Perhaps generic, unimaginative, or disinterested.
A building which inspires nothing in students and does not try to; a building which has nothing to say.
https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1782036288557723871
I’m on the Paris-Quimper TGV, in 2nd class. From the capital to Cornouaille. Happily the French taxpayer is paying the €159 price
The exact equivalent in the UK is London-Truro. From the capital to Cornwall. In 2nd class an off peak return is £94 - I just checked
So the UK is considerably cheaper, even if the French trains are notably faster (but have further to go)
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2024/0422/1444924-garda-shotgun/
"A shotgun that was supposed to be in the possession of gardaí since 2009 was seized for a second time last year during an operation into a feud between two organised crime groups."
I think it was generally something like a few days in the trenches, maybe a week, then they'd be rotated out for a couple of weeks or so. But as you say, when out of the frontline they were either training or very often doing fatigues - someone had to repair the roads and trenches and lug all the ammo, shells, food, water and other supplies hither and thither. Physically hard work often done by the 'resting' infantry.
The ending is one of the most moving codas in the history of cinema
I didn't have an issue with either of your individual statements. As I said I was just being an arse by being a pedant.
That last building is quite a shocker
I was wondering this morning what it is like to be an architect of something hideously dull and drab - like that - or actually hideous and marring - like the Tour Montparnasse which I passed under at 10am
It’s so ugly and intrusive and everyone hates it and would love to knock it down. It is an obvious blemish on a beautiful cityscape
So what do the architects think of themselves when they commit such a vile sin? We all have to live with the results of their incompetence or greed or stupidity, it’s not like a crappy novel or rubbish movie you can ignore
Indeed it might be fun to interview one of these architects and interrogate them on this. Don’t you feel SHAME?
I sincerely wonder if some do, they can’t all be arrogant sociopathic twats
The problem for Trump is that this trial is held in overwhelmingly Democrat NY, while juries should be impartial inevitably that may have an impact. If the trial was in Texas or Ohio or even Michigan or Arizona he would be on safer ground
Yvette Cooper.
If you want to see why Le Pen might win, go to Paris
Fitzroy Report (1904)
Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration
Vol. I Report and Appendix
https://education-uk.org/documents/fitzroy1904/fitzroy1904.html
Quite illuminating of then social attitudes.
Not exactly progressive, but better than those who were advocating eugenics as a solution to the problem.
By comparison with the full cost of ownership, the train is cheap. The problem is that for people who already own a car, the comparison is with that marginal cost - they’ve already incurred the fixed costs & the train can’t compete.
Car clubs that make occasional car usage feasible really ram this home if you’re able to book a car ahead of time - so much cheaper than 24/7 car ownership.
Wars need young men. I read a book by a Vietnam vet called Karl Marlentes who was a young marine out there, he wrote a fictionalised account of his experiences. He made the point that 18 and 19 year-olds can be relatively easily persuaded to fling themselves at a machinegun post. Late 20s/early 30s guys, not so much. A point that has stayed with me.
The same journey seemingly might be £30 one week then £200 another. We have been conditioned to expect that with half term flights but not yet train travel.
But I am far from well-travelled in France and will happily bow to the experience of kjh and TimS and Leon on this.
That isn’t saying much about American justice, the jury nor anyone else
Corsica. It’s called the “Ile de beaute” for a reason - it’s a stunner. Also really good cheeses, many of them not exported
Paradoxically the people are some of the most unpleasant I’ve ever met. Phenomenally rude. Even the French (mainland) think corsicans are rude. Even the Parisians think corsicans are rude
Apparently it comes from centuries of vendettas and mistrust - Dorothy Carrington talks about Corsican rudeness in her travel classic “Granite Island”
So it's not an either/or equation. You already have the car, plus the fixed costs associated with it, which makes the marginal cost of using the train that much worse.
In reality we know juries there and here are not immune from human emotion and their inner feelings and prejudices.
See the excellent Jury: Murder Trial programme experiment on C4 recently where 2 different juries reached different verdicts on the same case with the same facts, one of murder and one of manslaughter
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-jury-murder-trial
Any felony? No it shouldn’t bar anyone from office (in the way that once a felon’s sentence is served they should get the vote back).
But if the judge thinks it warrants a specific punishment / statement that it should disbar him from office then he can impose that
I reserve judgement on this scheme, but it had 48/35% support in November 23 you gov poll and until it is operational its success or otherwise remains an unknown
I would suggest however that today's announcement by Sunak with flights due by June/July that an election before November- December is unlikely and I expect it to be on the 14th November or 12th December
https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1782060450944831925?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
Maybe too much of a niche use case.