khiana

 

when pennies bought houses

be a man, you pussy

 

loved an audience

"He destroyed himself trying to stay true to the character he invented."

inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture

Pablo Picasso's [1881-1973] collaboration with Georges Braque [1882-1963] where paintings became not representations of things but things in themselves ended by the latter's head wound sustained as a WWI reservist - the Spaniard said he never saw his French friend again.

Homo homini lupus

"Man is a wolf to man."

"Thoughts for the Times on War and Death"

 

Sigmund Freud [1856-1939] observes Germany's fall from the apex of civilization to brutality here.

on prognostication

 

Themistocles

square root of 2

"Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals."
- T. E. Lawrence

seal against gas

Adolph Hitler [1889-1945] adopted his variety of moustache in World War I to accommodate gas masks.

on pain

[Lawrence has just extinguished a match between his thumb and forefinger. William Potter surreptitiously attempts the same.]

William Potter: Ooh! It damn well 'urts!

T.E. Lawrence: Certainly it hurts.

Officer: What's the trick then?

T.E. Lawrence: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.

in times of crisis

"Days are like years; years are like days."
- Dave Zirin

gruesome reality

by Otto Dix, 1920

German veterans of WWI afflicted with injuries play cards.

best spy book ever written

passionate intensity

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Excerpt from The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats [1865-1939] written in the aftermath of the First World War in 1919.

grim and gay

In fifty years, when peace outshines
Remembrance of the battle lines,
Adventurous lads will sigh and cast
Proud looks upon the plundered past.
On summer morn or winter's night,
Their hearts will kindle for the fight,
Reading a snatch of soldier-song,
Savage and jaunty, fierce and strong;
And through the angry marching rhymes
Of blind regret and haggard mirth,
They'll envy us the dazzling times
When sacrifice absolved our earth.

Some ancient man with silver locks
Will lift his weary face to say:
'War was a fiend who stopped our clocks
Although we met him grim and gay.'
And then he'll speak of Haig's last drive,
Marvelling that any came alive
Out of the shambles that men built
And smashed, to cleanse the world of guilt.
But the boys, with grin and sidelong glance,
Will think, 'Poor grandad's day is done.'
And dream of lads who fought in France
And lived in time to share the fun.
- Siegfried Sassoon [1886-1967] was treated at the Cassel Hospital for Functional Nervous Disorder or shell-shock.

rupture in history

Image source.

Walter Allward [1876-1955] created Canada's WWI memorial at Vimy Ridge.

the greatest error of modern history?

Prince Archduke Francis Ferdinand [1863-1914], heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo. The Archduke had been on a visit to Bosnia. The assassin was a Serbian nationalist whose co-conspirators were in Belgrade. The Serbians wanted to detach Bosnia from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

A look back at a review of Niall Ferguson's [born 1964] World War I book The Pity of War where he argues that Britain's intervention in 1914 was "nothing less than the greatest error of modern history," because Germany in fact did not pose an essential threat to British interests.

WWI

Sergeant Katczinsky

Whenever there's a big war coming on, you should rope-off a big field.

Infantry Soldier

And sell tickets.

Sergeant Katczinsky

Yeah. And on the big day, you take all the Kings, and their Cabinets, and their Generals, put them in the center dressed in their underpants and let them fight it out with clubs. The best country wins.

From the 1930 screenplay of Erich Maria Remarque's [1898-1970] 1928 novel All Quiet on the Western Front.