Tree Shaped Tomb Stones at Our Lady of Lourdes

Still on that detour road north of Rice Lake Wisconsin!

I'd seen signs pointing to Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church on earlier jaunts, so I figured a short side trip was in order.  It is a very pretty pink stone building.

This is in a tiny little hamlet called Dobie, which grew out of an earlier French Canadian enclave. And as is common in this part of the state, there were a few "Tree Shaped Tombstones".

This is the "Stack of Logs" variant that seems to be common in the area.  The Christ on the cross addition on top is almost exclusive to Catholic settings.

Sometimes the crucifix is the only tree element in the design.  Here's two of them.  I assume they were ordered from the same catalog.

Because I already have enough strange interests I usually ignore any tombstones without bark and branches.  But here I ran across a couple that seem worthy of an off topic mention...

This one must date to that earlier French community.  The "Here Lies the Body of" in French is very unusual to this part of the world.  And what's with that logo in the circle?  It looks like tweezers and beans!

Veteran's graves always merit a moment of contemplation and respect.  This soldier of the Great War almost made it to the November 11th Armistice.  So close....

Every tombstone tells the story of a life.  In this case....

C.A.C. stands for Coastal Artillery Corps.  And while some of these guys were deployed to Europe to man the larger guns, Private Kearney died in Seattle.  Of influenza.

I guess we've mostly forgotten Covid-19 and the memories it stirred of the Spanish flu pandemic that landed a follow up punch to civilization just as the guns went silent.

One Man Against the Noise Farms

A while back I did a post on YouTube and the odd recommendations their algorithms were sending me.  Subsequently I did hear from people who had similar experiences but in a departure from my usual policy I decided to not post comments and make their discontents potentially visible to the Google Masters.  But my curiosity was stirred.  Could I actually make You Tube stop sending me nonsensical suggestions?

Now lets be honest.  You Tube is great.  If you want to learn about a specific subject or need to get the basics of an unfamiliar task in front of you it is the place to go.  I like it.  But there is the matter of all the useless dreck that goes along with it.  It's just getting in my way, in fact it is making it harder for YT to live up to its potential.  I also don't like to be told what sorts of things I should find important.  I'll make up my own mind, thanks.

After about three weeks of "interaction" with the algorithms I got to the point where YouTube surrendered and instead of suggesting specific videos they just sent me this:

Now that I consider fair.  It asks me what I wish to view instead of pushing various gaudy trinkets on me.   

After about two weeks it reverted to the status quo antebellum and began recommending things again.  So I started a second campaign.

To get rid of nonsense recommendations you of course must turn off History on your YT account and any linked accounts.   Don't make the bots non-life too easy.  You'll still get suggestions based on Channels you follow but that's fair game.  So I see and will occasionally watch videos relating to robotics and Roman archaeology.  But there are entire universes (and metaverses!) of other interests, and absent guidance from deplorable meat puppets the Silicon Overlords unleash a torrent of things they think you should be interested in. 

These include:  music compilations, 12 hour white noise and/or rain videos to help you sleep, endless "gamer" videos ranging from the infantile Minecraft up to abominable first person shoot fests, stupid people doing stupid things on TikTok, political screeds albeit only from one end of the ideological spectrum and a bunch of really odd stuff.  I got pretty grossed out by some veterinary surgery videos.  I had no idea there were so many bulldozers sitting in a shed for 30 years ready to be fixed up.  I am considerably better versed in the cuisine of Japan and local news reports from, I think, rural Pakistan.

So, how to reduce these?

When a video is suggested you can click on the little line in the right lower corner.  It gives you options:

Not Interested

Don't Recommend Channel

Report

Report further breaks down into categories.  Sexual Content, Violent or Repulsive Content, Hateful or Abusive Content, Harmful or Dangerous Acts, Spam or Misleading, Child Abuse.

These are the tools you have, and each deserves comment.

I read somewhere that Not Interested was the most feared feedback to YouTubers.  But it really does not serve my purposes.  Sometimes YT just sends the same video right back to you.  Sometimes sites have an entire array of similar nonsense and will just send you the next one in line (See Noise Farms below).  I still use it for things that are legitimately not of interest to me but otherwise inoffensive.

The Report function initially took a video off my feed with one click.  Now I have to double click the same report, or two different ones, before it goes away.  This is a new since my initial victory.  I try to be fair.  Making kids enter beauty pageants seems like Child Abuse to me.  And I'm repulsed by many things including execrable grammar.

It would seem that the ultimate weapon would be Don't Recommend Channel.  You click on that and YouTube promises: We won't recommend videos from this channel to you again.

Ah, but do they keep that promise?

For a while I was not sure.  So many Youtube sites just swipe the same music and video clips and if the name of the site is in Urdu I won't be able to read it.  But, alas, after many times hitting refresh and nuking a fresh batch of sites I saw old (non) friends reappear.  A gaudy young lady styling herself Lena Slime has a weird make over channel I've dispatched several times.

Because the YouTube algorithms appear to be cheating I don't think they can be defeated.  Oh you can drive them into a corner now and then, forcing them to send you peculiar videos.  I'm actually worried about a Muslim cleric from Indonesia who always appears with his hands held to his face in distress.

But mostly what you get as a last ditch from YouTube are things like this:

Compilations of hours long videos of harps, rain, white noise, Native American flute music,  bootleg soft rock classics, healing Tibetian gongs, etc.  And they just keep coming.  There are entire sites that crank this stuff out.  I call them Noise Farms.  

They never stop coming.  Their name is Legion.  Endless variations on genres, so many variations on phrases like lofi, Ambience, Chill.  Some variants are religious.  Some are Goth.  Some defy description.

Oh I suppose if I were willing to commit to a grinding Western Front war of attrition I might get them all perhaps at the cost of tendonitis in my mouse clicking finger.  But YouTube has a final card to play.  Intermittently they send me recommendations from YouTube Music.  Slightly less bizarre than Sufi Ambience Chill Vibes for Villains to Study By,  these recommendations only come with one available option:  Not Interested.

I'm pretty sure that whatever subroutine of the Youtube algorithm I've been shunted off into already knows that.  And does not give one digital damn.

My visit to Kiel, Wisconsin....

As you'd correctly guess from its name, the little town of Kiel, Wisconsin was settled mostly by Germans.  I stopped in on my fall road trip and found an assortment of interesting things.  None perhaps quite sufficient for a stand alone post but in aggregate a fascinating picture.  Breweries, tombstones....and a machine gun.

Breweries

Gutheil Brothers

Dates are a bit "squishy" but the Gutheil brewery seems to have been Kiel's first, starting in 1858.  It was outside of town and on a nice convenient hill.  It is said that the Gutheil brothers made an excellent product, perhaps too much quality for the modest prices they charged.  $5 for a 32 gallon barrel and a nickel to fill a pitcher sure sounds reasonable.  The brewery topped off at a production level around 670 barrels a year in 1879.  An old settler named John Schroeder recalled in 1928, that the Gutheils "....used to have various-sized glasses, too.  There was the largest size called the Plattdeutscher Schmitt, and the square Mecklenburger Schmitt...".

The brothers Gutheil moved on to other ventures in the late 1880's, with 1887 likely the terminus for this venture.  The brewery building was torn down in the early 1900's and a brick house built on the foundations.  It is said that evidence of its prior use can be seen in the basement....

Here's the site in late 2019.  The brick house stands strong.  All sorts of odd lumps and bumps in the hillside behind could be anything from vanished outbuildings to modern septic tanks.  I'm assuming there was once a  stone arch style cave extending straight back from the brewery site.

The Dimmler Brewery

Dimmler, Duseler, Dimmel, even the name of the proprietor is obscured by the passage of time and the mutability of German spellings.  The brewery probably got started in 1859 but given its prime location a small scale operation preceding this would not be surprising.  The location was, in modern terms, 28 East Fremont.  The same gentleman named Schroeder quoted above, had some recollections of this establishment too.  It is said that a cellar was excavated, with dimensions of 22 feet by 23 feet by 18 feet.  This too would suggest an arched construction and other than the unusual height would fit a small brewing operation.  

The Dimmler brewery supposedly made even better beer than the Gutheils.  They had a few advantages there.  The water they used was said to be superior and being right next to the mill pond they would have had all the ice they needed.  (Schroeder claims that the cellar kept the beer cold without it but with a presumed length of only 23 feet that's unlikely).

But the venture was not a success, going out of business in 1872.  Local competition, financial difficulties and an on site stabbing contributed. Part of the building became The German Drug Store and later the Riverside Grocery.  The latter business apparently kept using the cellar for storage.  The building was damaged by fire in 1999 and razed in 2000.  Until fairly recently the cellars were said to be intact and even after the building was demolished a mound of earth marked their location somewhere near a house at 20 East Fremont.  Alas, today a new housing complex has removed all traces.  

Early breweries had assorted outbuildings and spread out over multiple lots, so there is a small chance that this stone structure behind 10 East Fremont might be related to the earlier enterprise.  

Tree Shaped Tombstones

German and other central European communities seem to have a fondness for these elaborate monuments.  So I had considerable hopes when walking about a little hillside cemetery in Kiel. I only found one, but it is an oddity.

Nicely executed work, love the little acorns.  This is the only example I've seen that represents two families.  They must have been closely aligned by business or family tree connections.  Ruhestaedte means "resting place".  The conjoined AE is also peculiar, I think I've seen it once or twice on Norwegian tombstones but never German.

Standing Guard

Down the hill from the cemetery is a little park with the not uncommon dedication to local veterans.  These places often have assorted martial hardware on display either US surplus or captured enemy weapons.  Here we see something interesting.

This is an impressively well preserved German machine gun of the M1908 variety.  The plate with the serial number indicates it was made in 1918, and so was perhaps captured by American troops late in the war.  Were they lads from Kiel?  If so, did they feel conflicted on any level regards fighting against men who were culturally closer to them than many of their fellow citizens?  If such attitudes existed back then they have not been recorded in any public fashion I've run across.

For now the old machine gun is keeping a wary vigil.  That red roof in the distance is a Dairy Queen and you just know they are up to something....

Another "Doughboy" with Tree, Manitowoc Wisconsin

Less than 24 hours after finding an amazing new form of "Tree Shaped Tombstone" I found another one.  This "Doughboy" is in the Evergreen Cemetery of Manitowoc.  The condition is not quite as good, but it is still magnificent.

This is the grave of Private Otto Luecke.

As you can see, the right ear and the brim of his had have had some damage.  There is also a bit more overall weathering.  This makes it hard to read the inscription on the "stump" but it indicates he died in Manchester England.  I assumed he was a victim of the "Spanish Flu".  And I was right.

It is a sobering reminder that the Four Horsemen always ride in tandem.  The 1918 influenza pandemic killed many more than the shell fire and machine gun bullets of The Great War.

With the discovery of two essentially identical monuments it is clear that we are not dealing with a one off done by some talented and dedicated craftsman.  Somebody was creating and marketing these on a larger scale.  It is difficult to track them down with a standard Google image search, you just get buried under tons of more commonplace World War monuments.  But I have found at least two other specimens from other states.  I'd love to learn out more if anyone knows anything....

The fact that this was a commodity in no way detracts from their beauty.  You could not make something like this without considerable skill and passion for your work.  I'm sure the families appreciated it.

The Doughboy and the Tree

Bit of a longer post today.  The subject warrants it.

If I have limited time and am passing through a city I usually try to figure out where the "society" cemetery was.  That's where you find the most ornate tombstones.  Which is not to say always the most interesting ones.  But on this occasion I was on the edge of Manitowoc Wisconsin and noticed that Calvary Cemetery, a smaller place on the outskirts, was nearby.  I drove up and saw.....this.

A life sized World War I doughboy standing at parade rest next to an ornamental tree stump.  I'd never seen one before, never even heard of one.  It's amazing.  Check out the details!

The hand holding the rifle has fingernails.

The boots have distinct lacings.  The legs have that odd cloth wrap that was intended to keep the muck of the trenches somewhat at bay.  The toes of the boots have that odd "Ronald McDonald" look that I'm sure reflected reality.

Not just a canteen, but one with a canvas cover.

Even the rifle is shown in enough detail that it can be identified by type.  It is a so called "American Enfield", a British design rechambered for American ammunition.  It was in fact the most common rifle issued to American troops.  The tell tale clue is the distinctive front sights.

(since my experience digging at Hill 80 I've developed an interest in the history of Great War firearms.  A fabulous - and non political - source for this is C&Rsenal ).

A much weathered inscription on the top of the "stump" only gives the first name, Edward.  But it is in the plot of the Gerl family.  There is also an inscription on the front which gives the details of his death:

"Lost his life in the English Channel.  May 21, 1918."

The full story is HERE.  The short version is that he was a Manitowoc lad who had been working as a teacher before enlisting.  He was in an early draft sent overseas and was one of 53 American soldiers who died when the transport Moldavia was torpedoed in the English Channel by the German submarine UB-57.

There are many remarkable things about this monument.  The details of his death.  The absence of a last name.  But mostly the incredible detail.  My first thought was that this was a privately commissioned work, and I marveled that there was no artist's signature to be found.  I stared at the face, and it stared right back.  Was it based on the actual face of Edward Gerl?

Hard to tell, isn't it?  I was still pondering the question when I discovered the answer.  More on this next time.

The hunt for history as recorded in tombstones may seem a bit morbid, but it provides plenty of occasion for reflection on Life and Death.  And less commonly for wonderful surprises such as the Doughboy and the Tree monument I found in Calvary Cemetery, on the outskirts of Manitowoc....

An American Doughboy - Still Standing....for now.

Road trips are an excellent way to discover new things.  But there are disadvantages too.  When just "passing through" you sometimes have to get your photos on a day when conditions are not ideal.  As for instance with this interesting monument adjacent to the "Janesville 99" memorial we visited last time.

It is a World War I monument, and actually the dark, swirling clouds above do a decent job of bringing to mind the smoke and hellfire of trench warfare.  The Doughboy is standing defiant, rifle in one hand, grenade held high in the other.  The detail work is very nice, notice the little touches such as the barbed wire near his feet.

I learned that this was one of a large series of such statues from the 1920s and 30s.  Here's another image of one taken by someone blessed with better equipment, eye and weather conditions.

When I got up on tiptoes to photograph the leggings and barbed wire I noticed this plaque, a helpful clue to the history of these sculptures.

As it happens there already exists a website and a related Facebook group dedicated to the history of these "Spirit of the American Doughboy" memorials as created* by an interesting character named Ernest Moore Viquesney.  In brief, these were commercially produced in the decades after The Great War, and found considerable favor as memorials that were generally placed in public spaces with the support of, and in honor of, American WW I veterans.  Approximately 140 are known to exist, although some have not survived the passage of time and perhaps a few are yet to be found in some dusty corner of a storage building.

The majority of known Doughboys, approximately 120, are made of thin sheets of bronze welded together.  Thus they are much lighter and more damage prone than what an equivalent solid bronze statue would be.  Of course this made them far more affordable, and Viquesney was very much of mercantile inclinations.  At least three were done in stone.  And in 1934 due to the economic hard times of the Depression, a version made of cheaper zinc was marketed.  At only $700 each he continued to sell a few although in dwindling numbers as the shadows of a new war grew and as memories of the last one perhaps faded.  Production ended in 1942, at a time when there was likely no extra metal of any kind available.

I do recommend the site linked above.  It is encyclopedic and a fine example of what dedicated amateur historians can accomplish.  It is in its own way a memorial to a time when a scholarly pride in our nation's accomplishments was much in evidence.

The Doughboy Monuments are mostly still in place.  But over the years a dozen or so have suffered vandalism and a few have vanished altogether.  The vandals have been a mixed lot.  The statues are not nearly as sturdy as they look, and not a few drunkards have been very sure they could swing from an arm or from that extended rifle.  A few have been more systematically savaged by people with obscure political motives or by illicit metal scrappers.  Some of the latter have been badly disappointed by the zinc composition and the thin plating of the later versions.  

But what of today?  Is there much left of that "scholarly pride" in our past these days?  Alas I fear not.  

We've had considerable unrest in recent weeks.  Peaceful protests have mutated into something uglier.  Statues commemorating Confederate leaders have been targeted widely, and with at least some logic.  From there it takes so little to throw the ropes and start pulling down figures with ambiguous status.  Columbus, Jefferson.....even The Great Emancipator himself.  And when no convenient target can be brought down by the jeering mob, well, any statue will do.  At least three Doughboys have been damaged since the Floyd protests began in May of 2020.  

Here is the best documented and perhaps saddest example.  Birmingham Alabama, May 31st.  A mob attacks the Confederate Obelisk in a public park.  It proves too sturdy for their engineering abilities, which are likely as rudimentary as other aspects of their education.  

No problem.  Here's another statue.  Let's Mess It Up.

Immediately thereafter both the Confederate Obelisk and the Doughboy were taken down by the City of Birmingham, whose Mayor had actually participated in the protests although not in the defacement of the monuments.

That the Obelisk should go is palatable.  There are mechanisms by which such decisions can be deliberated and done in a proper fashion.  No doubt there are on the one side firebrands who would advocate immediate dynamiting and stubborn obstructionists who would like to continue to enshrine aspects of our history that are no longer considered noble and good.  Our society always functions best when Progress and Conservation can meet, often uneasily, and compromise.

But the Doughboy was just a target of convenience.

I consider World War One to be our last idealistic war.  We took up arms for others, in a conflict that did not directly impact our nation's security.  We fought for the subjugated and abused citizens of Belgium.  We fought for Freedom of the Seas.  We fought because small nations should not be ground under the heel of mighty empires.  Try as I can to appreciate the peculiar mind set of our modern Visigoths I can't see much racism involved in it.  In fact we joined an alliance where black and asian colonial troops were fighting and dying for Ideals, while looking ahead to the eventual freedom that always seems to result when brave men prove they are the equal of their nominal "masters".

The Birmingham Doughboy is now safe somewhere and supposedly will be cleaned up, repaired and restored to his pedestal.  I hope you'll forgive me if the cynicism of these ignorant times has given me doubts as to whether that will in fact ever happen.

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* I will by convention give Viquesney credit for these statues, but the true story of the artists and craftsmen involved is complex and best addressed by the Viquesney website.  I again recommend it.

Hill 80 Revisited

It has been almost two years since I helped excavate the World War One battlefield site of Hill 80 in rural Belgium.  I gave a talk on it in November 2018, timed to be as close as the schedule would allow to the exact moment that the guns fell silent in 1918.  

Recently I offered to reprise several of my talks for the local community education program as a three part Archaeology Series.  Yesterday I revisited Hill 80.

Good turnout, its always gratifying when the limiting factor is size of the room.

This was a noon hour session so we did have to mix a light lunch with a heavy topic.

I was able to use new material this time, including a variety of great photos of items conserved post excavation.

And this time around I could report publically the name of a soldier - one of 120 lost soldiers recoved during the dig - who had been definitively identified by name.

Rest in Peace Albert Oehrle.  A Bavarian whose pre-war occupation was listed as "Gardener".  He enlisted in the initial wave of enthusiasm in 1914.  His military career was short.  His regiment was thrown into the desparate First Battle of Ypres.  Most of these new recruits were only partly trained.  Many were very young.  In Germany this is remembered as the Kindermort.  Literally this means "the death of the children" but it is also a reference to the New Testament "massacre of the innocents" carried out by Herod after the visit of the Magi to Bethlahem.

Albert Oehrle was 17 years old.   

Time Capsule - Button Box Part Three

A non button item from the button box.  This is at first glance rather jarring to the eye.  We are accustomed to having medals display the national colors of the nation issuing them.  This is a definite and intentional exception.  Take a closer look.

The front does not help much.  It's a thematic mish mash.  An angel with shield and sword, the latter now lowered.  A radiate crown suggesting the Statue of Liberty.  Bare feet striding across a curved surface that could be the face of the earth.  I'm seeing elements of Joan of Arc, The Angels of Mons, maybe the Arch Angel Micheal.

Here's the reverse, and the start of our explanation.  All the Allied Powers in World War One.  

At the end of The Great War there was a sense of unity.  So it was decided that a medal commemorating service would be issued to all Allied soldiers with the ribbon representing a blending of all the national flags, and the back listing the Allied Nations.  It's a nice touch to include Montenegro and Brazil, whose contributions were minor, and Russia who had dropped out and to some extent even switched sides.  In fact, this medal was, in the US version at least, issued not only to soldiers who fought in World War One but also in the post war Allied interventions in the Russian Civil War!

The front images had similar themes but were a bit different for the various nations.  Here's a rather racy version representing Belgium, taken from this compilation.

The subject of these Great War commemorative medals is actually complicated, as one would expect with so many war weary nations all doing this at once.  There seem to be official and semi official versions, and the supposedly uniform size and theme requirements were not always adhered to.  Some of these are quite rare and worth a bit, but an example from a major combatant nation, separated from the history of the soldier, and lacking the various "battle honor" clips you sometimes see is not much more than a historical curio.

One final thought.  Notice the image on the back of the medal.  It is an axe and a bundle of sticks.  This is the classic "fasces" a symbol indicating that a group of people, or group of nations were stronger united together than standing alone.  When this medal was issued in 1919 a wounded Italian veteran named Benito Mussolini had already founded the Revolutionary Fascist Party with this as its emblem.  In the years that followed Fascism would spread and of the nations listed on this medal only sensibly neutral Portugal would be spared the horrors of a Second World War.

Heinrich Hertz and the tragedy of German Science

I learned things in my electronics class.  Not always things in the curriculum...because I kept wandering down interesting side paths.  For instance, we studied alternating current wave forms.  Ooh, compelling stuff.  Nah, only useful stuff.  But the unit of frequency for wave forms is hertz.  As in kilohertz, megahertz, etc.  I got to wondering who this was named after....and a remarkable but sad story emerged.  In a sense it is a condensed version of the larger somber tale of how German science and industry was bent to evil purposes in the first half of the 20th century.....

Meet Heinrich Rudolph Hertz.  A brilliant polymath he was accomplished not only in physics and engineering but learned Arabic and Sanskrit.  Although he had the previous theoretical work of Maxwell to build on he was the first scientist to prove the wave nature of electrical and magnetic fields.  Having basically just proven the principles on which radio, AC current and most modern electronics function he was asked what practical use he saw in this.  His answer?

"Nothing, I guess."

Heinrich Hertz died in 1894 at the young age of 34.  Cause of death was a disease I learned as "Wegner's Granulomatosis".  In recent years it has been renamed, as it turns out that Herr Docktor Wegener did some dodgy medical experiments involving concentration camp inmates.

Meet Gustav Ludwig Hertz, nephew of Heinrich.

Also a very bright fellow, he was one half of the team that presented the Franck-Hertz experiments to the scientific community in April of 1914.  These studied the electrical properties of gases in a vacuum and demonstrated the quantum nature of atoms. 

Oh, and about 1914 and gases....

Hertz served in the German army during WW I, in a special unit commanded by Fritz Haber that for the first time developed and deployed poison gas in warfare.  Pioneer Regiment 35/36 had no fewer than four future Nobel Prize winners in its ranks.  Franck and Hertz won the Physics prize in 1925.  Otto Hahn discovered nuclear fission and won the 1944 Nobel for chemistry despite carrying on his research in Berlin!  (To be fair it was only announced post war).  Fritz Haber topped them all.  He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918.....at a time when the acrid stench of poison gas still lingered in the depths of shattered battlefields.

An interesting reflection on a different mind set.  Haber won his prize for discovering a way that atmospheric nitrogen could be "fixed" and utilized in chemical reactions.  It allowed the mass manufacture of high explosives that tore apart millions of soldiers.  Also the commercial production of fertilizers that fed billions of civilians.  How different from our "woke" modern attitude that requires past figures be subjected to modern judgments, their statues removed, their presence in texts erased or marked with asterisks!

It has become fashionable to condemn any questioning of science as an "attack" and those who do so as "deniers".  But let's be fair, brilliant men are far from omniscient. H. Hertz discounting electromagnetic waves as a clever parlor trick.  Haber, Hahn and G. Hertz not seeing past their equations to gasping and incinerated bodies.  But in the epilogue to this tale there are rays both of dark and light.

James Franck and Gustav Hertz arranged to defect to the Russians at the end of World War II.  They worked on the Soviet nuclear program which thankfully to date has never been used in war.

Gustav's Hertz's defection meant that his son, Carl, also a physicist would not be allowed to work in the US.  A POW captured in North Africa he went post war to Sweden where he pioneered inkjet technology and performed the first cardiac ultrasound.  

Otto Hahn was also captured by the Western Allies.  When given the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he was appalled at the direction his work had taken.  His immediate response was to get very drunk.  In the longer term he became a prominent advocate for the abolition of nuclear weapons entirely.

Ah, but Fritz Haber had the strangest journey.  He continued work in secret on poison gas in the post WW I era.  But being of Jewish ancestry he fell into disfavor with the rise of the Nazi regime.  Remarkably he was invited to emigrate to England, where he worked for a few years. 

Fritz Haber

Finally Chaim Weizmann reached out to Haber, inviting him to come to Jerusalem and head up the Sieff Research Institute.  In failing health, Haber died en route.

The Sieff was later renamed the Weizmann Institute, premier academic organization of the post WWII state of Israel.  It was of course named for Chaim Weizmann, first President of Israel and a man who attained his early scientific fame by devising a method of making high explosive cordite by fermenting starch, thereby making his own contribution to the ability to destroy human life on a grand and grotesque scale.

In honor of those who still rest far from home.

Remembering the end of The Great War.  Nonsense can wait for another day.

Soldiers of the Great War. Peace a Century Late.

It's been a year and a half since my stint helping excavate the World War One battlefield at Hill 80.  The site has now been developed and if there were any additional surprises found when the bulldozers rolled through I have not heard of them.

A major motivation for the excavation was to spare the many lost soldiers buried there an unworthy fate.  Human remains are found all the time on former World War sites. Generally the bones are at best put off to one side for the police to come and collect.  Since many of the remains are scattered and fragmentary, it is likely that a large number are not noticed at all, just ground into dust under the treads of heavy equipment.  And even the occasional intact burials get separated from artifacts that might have shown their nationality or - the best outcome - their identity.

In the end a minimum of 110 fallen soldiers were found.  The passage of time combined with four continuous years of artillery fire make an exact count impossible. In fact I consider it miraculous that so many of the early war casualties were quite nearly intact, buried in two mass graves.

On Thursday of last week 13 soldiers of the British Army were buried.  Three French and  one South African are to be interred at a later date.  

The photo below shows representatives of the Royal Navy, Army and RAF.  All three of these folks worked on the excavation, I had the pleasure of getting to know two of them.

And on Friday the German casualties were put to rest in their own cemetery.  In this much larger group there was one possible and one definite ID.  17 year old Albert Oehrle a gardener from Bavaria who volunteered at the outbreak of war.  He would never see his 18th birthday.

Soldiers of the Great War, finally at rest.  Too late for living family to remember, they were casualties of a foolish war that the world would like to forget.   But we still remember the men, their bravery and sacrifice in the service of their various nations. And finally, if a century too late, they rest among their countrymen in a place dedicated to their memories.

The Quonsets Fall

We've made it through to glorious spring time, but oh it was a wicked winter.  Cold, blizzards, and finally one last late winter blast of heavy wet snow that weighed heavily on morale...and on local roofs.

On a recent walk I noticed that several Quonset huts in town had bitten the dust. 

I realized that I had never seriously thought about Quonset huts in my 62 years on earth.  A shameful oversight.

I of course knew that they were cheap, prefab structures widely used by the military, and that post WWII they were commonly used in civilian settings as well.  Many of the early ones in fact were Mil Surplus but subsequently they were offered by a wide range of builders.

I did not know that their antecedents went back even farther, to the so called "Nissen Huts" invented by the British in WW I.

These structures got their name from their inventor, a certain Major Peter Nissen of the Royal Engineers.  He was an interesting chap, born in America but moved first to Canada then to England with a brief stay in South Africa.  He enlisted at the start of hostilities in 1914.  The massive increase in the British Army made accommodation problematic, and the Nissen hut proved a versatile invention.  Over 100,000 were built during the war.  For this Major Nissen got no royalties although his design did generate income for him after the war when huts based on this design were constructed world wide.

Surprisingly there is still a Nissen Buildings Company going strong 102 years after their founding!

Alas, in the end these are still inexpensive, prefab buildings.  They are not destined to stand for centuries.  Here in my little town there will soon be two less of their Quonset descendants*.
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*So called because in the US they were first built at a Naval Construction Battalion Center at Quonset Point Rhode Island.

Art Gallery for the Dreary Winter Months

Yep, its winter.  More time cooped up indoors.  I have an "office" off in one corner of the house.  This and the basement workshop are mine to decorate as I choose, so I put up a few reminders of warmer and/or more cheerful times...

Here's one corner.

On the left are some small prints done by one of my fellow Dig Hill 80 excavators. At the time I did not know that Kathryn had this talent.  Here are a few examples before framing.  

Some of these are rather Brit-centric, like the Menin Gate.  Poppies also are more resonant "over there".  I rather like the buttons, ammo and water bottles having dug examples in various states of preservation.  If you want copies or other graphics stuff, I'm happy to give her an endorsement:

 Kathryn Duncan Illustration

The black and white photo to the right of the chair is something special. It was taken by another friend of mine, now departed.  Angello Spinelli was a POW who audaciously continued to take pictures while in the Stalags for two years.  This is a copy of one of his originals which are at the National POW Museum in Andersonville.  It shows the combined ball teams for a Stalag Baseball All Star game!

Up on an adjacent bookshelf are some  items that challenge our understanding of "What is Art?".  Still life with Fez collection?  Cross Species Dressing Bill the Squirrel?

Today Bill is styling some new Christmas acquisitions.  I hope his "Walter White" phase is brief.