November 22, 1918. King Albert returns home, the Allies march towards Germany

Third day of armistice movement.  Supply Train of the 1st Bn, 59th Infantry, Moyeuvre La Grande, Lorraine

French troops entering Brussels for King Albert's review.

Mid Week At Work Blog Mirror: The Myth of Stagnant Incomes:

From the Washington Post:

The Myth of Stagnant Incomes

Or not:

Some People Hate Income Inequality So Much They Pretend It Doesn't Exist.

- Neil A. Waring's - Confessions of a Writer of Westerns: Writing & Editing

- Neil A. Waring's - Confessions of a Writer of Westerns: Writing & Editing: This is a short week for most American’s – When I was a teacher I always liked Thanksgiving break. It was long enough for me to relax but s...

November 21, 1918. Marching through Luxembourg on the way to Germany

Aequa lege necessitas sortitur insignes et imos

Fate, by an impartial law, is allotted both to the conspicuous and the obscure.

Horace

Crossing borders, November 20, 1918.

Advance guard of the 18th Infantry crossing the border line of France and Luxembourg near Aumetz Lux, Lorraine, November 20, 1918.  The 18th was part of the 1st Division and had been in action from the start of American combat participation until the end of the war.  Note that this group of soldiers is entirely equipped with garrison caps and that one of the soldiers is carrying a Chauchat automatic rifle.

Arrival of the first American troops in Belgium, Arlon, Belgium, November 20, 1918.  This street scene is interesting, among other reasons, in that a couple of the men are wearing the type of fedora you'll occasionally see claimed to have not existed until the 1920s. This type shows up in other photos earlier than this, but this photograph gives a good example of them.

Acclinis falsis animus meliora recusat

The mind intent upon false appearances refuses to admit better things

Horace

Crappy but predictable career advice

From the ABA list serve:

Michelle Obama got this advice after confiding to her mother that she hated being a lawyer

And what, pray tell, was that advice:

“You know, my mother didn’t comment on the choices that we made,” Obama said. “She was live-and-let-live. So one day she’s driving me from the airport after I was doing document production in Washington, D.C., and I was like, ‘I can’t do this for the rest of my life. I can’t sit in a room and look at documents.’ I won’t get into what that is, but it’s deadly. Deadly. Document production. So I shared with her in the car: I’m just not happy. I don’t feel my passion. And my mother—my uninvolved, live-and-let-live mother—said, ‘Make the money, worry about being happy later.’ “

Let's look at that again.

Make the money, worry about being happy later.

Michelle Obama was born in 1964, one year later than me.  Her mother, Wikipedia reports, was born in 1937.  So at the time this advice was given, her mother was at least 50, maybe older (we aren't really informed when this advice was given, only that it was give prior to Mrs. Obama meeting her husband. . . we know that Michele Obama graduated from Harvard Law School (of course) in 1988 (she's a Princeton undergrad by the way) and met her future husband in 1989 (their first date was to see "Do The Right Thing").  So, this conversation must have occurred in 1988 or 1989.

Michelle Obama is a really smart person.  And extremely well-educated, to say the least. So if she was relating to her mother that she hated being a lawyer and wanted to hang it up. . . well that really says something either about the law as a profession (and the propaganda surrounding it) or maybe the place she was working, or maybe her personality.  Any of those could be true.

But it also says something huge about that generation that her mother was part of.

Now, Her mother was born late enough that she's not really part of that Depression era generation that Tom Brokaw has grossly mischaracterized as being "The Greatest Generation".  The generation she would have been born into is the "Silent Generation", which according to the generational theorists Strauss and Howe, we've written about before, has the following characteristics:

• Silent Generation (1925–1942) (Artist) 

Again, this is a commonly used term for this generation.  I can't say much about them other than that both of my parents would have fit into it.  According to Strauss and Howe that would mean: 

Artists grow up overprotected by adults preoccupied with the Crisis, come of age as the socialized and conformist young adults of a post-Crisis world, break out as process-oriented midlife leaders during an Awakening, and age into thoughtful post-Awakening elders.

I definitely don't see that in my parents generation.  Indeed, I really think that there was very little difference between the World War Two generation and them, other than they were born at an age where they were either serving very late in the war, or in the next one.  In other words, if the artist category describes people born in the late 1920s, anyhow, this doesn't seem right to me at all. And indeed, perhaps the generational years assigned to this cohort are flat out wrong.  It wouldn't strike me, for example, that kids born in the Jazz Age year of 1925, who would have been eligible for military service in 1943, would share that much in common with people born in 1945.

Well, what I noted there, I'd note again.  I don't think there's a colossal difference between the World War Two generation and those born in the late 1920s and the 1930s.  Indeed, my guess is that the overarching nature of the twin global crises of World War Two and the Great Depression had a big generational leveling effect. To add to that, my mother, who was slightly older than my father, was actually old enough to have joined the Canadian armed forces, which she inquired about doing, if she had wanted to (she realized right off that her genteel upbringing made her singularly unsuitable for service life, and so she didn't pursue it).  My father was too young to serve in World War Two, but that generation that came close to fighting in it always looked to it and their late teen experiences such that it was a looming event in their life. . . in some ways even a larger event than the one that many of them did serve in (including my father), the Korean War.

I do think the name the "Silent Generation" is apt, however, as something in what appeared in the ABA article did really strike me, that being" my mother didn’t comment on the choices that we made".  My parents, and in particular my father, didn't either. I sure wish he had, quite frankly, as he had a wealth of personal experience and had lived a really hard young life (he worked in his father's packing house in the 1940s as a teen, he became the head of the family in his late teens when his own father died, he had effectively become the father to his youngest brother when he was that age and on into his own twenties. He'd started off in manual work and then had been sent to college at his mother's command and had acquired a dental degree which he worked at until he died at age 62).  I would have liked his insights, but he didn't really provide them.

But when he did, they were basically of the same nature as Michelle Obama's mother.  He never told me "Make the money, worry about being happy later.“ but I recall that he did tell me, when I was thinking of becoming a game warden and majoring in Wildlife Management "there are a lot of guys around here with wildlife management degrees and no jobs" and when I was thinking of going to law school "a law degree is something you can use for a lot of things".

He was flat out wrong on the last comment in spite of being truly a quiet genius.  He was probably right in his first observation, however, FWIW.

So what's my point?

Well my point is that this advice is both in error in objective fact (there's no guaranty that you are going to rake in piles of bucks as a lawyer), and in what it suggests on a larger scale.  But it's also common to generations that grew up in financial distress.

Indeed, it's frankly a common view for my own generation if they grew up around here.  People like me were born into a local economic depression and in some ways most of us never got over it, just like our parents that grew up in the Great Depression also didn't get over it.  Having a job, in and of itself, was absolutely paramount in people's minds, given that so many of us (myself included) at least at one time didn't have one.

This view, we're now told, is common to "Generation Z", the generation that is just coming into the workforce.  Some new studies relate that in terms of employment, they look a lot like the generation that came of age in the wake of the Great Depression.  They seem to value job stability above all else, and they don't worry about climbing to the top of the economic ladder.  Indeed, it's reported at least right now that they'd rather get a job in an established entity owned by somebody else, rather than try starting one up, which makes a great deal of sense if their personal youthful experience with that effort is watching things fail.

Maybe generational traits truly are cyclical.  If so, maybe we can hope for an abatement in some other trends that have come on post 1960.

But was Michelle Obama's mother right?  Well I don't think so.  I grasp what she was saying, but that can be a recipe for long term bitter disappointment.

Indeed, I frequently note that people who give these recollections in the public sphere often had their lives take a really dramatic turn that makes the value of their recollection questionable.  In fairness to Michelle Obama, she's not really conveying this recollection as advice.   More telling is that the Harvard Law graduate (and as I've noted in the past, while I think it's singularly unfair and a bit absurd, Harvard Law graduates pretty much get to write their own ticket) only briefly practiced law and put her license on inactive status in 1993.  She was admitted to the bar in 1988. So, in fact, she basically rejected her mother's advice.

Probably wisely.  Things worked out, and her career, while it probably wasn't as lucrative as the one she started to pursue in 1988, turned out no doubt to be more interesting.

November 19, 1918. The President's Proclamation on Thanksgiving, Wilson to go to Europe, Bolsheviks and Peace

- Neil A. Waring's - Confessions of a Writer of Westerns: Great First Lines

- Neil A. Waring's - Confessions of a Writer of Westerns: Great First Lines: The snow is coming down as I write this, looks like four or five inches so far. The First Line – So much has been written about getting a...

And some great first lines there!

Whitaker appointment dispute reaches Supreme Court

Whitaker appointment dispute reaches Supreme Court

Uff, just seems like one thing after another, doesn't it?

Because Pie's Are Great

My wife claims she doesn't like pie.

8 Spectacular Pies That Taste as Good as They Look

How can anyone really not like pie?

November 18, 1918. Allies March on the Rhine and the Impact of the Loss of the War Stars More Fully In Germany

Photograph taken on November 18, 1918.

Particularly if you hang out in areas of the net where the things are somewhat pedantic, you'll see the claim that World War One "didn't end" on November 11, 1918, because the Versailles Treaty was signed in May, 1919.

Cheyenne newspaper noting the American and Allied march into Germany and the surrender of the German fleet.  This paper also notes the horrible death toll of the Spanish Flu Epidemic.

Well, dear reader, armies don't march into the "heart" of a nation that isn't defeated.  Nor does a non defeated nation, in a time of war, turn its ships over to the enemy.

Laramie newspaper noting much the same, but also noting one of the ways in which wars change things. . . air mail was expanding following the close of the war. . . and of course the war had changed airplanes much.

No, while you'll occasionally see that, it's clear German was not only on its knees in November 1918, it was a defeated nation in Revolution.

The Casper paper ran as its headline the reunification of Alsace with France. . .something that a defeated nation does is give up territory.

And Germany was getting smaller, as this headline noted.

"‘Great War’ brought Catholics, bishops into mainstream of US society"? Not so much.

‘Great War’ brought Catholics, bishops into mainstream of US society

So claims the headline for a story in the website of   The Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau

The Roman Catholic Church of Southern Missouri.

Well. . .

I don't really think so.

One of the temptations when you study a certain era of history, or write a lot about it, or even look into it, is to attribute things to it that exceed the boundaries of where you ought to go.

Now, don't get me wrong, war brings about a lot of first.  Indeed, we've maintained here that War Changes Everything.  And that's true. But it doesn't change as much as we might think.

What this article touches on is something that we tend not to think a lot about today, even though it is still with us, that being the strong prejudice against Catholics that once existed in the United States.

On that, a little background. There was once a vast amount of prejudice against Catholics in the United States.   I've touched on this elsewhere, but the United States wasn't founded by a culture that wasn't tolerant of Catholicism in the first place, even if one of the colonies was, for a time, a refuge for English Catholics.  Indeed, contrary to what we tend to imagine about the founding of the American colonies, they weren't religiously tolerant in general.  England had gone from being a highly Catholic country prior to the reign of King Henry VIII (who no doubt always imagined himself to be a loyal Catholic of some sort in spite of everything) to being one that endured a long period of religious strife which broke out occasionally into open warfare.  By the time that the English planted their first colony in North America, the English were officially Protestant but it was still whipping around from one Protestant theology to another.  As noted, King Henry VIII basically thought of himself as the head of the Catholic Church in England, but still a Catholic.  More radical Protestant reformers were vying for position and would soon come into control with his passing, but not before the nation became Catholic again under Mary, and then ostensible reached a "religious settlement" under Elizabeth. Even that settlement wasn't really one. Things were muddy under King James I as a struggle between Calvinist and Anglicans went on during his reign over England and Scotland.  Puritans would come to be oppressed and flea to the Netherlands where they'd prove to be annoying and end up leaving later.  Various English colonies were strongly sectarian, so much so that Puritans coming down out of Rhode Island later would be tried and executed.  Religious tolerance was somewhat lacking early on.

Remains of the early church at Jamestown in the 1870s.  This was an Anglican Church, as the settlers at Jamestown were all members of the Church of England.  The Puritans (only part of the "Pilgrims") were not however, and in their Plymouth Rock settlement their church was not an Anglican one.  The two groups did not get along.

Anyhow, while Catholics were present in the colonies early on (and Catholics remained in varying stages of being underground in England but very much above grown in Ireland. . .and then there's the story of English crypto Catholics which I'll not go into as it complicates the story further) they were always a minority and knew it.  That might be, oddly enough, why the small Catholic population of the Colonies supported the Revolution in greater percentages than other colonists, in spite of the anti Catholic rhetoric of the Intolerable Acts.  Catholics remained looked down upon in the new nation even as it adopted a policy of prohibiting a state religion which morphed into officially accepting religious tolerance (the two aren't really the same).  And this continued on for a very long time.

Now, let me first note that it would be absolutely the truth to state that war, or more correctly wars, changed the view of a segments of American society and sometimes all of American society towards Catholics. But World War One wasn't really one of those wars. 

The Mexican War was.  By the time of the Mexican War, which ran from 1846 to 1848, lots of Germans and Irish were immigrating to the United States.  Indeed, the Irish were also immigrating in large numbers to Canada and some of them from Canada to the United States.  The Irish Great Famine (potato famine) commenced in 1845 and was driving millions of Irish from Eire causing a population that was already religious oppressed and living in primitive poverty to enter other lands where they were truly alien.  Political conditions in Germany were in turmoil which would break out in the revolutions of 1848, something that saw large-scale Catholic emigration out of Germany as Catholics sought to avoid living in a Prussian Germany.

A large number of Catholics therefore ended up serving in the American forces during the Mexican War as enlisted men, many of whom were Irish born or born in one of the various German states.  They were treated abysmally by their Protestant officers and particularly by Southern officers, who tended to detest Catholics.

They generally fought well however and their numbers caused the appointment of the first Catholic clerics to the U.S. Army.  That helped bring about a new relationship between the Army and Catholics, but what really did it is that the appalling abuse of Catholic enlisted men lead a group of them to desert and join the Mexican army, which formed its own artillery unit made up of American deserters.  That shock caused the Army to reevaluate what it was doing, and Catholics, particularly Catholic immigrants, found a home in the Army thereafter.

Mass hanging of captured members of the San Patricio's. The penalty for treason was death, but this would be the last act of its type and bring to an end outward discrimination against Catholics in the enlisted ranks of the U.S. Army.

That was built on during the Civil War, during which you can find several examples of very senior Catholic officers, such as Phil Sheridan.  Sheridan is notable in this context as he entered West Point in 1848, hard on the heels of the Mexican War, which shows how quickly things were changing.  By the time of the Civil War Catholics, and in particular Irish Catholics, were common in the Army.  The enlisted career Irish sergeant was a fixture in the American Army by that time.

Philip Sheridan, one of the most famous American officers of the Civil War and a Catholic.  By this time the oddity of having a Catholic general officer was gone. For that matter, William Sherman was married to a devout Catholic which is something that would have been held against him in an earlier era but was not, and he had converted to Catholicism but was not observant and sometimes disclaimed it.  His son would become a Jesuit Priest.

The Civil War brought about a wider change however as American society at large remained viciously anti Catholic prior to the Civil War.  Catholics may have found a place in the Army, but they were generally pretty isolated in every way otherwise.  Bizarre anti Catholic literature was common accusing Catholics of all sorts of things.

Following the war, however, this largely ceased. The country didn't grow suddenly tolerant, but rather open bizarre hostility stopped.  This was in part because the high degree of sectarianism also stopped due to the war. Going into the Civil War Americans not only tended to be strongly Protestant or Catholic (although the level of non observance was much, much higher than imagined, which is another story), but they also tended to strongly have opinions on other Protestant faiths if they were Protestant.

San Miguel Church in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Built between 1610 and 1625, this church is a contemporary to the Anglican church at Jamestown, but it remains in use today.  This Catholic church is emblematic of the act that with the large amount of Mexican territory taken in by the United States during the Mexican War, a Hispanic Catholic population was taken in as well.

The American Civil War had come in the wake of the Second Great Awakening, although its technically outside of the time period for that which historians have assigned it and instead in what they have framed as the Third Great Awakening.  The Second Great Awakening saw the rise of the a lot of American Protestant denominations including some that had strong millenialism beliefs.  Catholics weren't part of this in the United States, of course.  But the very strong sectarianism that came up in the period came to a bit of a hiatus due to the Civil War.  Prior to the Civil War Americans were ready to cite religion in support of their fighting positions.  Mexico's Catholic status had been a cited reason to fight it in some Protestant sermons prior to the Mexican War.  The United States had fought a small scale war with the Mormons in the 1850s.  Going into the Civil War both sides cited religious grounds for going to war, with both of those sides citing Protestant religious grounds at that.

Let's be clear.  Neither the Mexican War nor the Civil War were wars over religion by any means.  Protestant ministers who cited Mexico's Catholic nation status as a reason to fight it were sincere, but at the end of the day the Mexican War was fought because Mexico couldn't stomach the thought that it had lost the province of Texas and they couldn't agree to the border with the newly American Texas being where it was claimed to be by the United States.  Religion didn't have much to do with that. And the Civil War was about slavery, plain and simple. There were certainly religious overtones to the positions taken by both sides in the Civil War, and religion strongly informed some of those positions, but the war itself was not a religious war which is attested to by some of the oddities of the topic on both sides of the war. The Union had huge numbers of Catholic troops including some who were outright Fenians, but that impacted those units only within them.  The Confederacy, which had  much higher religious uniformity than the North; it was overwhelmingly Protestant except in Louisiana and many of its senior generals were devout Episcopalians including one who was an Episcopal Bishop found itself taking a position on slavery that had already been condemned by the Catholic Church in Rome but its president toyed with Catholicism throughout his life and the Confederate cabinet included a Jewish member.

But because of the Civil War Americans really backed down on citing religion in an extreme prejudicial way like they had before.  Indeed, it wasn't all that long, in spite of ongoing prejudice, that there would be a United States Supreme Court justice on the bench who was both a veteran of the Confederate army and a Catholic.

Which doesn't mean that the prejudice had ended.  Well into the 20th Century to be a Catholic was to be subject to prejudice.  Catholics were mostly blue collar or agriculturalist, with medicine and the law, two professions always occupied by minorities, the exceptions. They couldn't attend Ivy League schools and remain faithful to their faiths and they largely didn't go on to upper education at all.

Which was the status when the United States entered World War One.

And the status after the war as well.

St. Joseph's Polish Catholic Church, an active church in Denver Colorado today, was built in 1902 as the Polish Catholics wanted their own church separate from the southern Slavic (Balkans) Catholic church one a block away. This is a bit symbolic of the degree to which Catholics lived in ethnic Ghettos at the time, but it was also contrary to the policy of the Catholic Church to attempt to integrate all Catholics into non ethnic congregations. This church was built in 1902 just as Slavic immigration was becoming significant in the United States and obviously various diocese yielded to pressures on occasion.  This same neighborhood contains a Russian Orthodox cathedral of the same vintage, reflecting the Slavic nature of the neighborhood. At the time this church was built, Poland wasn't a state and was part of both Russia and Germany.

Indeed, going into the war there were real reasons to worry about some of the Catholic populations of the United States and their receptive loyalties.  At the time, Catholicism was heavily represented in Irish, German, French, Italian and "Mexican" demographics.  Irish populations identified heavily with their ethnic fellows in Eire, which remained part of the United Kingdom but which was struggling with obtaining home rule and which was suffering under the long impact of religious oppression that had come to an official end only in the 19th Century.  German Americans retained a strong sense of pride in their ethnic origin and openly celebrated their Germaness in various ways throughout the year.  Hispanics, who were of various origins but whom most of, at that time, traced an origin to from Mexico or Spanish Mexico, were a suspect people both because of their ethnicity and because there were fears that they may sympathize with Carranza who, it was feared, might be sympathizing with the Germans.

Only French Americans, who were mostly Acadians, Cajuns, or Creole's, and Italian Americans, were not suspect. But the French population was so remote from France that it had no real sympathies with France itself and was highly concentrated in Maine and Louisiana.  The Italians were recent arrivals who did sympathize with Italy, an Allied power in World War One, and were not accordingly suspect.

Indeed, the Italians were hugely celebrated during World War One in the United States.  The Germans, Irish and Mexicans were worried about.

For no reason, as it turned out. They were not disloyal to the United States at all and served loyally.  Prejudice against the Germans was vicious in the U.S. but the German population in the country reacted basically by burying their culture to such an extent that it was largely lost.  The Irish did not do that, but their service in the Great War, including the fact that they were well represented in the Regular Army and made up the bulk of some National Guard regiments, put aside any fears that people had.

But it didn't do much, indeed anything at all, to address the ongoing prejudice that remained in the country.  In that fashion, they found themselves in the same position, but to a much lesser degree, as African Americans. African Americans served very loyally during the war and, unlike World War Two, there were significant numbers of black combat officers in some all black units, but after the war, prejudice against them didn't abate at all.

It'd really take the Second World War to address all of that.

The Bests Posts of the Week of November 11, 2018

The Best Posts of the Week of November 11, 2018.

Lest We Forget.

Sunday Morning Scene: Some Gave All: World War One Memorial, Episcopal Cathedral, Laramie, Wyoming

World War One Ends. November 11, 1918, 1100 (0400 MST).

“You are never too old to set another goal, or to dream a new dream . . ."

Fortuna caeca est

Friday Farming: A nation of self reliant farmers.

 

If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.

Edward Abbey

8F and its just November 17. . .

granted, it's often cold here in November.

But 8F is really cold. And it'll get colder still tonight.

Poster Saturday: "Paid Off"

Folk Medicine

I've had it with Folk Medicine.

It's an irony of the early 21st Century that we've come so far scienticiaclly, and medicine is part of that, and yet in this day and age there are a tremendous number of Americans who believe in stuff that is anti-scientific.

• There are no "essential oils".  That's bunkus.  Unless you are speaking about 10W40 for your car, they don't exist. 
• Copper bracelets on your wrist do nothing whatsoever.  Nothing.
• Your spine does not need to be "adjusted".  I mean, come on. Think about that.
• Acupuncture works as the mini infections it causes distract your pain receptors.  Not really the brainiest thing to be doing.
• Vaccinations are one of the greatest things of all time.  They do not cause Downes syndrome.  Quite taking your medical advice from a former Playboy bunny for goodness sake. 

Today In Wyoming's History: November 17, 1968. A date which lives in television infamy.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 17:

1968     NBC outraged football fans by cutting away from the final minutes of a game to air a TV special, "Heidi," on schedule.

Monuments that didn't happen. November 17, 1918.

American infantrymen crossing the Armistice Line at Etain, March 17, 1918..

American troops were marching into Germany while some were denying that a prostrate Germany was prostrate.  And at the same time a proposal was made to erect a monument to the Great War dead from Natrona County in front of the courthouse.

That courthouse is now gone.  Maybe that monument was erected and is gone now, but as far as I'm aware, the only outdoor memorial to Natrona County's World War One veterans came up in the 2000s, although there were early memorials of other types, those being a trench mortar in Veteran's Park, Caissons at Washington Park, and a swimming pool named in memory of a lost soldier of World War One at the same park.

Best Posts of the Week of November 4, 2018

Belatedly posted, the best posts of the week of November 4, 2018.

The 2018 Wyoming General Election (and the national election too).

Comparisons and Constrasts

Holscher's Hub: The Chute

Countdown on the Great War, November 9, 1918: The End of the German Empire.

Some say the Vikings took cats with them.

Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me

No, you can't always get what you want 

You can't always get what you want 

You can't always get what you want 

But if you try sometime you find 

You get what you need

The Rolling Stones, You Can't Always Get What You Want

So say the sages Jagger and Richards.

 

I posted this earlier today:

“You are never too old to set another goal, or to dream a new dream . . ."

C. S. Lewis did not say.

That's right, that statement, frequently attributed to C. S. Lewis, is something he didn't say.

And that might be because you can indeed be too old to achieve a goal or dream.  And at some point, while you may dream it, it's a species of regret.

Not that we don't all have regrets, and indeed we should have regrets.  Edith Piaf did say "I don't regret anything", or rather sang it. . .in French. . . but that's not a very sound way of viewing things, quite frankly.  "I don't regret anything" might as well mean "I haven't learned anything", unless we don't regret our errors as we learned from them.  Even then, a person ought to rationally regret our trespasses, as the Lord's Prayer counsels that we do.

I have occasion to ponder it, and therefore I'm expanding on it.

One of the great American myths is that you are never too old to achieve goals.  Baloney.  Age closes doors on you without a doubt.  Depending on the goal, some close earlier than others.

You may have been a stand out high school baseball player.  After high school, if you figure yourself good enough to get into pro ball, you have a few years to do it. But let's face it, if you aren't picked up in those few years, you aren't going to be.  Age will close that door.

And the door closing won't necessarily be done so fairly.  There's a lot of reason that these things can happen. A person might have all the talent in the world and end up on a team where the coast is busy playing tetris all day and chooses never to field you.  Or your team might have a loosing record and therefore you are tainted with it.   

Lots of life is that way.  Sure, most people talents show through to some or indeed even a great degree, but that doesn't mean that they'll rise to the top even if a more just fate would have decreed that.  There are colonels who would be better generals than the generals serving at the top. There are city councilmen who would be better governors than their state's governors and governors would would make better Presidents than any one President.  The whims of fate keep them down. That and the operation of politics of all types, great and small.  Who you know remains a better indicator of success in many instances than what you know.  Your personal associates may believe in you and champion your call but that doesn't mean that they have the political muscle to see that you achieve what you should.  

Which brings us to another matter.

My wife is fond of saying "things happen for a reason".  And many things do happen for a reason.  Maybe all things happen for a reason.  But her simple Protestant faith on that varies considerably from my Catholic one.  Things may happen for a reason, but that doesn't mean that they're all beneficially decreed by God.  A lot of things happen for bad reasons.  In Catholic theology many would say that God allows these things to occur, and brings good ultimately out of them, but that doesn't mean that in all things God wills that they occur so then they do.  Conversely, all Christians would believe that God does cause some things to develop.  

Which brings us to the next thing, frustration.

God's ways and man's ways are not the same, and figuring out the mind of God is not something that human's can do.  Indeed, part of the proof of the smallness of the mind of man and the existence of the God is the vastness of all things and that something can't come out of nothing, but we close our minds to that so that we can grasp the tiny little sliver of that which we actually can slightly grasp.  It can be hard at times, however, not to question God on the direction of things, which of course puts us in the position of Job.

Indeed, in modern life, for average people, one of the most frustrating of all questions is to wonder why a person might have certain strong legitimate desires (we all have strong illegitimate desires) that a person cannot act on. Why would a person love baseball and not be able to become a baseball player? Why would a person desire their entire lives to be a farmer in the field and not be able to do it.  Why would a person have the talent to go to the top of their field and then be kept for doing so while lesser men and women surpass them. Why do some people get close to a goal again and again, and are urged to keep pursuing it only to have it repeatedly removed from their grasp?

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.

Well, I wasn't there and none of us have the understanding.

Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.

Sometimes, that's the answer in and of itself

Friday Farming: A nation of self reliant farmers.

 

If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.

Edward Abbey

Weird Internet Headlines

Giant Impact Crater Found In Unusual Place

Eh?

There's a usual place for giant impact craters?

Fortuna caeca est

"Fortune is blind." 

Cicero

World War I: Every Day

   

I think I've shared this video before, but as we've been doing the late war period in sort of real time, it's worth looking at again.

Arguing in Ignorance

I can't  help but notice that a lot of the most strident opinions I see argued on the net, and mostly on Facebook at that, are done in blistering ignorance.

This includes, I'd note, recycled "why this or that" items other people have prepared that are posted in as if they're really informative, just because they exist.

Make no mistake, arguments, no matter how self convinced, that are presented in ignorance, aren't very convincing except to the already convinced in ignorance.  These mostly reinforce a strongly held, but not very well examined, belief the poster holds.  They don't advance any argument at all for that reason.

For example, there's a lot of people who argue for gun control that are completely ignorant on firearms, the use of firearms, and even on actual crime rates. . .anywhere.  Given that, we get stuff that's really stupid like "Why Japan has a low murder rate and why we should adopt Japanese gun control".

Japan does have a low murder rate.  It also has a really high suicide rate.  It's also xenophobic,  homogeneous, and frankly fairly racist and has a culture that really accepts nearly complete control on what people will or can do with their lives in all sorts of ways.

That's not a model for anything other than Japan, accepting that its a model for Japan, which it arguably shouldn't be.

The same sort of "walk this way" mentality that allowed Japan to engage in regional murder and imperial expansion in the 1920s through the 1940s allows it to control who will own what and why in terms of firearms.  It also helps create a culture in which a lot of Japanese would rather be dead.  And the culture is so vastly different from the American one, where people feel that they get to do what they want with what they want, that it's not a model for anything whatsoever.

But people who don't use firearms adopt the model because, well, they don't use firearms and haven't though thought it out.

It isn't even really accurate.  There is, for example, a thing on "Why Japan has a low murder rate" circulating right now that urges the US to adopt the same policies in cartoon form, but it doesn't even have Japan's policies on guns down correctly.  It claims that after a very difficult process a Japanese person who has a need for a firearm that's demonstrated, and who jumps through all sorts of hoops, can get a shotgun or an "air rifle". Wrong.

First of all, the Japanese policy on guns is difficult, to be sure, but not as difficult as people who cite to it like to claim.  Japan does tightly restrict firearms ownership, but in terms of simply banning an entire class of sporting firearms, only handguns are actually banned.

And, fwiw, Japan is experiencing a growth in hunting (and fishing) as women in the country enter those sports.  So, cartoon circulators, you're way off the mark.

Citing to Japan in the US in any event makes about as much sense as me making suggestions for NASCAR and football, both of which I can't stand.  I can't stand them, and I don't understand them, which is why I don't make suggestions for football and NASCAR.

But I could.

And some do. I  know, for example, that football has a tragic concussion rate and there are those who really worry about it.  I worry about that some, as I know that young people play the game.

But I can't stand the game personally so I try not to spout off about it.  But, perhaps, I could say that "Japan has a low youth concussion rate?  Why? Well it doesn't let its youth play football.  Instead, they draw anime on their computers and briefly flirt with weird cuteness and a culture that approves of cartoon character that feature a superhero called "Rape Man".  Yes, that's what we should do too".

Does that make sense.  No, and while there is a Japanese cartoon character called "Rape Man" and the Japanese culture does (or perhaps did) have a weird thing for "cute", I'm sure it's otherwise way off the mark.

Just like it is to suggest that Japan offers anything to inform us about gun control.  The only culture that can inform u son that topic is our own.

That includes Australia, I'd note.

I also see a lot of citations to Australia as a prime example of what we ought to do regarding guns.  Well, actually Australia's murder rate is just about the same as the US one in the states with low gun control.

What?  Yes, that's right.  US states with low gun control have low murder rates and Australia with high gun control has low murder rates.  Which suggest that perhaps the murder rates in these two English speaking and European culture countries might be tied to something else.

Indeed, in stupid arguments, I recently saw a post by an Australian that if he lived in the US he'd carry a gun all the time as its so dangerous here. Well, Oz, just about as dangerous as Perth, actually.  I.e., not very.

Of course Americans have done a good job of making their own cities look horribly dangerous by portraying them that way on television.  Most aren't, however.  Big ones usually have a district that is, but most big cities everywhere do.  Even cities that are really dangerous, like Chicago, aren't as dangerous as television and the movies portray them.  According to television, for example, Chicago is in a four alarm fire all the time.

And while we discuss "something else" in terms of English speaking European cultured countries, I saw a headline posted on the net the other day entitled "Why Canada Does Things Better than The US".  I'm not sure I'd agree that Canada does do things better than the US, but if it does, perhaps having a more homogeneous culture that has less than 10% of the American population might have something to do with that. 

People hate it when you say that, and Americans particularly do as we like to cite to the claim that "we're a nation of immigrants" and "diversity is our strength" but in truth, while it doesn't say anything for or against our immigration policies, homogeneous nations with lower population generally do everything better, except (usually) accepting immigrants. Canada, which has done that, except not like the US, is an exception to that rule.  Anyhow, if the US had a population of 30 million rather than over 300 million, yes it too probably would be doing everything just super.  That's not an argument for or against anything, but when you argue "we're doing super" and you are a nation of low population. well. . . .

But you can't pat yourself on the back, if you are Canada, for that, as it looks bad.  "Yes!  Our climate and history means we've kept the population lower and less diverse!  Hooray for liberal us!"  No, you can't do that.

Nor can you pat yourself on the back, really, for "good old American know how".  While I see memes on that sort of thing all the time, the US became the powerful nation it is in large part because it had a combination of English Common Law (which we didn't think up), free market economics (mostly accidentally) and vast unexplored natural resources (which we didn't put there).  Almost all of the nations that have shared these benefits, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US have done super.

On another topic, I have a couple of friends who are really hostile to religion. They hate it.  They are also amongst those whose personal lives are such a titanic mess that they could best benefit from religion. . .any religion, as they've made such a dog's breakfast of their own existence.  And yet they'll blame religion for everything.  "Christianity is keeping people down!"  Hmmm, your string of failed relationship, broken marriages, and drug use might have something to do with keeping your economic status in the dumpers. . . just saying.

These folks typically have no idea what the tenants of any religion actually are. They just now that religions, at the end of the day, say that there's something greater than oneself out there, and they hate that idea more than anything else.  They often also tend to be fairly hostile to life, for one reason or another, but don't recognize that.

On that, an ignorant argument by anti life, i.e., "pro choice" people, will be, "oh  yeah, well you pro life people sure don't care anything about life outside the womb!".  That's complete bull.

If you look at it, the same people who are pro life tend to be radically pro adoption and very very frequently opponents of the death penalty.  They're likely more charitable towards the young in stress or need than anyone else.

Which brings up an ignorant argument from the last election cycle.  Last election cycle, as things began to go down the tubes for Hillary Clinton, people kept saying "she's worked her whole life for women".

I'm not sure what Clinton did for women, but quite frankly you can't claim to be a worker for the interest of women and also be an abortion proponent, as over half the babies killed in that process are female.  So, in reality, if Clinton worked her whole life for women, it has to be qualified as working for women who are born only.  It's a fairly significant qualifier.

Also as qualifiers, quite frankly are the zillions of simple minded heart warming stories that start of with some surprising fact and then take you to some amazing conclusions.  You know, "This boy was left in the woods. . . wolves found  him. . . but they brought him a burger from a Burger King dumpster. . . " and you go on to find its Bill Gates.  Hmmmmmm . . .probably more to that story. . . 

I guess the lesson in all of this might be this.

Facebook advocacy snippets tend to be dumb.

“You are never too old to set another goal, or to dream a new dream . . ."

C. S. Lewis did not say.

That's right, that statement, frequently attributed to C. S. Lewis, is something he didn't say.

And that might be because you can indeed be too old to achieve a goal or dream.  And at some point, while you may dream it, it's a species of regret.

Not that we don't all have regrets, and indeed we should have regrets.  Edith Piaf did say "I don't regret anything", or rather sang it. . .in French. . . but that's not a very sound way of viewing things, quite frankly.  "I don't regret anything" might as well mean "I haven't learned anything", unless we don't regret our errors as we learned from them.  Even then, a person ought to rationally regret our trespasses, as the Lord's Prayer counsels that we do.

Blog Mirror: Hundred-year-old Thanksgiving Menus

From A Hundred Years Ago:

Hundred-year-old Thanksgiving Menus

It's interesting to note what's on the menu not only for what's on it, but what isn't.  The authoris of these menus didn't necessarily think that you had to have turkey.  Indeed, turkey is only on one of the menus.  "Roast fowl" is on two of them. But what sort of fowl were they thinking of? Any fowl?  Pheasant?

And wine isn't on the menu at all.  I note that as if you spend any time watching the endless Thanksgiving shows that will now be appearing on the Food Channel, or whatever, they're all going to have a part, or at least some surely will, where somebody talks about pairing wine with turkey (as they're all going to feature turkey. . . which is okay as I like turkey).

They're all going to have pumpkin pie as well. . . which only one of these does.  One of these, for that matter, has Maple Parfait. What's that?

Interesting stuff.

Company B, 27th Infantry, at Khabarofsk. November 15, 1918.

Soldiers of Company B of the Twenty-seventh Infantry waiting to unload supplies from Russian box cars at the railroad yards at Khabarovsk, Siberia, during the Allied Siberian Expedition on November 15, 1918.

Ft. Dix New Jersey. November 14, 1918.

And the war ends . . . in Africa. Prosperity means abolishing the eight hour day? Kaiser to be "brot" (the German word for bread . . . or a sandwich) to justice? Wilson taking jars? Eh? November 14, 1918.

As odd as it may seem, it was this day, November 14, 1918, when the Germans surrendered in Africa.

It took that long for news to reach British and German forces in Zambia, where they were still engaged in hostilities up until that time.

Paul von Lettow Vorbeck, commander of the German forces in Africa who would return to Germany a hero in March 1919 and actually be allowed to lead his returning troops through the Brandenburg Gate in full German African regalia.  He went on to be an anti Nazi monarchist right wing politician in the Reichtag and was reduced to poverty during World War Two, living for a time after it, on packages from his former enemies Smuts and Meinertzhagen, although his fortunes recovered before he died in 1964.

The same day was one for sort of odd headlines, or at least oddly spelled headlines, in the Casper newspaper.

Elsewhere various types of celebrations were going on.

Red Cross sponsored play "Democracy Victorious" being presented in France at Base Hospital No. 10.

Pondering the Post War World. . .hit and miss. . . the news of November 13, 1918.

On this mid week of 1918 (this paper was published on a Wednesday) the Wyoming State Tribune was pondering the post war world with some optimism.

Not all of which would prove warranted.

First we'll note, however, that the depiction of Germany's new borders was spot on, showing once again how remarkably accurate these World War One papers tended to be.  They weren't always, and this past week with rumors of the armistice arriving prematurely, and with additional rumors that Red German sailors who had in fact sabotaged their ships to some degree were going to come out fighting, they were off the mark more than a little. But by and large, they appear to be on in just about the same degree as modern papers tend to be.

But as to a post war economic boom. .  not so much.

In fact the end of the war brought on a mild recession that started this very year; 1918. That recession would continue on into 1919, when a recovery would be staged, but following that a severe recession hit in 1920 and lasted until 1921.  

Overall, both periods of recession were brief, and there were some oddities to them. The American recession of 1918 actually started in August, which is flat out bizarre when it is considered that the United States was really just getting fully committed to combat in the Great War at that time and that it was conscripting all the way through the end of the war, thereby creating labor shortages that were growing worse.  That a recession would hit should have been expected, but a rational expectation should have been that it would have hit in early 1919.  It didn't, and overall the first recession only lasted seven months.

The second much worse one hit in January 1920 and lasted until 1921. That one makes much more sense if we keep in mind that while the fighting ended, the war technically went on into 1919 and the United States continued to maintain and supply a large overseas army that was on occupation duty that entire time.  Indeed, combat troops finally left Europe in September 1919 but an occupation force of 16,000 U.S. troops based out of Coblenz remained in Germany until 1923.  And somewhat forgotten, while the fighting had ended in France and Belgium, it continued on in Russia where a U.S. commitment remained until fully withdrawn on April 1, 1920. 

Of course, this has an expression in what we was called the Jazz Age.  No era of any kind every has a clean break from one to another, but in this case the effects of the war in various ways lingered through the first recession until the lid really came off and the post war world set in which gave us the Roaring Twenties/Jazz Age, which continued on until the crash of October 1929.  The Jazz Age, in a lot of ways, was the preamble to the 1960s, brought to an abrupt end by the economic realities of the Great War.

In Wyoming, as is so often the case, the national economy didn't really follow the path of the national one.  The oil boom of the Great War came to a screeching halt with the end of the war.  Oil production and refining of course went on, and the conversion of Casper Wyoming from a minor oil town into a significant oil city, was permanent.  But a local recession was inevitable with the end of the war.

Amplifying that recession was a general recession in the agricultural sector as a whole.  Massive demands for meat, wool, leather, and grain came to a rapid end, and with it came an agricultural depression that lasted through the economic recovery and on into the next recession.  1919, in fact, was the last year in American history in which farm families shared economic parity with urban families.

So the paper got that one wrong.  But its map of post war Germany was quite right.  The rest of the new European map had yet to be worked out through the process of the Versailles Treaty and local effort in new nations, to include the effort of new wears that erupted following the collapse of empires in the Great War, but that process was going on at the very time this paper was printed.

Holland didn't really treat the deposed Kaiser Wilhelm II like any other interned German officer.  He became a permanent exiled resident who never did come to see his removal as justified or his actions as questionable.  He'd die there during World War Two.

And while the paper gave a positive prognosis on the news that Theodore Roosevelt was in the hospital but would recover, the old lion wasn't himself anymore.

Great War Post Script. November 12, 1918: Mutinous German sailors decide to attack the Allies? Draftees still have to report.

The Cheyenne State Leader was wrong.  German sailors were not mobilizing to set sail to take on the Allies.

No, not even close.

The Casper Daily Press did better on the first post World War One day of 1918. 

Like Cheyenne, there'd been a lot of celebrating the prior day.

That next day, however, those who had been selected to report for military training, i.e., conscripted, still had to go, even if the Selective Service System was immediately ceasing to classify men for additional conscription.

World War One Ends. November 11, 1918, 1100 (0400 MST).

"To Our Hero's".  Cemetery Wall in Paris, France.  France's contribution to the Allied victory in World War One surpasses that of any other Allied nation. . .something you'd sometimes not realize if you only read the English language accounts of the war.  MKTH photograph.

On this date in 1918, the Great War came to an end.*

Usually such posts are highly retrospective, and I suppose this one will be to a degree, but not in the "oh what a terrible waste" fashion that so many of them are.  The "Oh, What A Lovely War" view of the war popularized by the posthumous post World War Two publication of Siegfried Sassoon's poetry is largely baloney.**  In reality, the view taken earlier, that Germany was a horrible world menace on the European stage ruled by its military and a few autocrats who cared little about the rivers of blood they were spilling in order to impose Germany's imperial will on Europe is much closer to reality.

Indeed, its telling that in order to being the peace about, it had to occur in the context of a German revolution.  That revolution threatened for a time to make former Imperial Germany into a communist Soviet state, and put the new provisional government in the position of having to put down a left wing revolution.  That alignment, and the unrepentant view of Germany's hard right and its military would guaranty a second war, not the supposedly "harsh" terms of the Versailles Treaty.  A hard won victory, therefore, would not bring lasting peace, but that too really isn't for the reasons so often cited.

Indeed, had the provisions of the Versailles Treaty been more strictly enforced, World War Two would not have come about.  And had the conditions of the treaty been arrived upon more quickly, when Germans had no choice but to admit that they'd been fully defeated on the battlefield and the revolution only saved Germany from the Allies entering German soil in action, as they did in 1945, the excuse that the treaty became would not have occurred.  And the treaty did become a German excuse, and the "stabbed in the back" myth would arise, but more than anything it was the smashing of the Old Order that brought about the second war.

But was the collapse of the imperial order in nations that had not moved sufficiently towards democratic rule as populations moved from rural peasantry towards industrial laborers that really created the mess that would result in World War Two.

Almost every European nation had faced this in some fashion, but some had handled it much better.  Nations like Germany, Austro Hungaria, and Russia, however, had not.  Indeed, they'd not only failed to accommodate the new world of a more educated working class, but in Germany's case they'd actually arrived upon an autocratic imperial state late.  Nations like France and Germany, in contrast, had moved more and more towards real democratic rule much earlier, and therefore the forces that would gather in the vacuum of the demise of the Old Order would not impact them in the same degree, or indeed in the democratic UK, at all.

In nations like Germany, Russia and (for WWI Allied) Japan, however, the demise of the Old Order would create a vacuum that would be filled by a vicious extreme forces, communistic or fascistic in nature, that opposed democratic rule and glorified martial violence.  In some places those forces would oppose any hint at restoring the Old Order, as in Russia, in others they'd co-opt elements of it, as in Italy.  In all such places, the result was to bring about disaster in every form.

When that war came, much of what the world had become acclimated to in the First World War would play out in horrific fashion.  And much of that can be blamed on Germany, which had often acted just as barbarously in the Great War as they were to act in World War Two.

Germany had in large measure brought that defeat in the Great War upon itself.  While people like to look back for some reason and imagine the Germany military of World War One and World War Two as hyper competent, quite the opposite was often true.  While the Spring 1918 offensive was absolutely brilliant, Germany's dithering with the collapse of Russia guaranteed that a million men it desperately need on the Western Front would not be available.  If Germany was stabbed in the back, it's own autocratic class and military leadership did the stabbing, as Germany set about advancing in a country it had already defeated and had helped push into civil war.  It acted as if it had won the war, when in fact it had not.

Officers of the newly crated Third Army which was formed in France too late to see combat, but which would go on to occupation duty in Germany.

Of course the arms of the Western Allies cannot be ignored in that role. The ability of the British to rebound in the face of the 1918 offensive was magnificent, even if the common British view that they seemingly won the war on their own is exaggerated.  The long suffering French deserve huge credit for the defense of their own country and carrying the war through to the end, which included the contribution of Marshall Foch whose coordinating the efforts of the Allies was a monumentally difficult task.

Drafted inductees into the U.S. Army, Los Angeles California, November 11, 1918. The U.S. continued to draft right up until the end of the war.  I don't know what happened to men brought in this late.

And the US deserves much more credit than it is typically given by non American historians even if its military leadership deserves much more criticism than American ones will give it.  The surprising ability of the U.S. to create a 4,000,000 man Army in just over a year's time, and to deploy 2,000,000 of them to France (and Italy) was a stunning achievement.  The individual fighting qualities of the American soldier were also hugely impressive, although much of that was due to the soldier being very green and, frankly, poorly lead.

Paris crowd, November 11, 1918.

The U.S. Army, in fact, was committed to action in a manner that was to prove wasteful of lives as the American leadership persisted in the belief that there were no lessons to be learned from the Allies.  The American effort was only able to get away with this as the Army was thrown into action at a time when massive force was likely to prevail against the Germans, even if it proved to be hugely costly.  Indeed, real questions should be raised as to why the American leadership continued to persist in this fashion when even the very early efforts demonstrated how bloody such actions would be, even if the American willingness to endure the bloodshed, much like the Union's willingness to endure it in the latter half of the Civil War, guaranteed that an Allied victory would occur.***

American Red Cross works gathering in London for a parade, November 11, 1918, in honor of the war's end.

And it did so bring it about, even if it did not do so single-handedly.  That sacrifice should not be forgotten.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*Before anyone points it out, yes I know that a state of war continued on until the execution of the Versailles Treaty, or even later if you consider that the US had to declare the war to be over unilaterally after the U.S. refused to enter into the treaty.  Indeed, I've already been "corrected" on that once.

Well, whatever, but the war ended on this day. Germany wasn't going back to fighting under any circumstances, and couldn't, after entering into the Armistice on this day.

**The morose British war poet view of the war is largely a post World War Two view of it that reflects more than anything the state of the British mind following World War Two, which left Britain with an empire that it obviously was going to leave and with an utterly wrecked economy.

***The U.S. Navy, on the other hand, was really effectively commanded in the Great War and contributed enormously to a reduction of the effectiveness of German submarines.  It's role, however, is largely forgotten.

Postscript

This day is also marked as Polish independence day, although it would be just as easy to pick a date several weeks earlier and indeed would perhaps be more accurate as various Polish political bodies had declared independence from Russia and Germany by this time.

There are several sad deaths often noted about the day.  Augustin Trebuchon was the last French soldier to die in the war.  He was 40 years old and had joined the French Army in August, 1914.  A shepherd by trade, he'd fought the entire war.  He had occupied the role of messenger throughout the war and knew that an agreement had been signed even when his unit went into action that morning, committed to an attack even with the knowledge that peace was likely to be soon agreed upon.  That battle went on until 6:00 p.m., a good seven hours after the armistice had been signed, when the unit received word that the fighting had ended.  French officials originally recorded his death as November 10, as they were embarrassed to admit that they had been fighting when peace was imminent.

George Lawrence Price was the last Canadian soldier killed.  The 25 year old private originally from Nova Scotia was killed in a small unit action by a German sniper when they were reconnoitering some Belgian houses and discovered German machinegunners.  He'd come into the Canadian army as a conscript the prior year, having been conscripted from his then home in Saskatchewan.

Private George Edwin Ellison was the last British soldier killed.  The British cavalryman, age 40, had served for a time as a per war soldier and had been recalled into his old unit, the 5th Royal Irish Lancers, in 1914.

Charles I, the Austro Hungarian Emperor, announced he would give up the Austrian crown.  He would do the same in regards to Hungary two days later.  He never actually abdicated in hopes he'd be recalled.  He wasn't.

Counter campaigns against Dutch socialist occured in the Hague.

British, Canadian and American troops, numbering about 600, engaged with a Red Army force of 2,500 at Tulgas, where the Armistice had no effect.  About 1/2 the force were Americans.  The combined unit had been attacked but after two days launched an Assault, 20th Maine at Gettysburg style, and drove the much larger Red unit back.  Red Army casualties nearly exceeded the number of men total in the Allied force.