Rotten

I have always loved "History" and learnt it up to "A Level" (university entrance exam). From 8 to 13 my teacher was a retired Army officer who had done most of his service in pre WWII India and his tales of colonial "pig-sticking" (wild boar hunting on horseback with lances) and all the dangers of tigers etc. made the history of the British Empire up to 1914 come alive. Made a break from the normal routine of learning the names of British monarchs from William in 1066 up to George V in 1914. But we also learnt the basics of Caesar, Boadicea and the pre Norman bit. He was also rather accurate when throwing a blackboard rubber at those of us not paying attention. Luckily a rare event but these rubbers were hand sized and mainly made of wood and hurt.

From 13 to 18 my history teacher was an incredibly enthusiastic man, Frank Heyer, brother of the British writer Georgette Heyer. He was no doubt the main reason why I got to like the subject. Just two years older than my father, he had also seen WWII action but back in the 1960’s British modern history stopped very abruptly at 1914 in Sarajevo and so his experiences of growing up in WWI and later, were not part of class work. He didn’t mention either that just like the British monarch George V changing the family name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor, so did his father change the pronunciation of their name Heyer from “higher” to “hair” to rid themselves of any German connections.

History between 1914 and 1939 didn’t exist except for Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia and we got to learn a little bit of life in Russia through Dr Zhivago. The period after was left to the countless films and comics of the day.

Naturally one knew about WWI from the popular 60’s & 70’s  Carnaby Street posters with Lord Kitchener pointing his finger and “needing us” for some purpose or other, as we hippied around London in our highly fashionable army trench coats.

So why all the above nonsense on Blip?

Last night I purely by chance watched a series of documentaries on a fringe German TV station. One of the failed live 24/7 news channels that Germans don’t seem to watch and so they spend much of the 24/7 showing documentaries and to be fair, quite good ones. First one was the end of the Normandy Landings up to the liberation of Paris. Bit disturbing to see quite how much civilian damage was caused but all in all stuff one knew from all the films. Then followed WWI, a series of five, one hour segments. All film footage with no breaks for experts opinions and all the B&W film has been digitally reworked and coloured making it even more realistic.  I saw the first two up to around 1915/6. I was dumbfounded, totally speechless at learning just how totally pointless the entire war was. I knew before it was pretty senseless but not how very criminal the actions of all the related cousins heads of state and governments of the time were. Matters like the Dardanelles & Gallipoli were just simply unbelievable.

I stopped watching after the warring allied parties got together at half time and decided that although it was going nowhere, had cost millions of lives, they would carry on so that they could reclaim the financial losses once they beat the German/Austrian side.

Many European countries exiled or at least got rid of their “Royal Families” during or after WWI. Shame the rest weren’t put on trial along with their governments.

Rant over. Snowing lightly most of the day with a nasty fresh wind. The spruce tree in the photo had seemingly broken off at about 5 metres high just above a spot where a fungus had got hold. The tree was well in excess of 30 metres tall and one can see the forester has cut a one metre section above the break point to reveal sound wood. Sadly this post mortem surgery is too late to save the tree.