My Only Friend, The End

A. E. Housman

At first glance nothing seems more unlikely than that the poet of the enormously popular A Shropshire Lad should be the classical scholar A. E. Housman. This Cambridge University professor of Latin left no doubt as to his priorities: the emendation of classical texts was both an intellectual search for the truth and his life's work; poetry was an emotional and physiological experience that began with a sensation in the pit of the stomach. The apparent discrepancies in this man who became both a first-rate scholar and a celebrated poet should be a reminder that, whatever else poetry does, it also records the interior life, a life that has its roots well beneath the academic gown or the business suit. Furthermore, in Housman's case, though he did aspire to be a great scholar first, scrutiny of his life and work reveals that he valued poetry more highly than he often admitted and that many of the presumed conflicts between the classical scholar and the romantic poet dissolve in the personality of the man.

Though the modern student is usually more interested in Housman's poetry than his textual criticism, some survey of his scholarship is important for an appreciation of his overall contribution and of the cast of mind that could be so devoted—and so imperious—in the search for truth. From his early work on Propertius at Oxford University through his professorship at University College, London, and culminating in his office as Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge University, Housman was not interested in the interpretation of the works of the classical writers he treated. Instead, he was solely involved in the establishment of reliable texts of their works. This process usually required the peeling away of centuries of error made by previous editors, whom Housman frequently treated with unmitigated scorn. In "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism," a paper presented to the Classical Association at Cambridge in 1921 and collected in John Carter's 1961 edition of the writer's prose, Housman described textual criticism as both a science and an art, requiring reason and common sense. As a science, however, it was not exact, he declared: "A textual critic engaged upon his business is not at all like Newton investigating the motion of the planets: he is much more like a dog hunting for fleas." Housman railed against the prevailing practice of accepting earlier manuscripts as better manuscripts or of accepting all readings—however inane—within a manuscript simply because of the authority of the whole. In this regard he criticized scholars for being lazy, and this tone of moral rectitude permeated the entire paper. Many scholars, he said, are stupid, lazy, vain—or all three. His last sentence put a cap on it: "Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not pudding, in your head."

Concerning Housman's own reputation as a classical scholar, D. R. Shackleton Bailey in a 1959 Listener article said that he was "beyond serious dispute, among the greatest of all time." Bailey spoke of the scholar's "passionate zeal to see each one of the innumerable problems in his text not as others had presented it or as he might have preferred it to appear but exactly as it was." Housman's greatest single textual work was his five-volume edition of the Astronomica of Manilius, a first century A.D. Latin poet. The first volume of this work was published in 1903 and the last in 1930. That Housman chose Manilius, a second-rate poet, over Propertius or any of the other better writers with whom he was familiar reveals his desire to establish for himself an unassailable reputation, for as Andrew S. F. Gow declared in A. E. Housman, the scholar realized that the Astronomica of Manilius provided him the greatest opportunity "of approaching finality in the solution of the problems presented." In a letter to Housman's biographer Graves, G. P. Goold, a later holder of the Latin chair at University College, summed up the scholar's accomplishments: "The legacy of Housman's scholarship is a thing of permanent value; and that value consists less in obvious results, the establishment of general propositions about Latin and the removal of scribal mistakes, than in the shining example he provides of a wonderful mind at work.... He was and may remain the last great textual critic.... And if we accord [Richard] Bentley the honour of being England's greatest Latinist, it will be largely because Housman declined to claim the title for himself."

It was at University College that Housman experienced his most sustained period of poetry composition, and the main fruit of this period was the publication of A Shropshire Lad in 1896. First offered to Macmillan Company in 1896 under the title "Poems by Terence Hearsay," A Shropshire Lad was rejected by that publisher: it was subsequently brought out in the same year by Kegan Paul, with the change in the title suggested by Housman's friend Pollard. The book was published at the author's own expense, and he insisted that he receive no royalties. There wouldn't have been many anyway, since Kegan Paul printed only five hundred copies, and, as Maude M. Hawkins noted in A. E. Housman: Man Behind a Mask, the book "sold so slowly that Laurence Housman at the end of two years bought up the last few copies." Though the volume was better appreciated in the United States than in England—Hawkins called most of the critical reviews "lukewarm or adverse." A Shropshire Lad did not sell well until it was published by Grant Richards, a man with whom Housman became lifelong friends. Richards's first edition was five hundred copies in 1897, which sold out; he then printed one thousand copies in 1900 followed by two thousand in 1902. Hawkins summed up the volume's early public reception: "After the slow stream of Housman readers from 1896 to 1903, the momentum of popularity increased rapidly. During this period A Shropshire Lad had been reviewed in thirty-three periodicals with both praise and condemnation."

During the twentieth century A Shropshire Lad has been more of a popular than a critical success. Looking back to the heyday of the book's success, George Orwell remarked in Inside the Whale and Other Essays: "Among people who were adolescent in the years 1910-25, Housman had an influence which was enormous and is now [1957] not at all easy to understand. In 1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew the whole of A Shropshire Lad by heart." In accounting for this popularity, Orwell spoke of certain elements in the poetry: a snobbism about belonging to the country; the adolescent themes of murder, suicide, unhappy love, and early death; and a "bitter, defiant paganism, a conviction that life is short and the gods are against you, which exactly fitted the prevailing mood of the young."

In all of his poetry, Housman continually returns to certain favorite themes. The predominant theme, discussed by Cleanth Brooks in the Ricks collection of essays, is that of time and the inevitability of death. As Brooks said, "Time is, with Housman, always the enemy." In the first poem of A Shropshire Lad, "1887," one of the few to be titled, the conventional patriotism of the Queen's jubilee is shot through with the irony that God can only save the Queen with the help of those who have died for her sake: "The saviours come not home tonight: / Themselves they could not save." Housman frequently deals with the plight of the young soldier, and he is usually able to maintain sympathy both for the youth who is the victim of war and for the patriotic cause of the nation. Robert B. Pearsall suggested in a 1967 PMLA essay that Housman dealt frequently with soldiers because "the uniform tended to cure isolation and unpopularity, and soldiers characteristically bask in mutual affection."

It is not only war but nature, too, that brings on thoughts of death in Housman's poetry. In the famous Shropshire Lad lyric beginning "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now," the speaker says that since life is all too short, he will go out "To see the cherry hung with snow," an obvious suggestion of death. In a well-known verse from Last Poems, a particularly wet and old spring causes the speaker to move from a description of nature—"The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers stream from the hawthorn on the wind away"—to a sense that his lost spring brings one closer to the grave, which, in turn, occasions a splenetic remark about the deity: "Whatever brute and blackguard made the world." To his credit, Housman often does not merely wallow in such pessimistic feelings but counsels a kind of stoical endurance as the proper response: "Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale." When the sky cannot be shouldered, a type of Roman suicide may be appropriate, as in "Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?" or in another Shropshire Lad poem, which ends with the lines: "But play the man, stand up and end you, / When your sickness is your soul."

Another frequent theme in Housman's poetry, one that is related to the death motif, is the attitude that the universe is cruel and hostile, created by a God who has abandoned it. In the poem "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries" in Last Poems, mercenaries must take up the slack for an uncaring deity: "What God abandoned, these defended, / And saved the sum of things for pay." In such a world where "malt does more than Milton can / To justify God's ways to man," as the lyricist wrote in A Shropshire Lad, poetry can serve the purpose of inuring one to the harshness of reality. R. Kowalczyk, in a 1967 Cithara essay, summed up this prevalent theme: "Housman's poetic characters fail to find divine love in the universe. They confront the enormity of space and realize that they are victims of Nature's blind forces. A number of Housman's lyrics scrutinize with cool, detached irony the impersonal universe, the vicious world in which man was placed to endure his fated existence."

Within such a universe, the pastoral theme of the preciousness of youth and youthful beauty is everywhere to be found. In "To an Athlete Dying Young," the youth is praised for leaving a world with his accomplishments intact. Like the young girl Lucy in romantic poet William Wordsworth's lyrics, Housman's youths sometimes die into nature and become part of the natural surroundings: "By brooks too broad for leaping / The lightfoot boys are laid; / The rose-lipt girls are sleeping / In fields where roses fade." But as Brooks declared, as recorded in Ricks's collection of essays, Housman's nature cannot be the same as Wordsworth's after the century's achievement in science: "Housman's view of nature looks forward to our time rather than back to that of Wordsworth. If nature is lovely and offers man delight, she does not offer him solace or sustain him as Wordsworth was solaced and sustained. For between Wordsworth and Housman there interpose themselves Darwin and Huxley and Tindall—the whole achievement of Victorian science."

Furthermore, society sometimes intrudes into Housman's world of nature, and when it does, the rustic youth frequently comes in conflict with it. As Oliver Robinson noted in Angry Dust: The Poetry of A. E. Housman, "Housman is especially sympathetic with the man who is at odds with society, the man who cannot keep 'these foreign laws of God and man.'" In one poem from A Shropshire Lad, the speaker pities the condemned man in Shrewsbury jail whom he calls "a better lad, if things went right, / Than most that sleep outside."

The themes of his poetry and his emotional handling of them mark Housman as an extension of the romantic movement that flourished in England in the early part of the nineteenth century and had a resurgence in the aesthetic movement of the 1890s. The critical evaluation of Housman's work in the two decades after his death in 1936 is tinged with the anti-romanticism of the period. The directness and simplicity of much of Housman's poetry were viewed as faults. In A. E. Housman and W. B. Yeats Richard Aldington reported a rumor that circulated about Cambridge University to the effect that when influential critic I. A. Richards left Housman's Cambridge inaugural lecture he was heard to say: "This had put us back ten years." And Cyril Connolly, in a 1936 New Statesman article reprinted in Ricks's essay collection, said that Housman's poems "are of a triteness of technique equalled only by the banality of thought." He also talked about the limitations of the poet's themes of man's mortality and rebellion against his lot.

To see irony in Housman's poetic technique, however, is to mitigate some of what would otherwise be considered faults: the adolescent nature of some of the thought and the sentimental handling of it. Christopher Ricks, in the essay in his collection on Housman, noted that "everyone seems to take it for granted that Housman's poems unwaveringly endorse the pessimistic beliefs which they assert. To me his poems are remarkable for the ways in which rhythm and style temper or mitigate or criticize what in bald paraphrase the poem would be saying."

Regardless of whether one finds irony in the author's poetic technique, it is true that Housman tried to place some distance between himself and his work. Referring to A Shropshire Lad in a letter written in 1933, Housman stated that "very little in the book is biographical" and said that his view of the world was "owing to my observation of the world, not to personal circumstances." As to the county of Shropshire itself, Housman admitted in a letter to Maurice Pollet: "I was born in Worcestershire, not Shropshire, where I have never spent much time."

In his roles as classical scholar and as poet, Housman exhibited an unswerving integrity. While this integrity served him well in his classical endeavors, in his poetry it may have relegated him to a rank below that of the major poets of his age. His poetry, based as it is on emotion, never went beyond what he could verify with his own feelings. As Edmund Wilson said in an essay appearing in the Ricks collection, "His world has no opening horizons; it is a prison that one can only endure. One can only come the same painful cropper over and over again and draw from it the same bitter moral." But few writers have expressed this dark if limited vision with more poignancy and clarity than Housman.

According to John Bayley in the London Review of Books, Housman was "a scholar worshipped and hated for his meticulous standards and his appalling sarcasms on the unscholarly." "He was certainly pugnacious and opinionated, as well as elegant and intellectually fastidious," concurred Peter Levi in The Spectator. These attributes emerge in A. E. Housman: Collected Poems and Selected Prose. The collection includes textual criticism, comic verses and poetry, and letters. "Although Housman's distinctive blend of sadness and savagery seems dated and unappealing, his writings embody certain patriotic and critical attitudes which no student of English culture can fail to ignore," declared Tom Paulin in The Observer.

Barthes and Semiotics

Roland Barthes was one of the earliest structuralist or poststructuralist theorists of culture. His work pioneered ideas of structure and signification which have come to underpin cultural studies and critical theory today. He was also an early instance of marginal criticism. Barthes was always an outsider, and articulated a view of the critic as a voice from the margins. He was an outsider in three ways: he was gay, he was Protestant in a Catholic culture, and he was an outsider in relation to French academic establishment. By the end of his life, however, he was widely renowned both in France and beyond.


Barthes and Semiotics

Barthes is one of the leading theorists of semiotics, the study of signs. He is often considered a structuralist, following the approach of Saussure, but sometimes as a poststructuralist.

A sign, in this context, refers to something which conveys meaning – for example, a written or spoken word, a symbol or a myth. As with many semioticists, one of Barthes’s main themes was the importance of avoiding the confusion of culture with nature, or the naturalisation of social phenomena. Another important theme is the importance in being careful how we use words and other signs.

One characteristic of Barthes’s style is that he frequently uses a lot of words to explain a few. He provides detailed analyses of short texts, passages and single images so as to explore how they work.

Another trait of his work is his constant systematisation. He draws up schemes for categorising the signs and codes with which he works, which can be applied to divide a text, a narrative or a myth into different parts with different functions. He draws up something like a blueprint of the areas of discourse he studies, showing how the different parts hold together.

In Saussurean analysis, which Barthes largely uses, the distinction between signifier and signified is crucial. The signifier is the image used to stand for something else, while the signified is what it stands for (a real thing or, in a stricter reading, a sense-impression).

The signified sometimes has an existence outside language and social construction, but the signifier does not. Further, the relationship between the two is ultimately arbitrary. There are many different ways a particular signified could be expressed in language, or different objects divided-up. None of these ways is ultimately superior to the others.

Barthes is an anti-essentialist. He is strongly opposed to the view that there is anything contained in a particular signifier which makes it naturally correspond to a particular signified. There’s no essence of particular groups of people (humanity, Britishness) or objects (chairness, appleness) which unifies them into a category or separates them from others.

For instance, there is no such thing as human nature. (This might be taken to mean that everything ultimately exists in an immanent, extensive plane of being). The division into categories is always a process of social construction. People don’t start off with thoughts or perceptions of objects which they then express in language. The categories of language determine how people divide up objects into types.

Furthermore, all signs depend on the entire system of signs. None of them have meaning aside from the system.

Barthes is best-known for showing the social constructedness of language by reference to familiar, everyday experiences.

However, he does not mechanically apply Saussure’s theory. He largely replaces Saussure’s term ‘arbitrary’ with the term ‘motivated’. The relationship between a signifier and a signified is arbitrary only from the point of view of language. From a social point of view, it channels particular interests or desires. It can be explained by reference to the society in which signs operate, and the place of the signs within them. Nothing is really meaningless. Signs are neither irrational nor natural.

Signs are taken to operate on a continuum, from ‘iconic’ with one strong meaning to users, through ‘motivated’, to the truly ‘arbitrary’. They vary along this continuum as to how tightly defined they are. Most signs have strong enough connotations and associations to be at least partly ‘motivated’. When they are used, they refer back to previous conventional uses.

For Barthes, most signs are mediated by language. Barthes usually reads non-linguistic signs (such as fashion) through linguistic signs (such as fashion journalism). He views non-linguistic signs as carrying linguistic meanings.

Indeed, in Barthes’s later work, even actions become mediated by language. Every act is at once an act (signified) and a sign of itself (signifier). It becomes hard to unpack the act from its meaning. For instance, in psychoanalysis, it’s argued that a person might kill or steal to confirm in the eyes of others her or his own sense of being a guilty person. The guilty act is a means to provide a sign of itself.

Barthes believes it is impossible to act (e.g. to dress) ‘innocently’ (in the sense of not conveying anything in terms of meaning). Signs of deviance from dominant norms – punk dress for example, or an archaic religious look – are just as conventional as those of the mainstream. They signify rejection of dominant norms and attachment to particular alternatives.

Signs are often used to differentiate one person or group from others. Taboos, for instance, can create a freedom to reject dominant norms by breaking them. Barthes assumes that acts of signifying are usually ‘guilty’: the image they project is intended.

Furthermore, the way people use language bears little relationship to underlying intent, feelings or perceptions. Beneath each text (whether it’s a novel or a speech-act) is simply the immense structure of the language-system, from which each person borrows words in a ceaseless act of writing.

There are also, however, special cases where meanings are violently projected from outside, as in the Dominici case (see below).

The main disagreement here is with the view of language as something akin to mathematical symbols designating particular objects. This kind of reference is one of the roles of language, known as denotation. However, language-use also tends to be affected by a second type of use, known as connotation. Mistaking connotations for denotations is one of the things which makes conventional uses seem natural.

Barthes opposes the view of arts such as literature as operating in this way. He also opposes the view of language as primarily instrumental – as a way of rationally understanding experience. Instead, language exists to produce sensuality, or sensory responses.

Barthes also disagrees with the view that people first form integrated sense-perceptions or thoughts to which they then give names through language. In common with other structuralists, he sees linguistic categories as constituting the divisions of phenomena into groups.

Barthes’s work is marked by a certain recurring concern for the closure which results from linguistic ways of seeing. Language always implies a one-sided way of seeing, which selects certain characteristics as meaningful, and ignores or discards others. This ‘intellectual imperialism’ or ‘fascism’ is built into the nature of language. Every statement prevents something else from being said. This exclusion is unavoidable.

Furthermore, once said or written, something is unchangeable. It creates a system. It cannot be undone. It can only be questioned. This goes against the openness of language. Derrida is later to suggest it is a kind of violence against the multitude of possible meanings.

Human freedom can be asserted against the nature of language in two ways. Firstly, by calling language into question. This is done by literature and semiotics. Secondly, by opening texts to new readings, and preventing them from being finalised. This is done through ‘writerly reading’, and through forms of writing which escape its restriction to communication, using signs for their own sake.

Mount Tai

望岳

岱宗夫如何
齊魯青未了

造化鍾神秀
陰陽割昏曉

盪胸生層雲
決眥入歸鳥

會當凌絕頂
一覽眾山小


Wang Yue

Dai zong fu ru he?
Qi lu qing wei liao
Zao hua zhong shen xiu
Yin yang ge hun xiao.

Dang xiong sheng ceng yun
Jue zi ru gui niao
Hui dang ling jue ding
Yi lan zhong shan xiao

Gaze Mountain

Tai-tsung then like what?

Chi Lu green never ends

Creator conentrated divine beauty

Northside southside cleave dark brown

Heaving breast are born layered clouds

Bursting eye-sockets enter returning birds

Really must surmount extreme summit

Single glance many mountains little.

Gazing at the Marchmount*

What is it like then, Mount Tai
Over Qi and Lu, endlessly green

Creation gathered divine beauty
North and south dividing dusk and daybreak

Chest heaves at heaped clouds rising
Eye-sockets burst – enter birds returning

Someday I’ll climb to the highest peak
See in one glance all other mountains small.

- Tien Tran 2016

 * Edward H. Schafer's translation of the term yue 嶽 as 'Marchmount,' explained in his Pacing the Void: T'ang Approaches to the Stars, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977: 'My version is based on the ancient belief that these numinous mountains stood at the four extremities of the habitable world, the marches of man's proper domain, the limits of the ritual tour of the Son of Heaven. There was, of course, a fifth—a kind of axial mount in the center of the world' (p.6).

Gazing at Mount Tai

How to describe a peak

that has produced such reverence?

there's the greenness that surrounds it-

two provinces, Qi and Lu

all creation is contained

on those dark slopes, that sunny side

layers of clouds refresh

climber and climbed alike

the birds fly up and up

beyond our straining eyes

someday I want to stand

right there on the summit

the other mountains dwarfed

spreading in all directions

- David Young 2015

Gazing on the Peak

And what then is Daizong like? - 

over Qi and Lu, green unending,

Creation compacted spirit splendors here,

Dark and Light, riving dusk and dawn.

Exhilarating the breast, it produces layers of cloud;

splitting eye-pupils, it has homing birds entering, 

Someday may I climb up to its highest summit,

with one sweeping view see how small all other mountains are.

- Stephen Owen 2015

On a Prospect of T'ai-shan

How is one to describe this king of mountains?

Throughout the whole of Ch-i and Lu one never loses sight of its greenness.

In it the Creator has concentrated all that is numinous and beautiful.

Its northern and southern slopes divide the dawn from the dark.

The layered clouds begin at the climber's heaving chest,

and homing birds fly suddenly within range of his straining eyes.

One day I must stand on top of its highest peak

and at a a single glance see all the other mountains grown tiny beneath me.

- David Hawkes 1965

Gazing at the Marchmount

[the Sacred Peak, Taishan]

Successor Alp - now what is it like?
Over Qi and Lu - greening interminate,
The Creator of CHanges converged divine glory;
Sun- and shadow slopes cleave dusk from dawn.
Heaving the breast, to arouse layered clouds;
Popping the pupils, to send in homing birds,
My time will come to surmount its pinnacle
And, in one view, survey all alps so wee,

- David McCraw 1992

Viewing Mt. Tai


How about old Mt. Tai?
Holding apart Qi and Lu.
Natures bounty elegant,
Slicing YinYang
begetting day and night.
Rocking my bosom
spawning thunderheads,
Scowling
at returning birds.
Approaching the summit
One glance below
Only puny hills!

- Dongbo 東波

Looking at Mount Tai

How is Mountain Tai?
Its green is seen beyond State Qi and State Lu,
a distillation of creation's spirit and beauty.
Its slopes split day into Yin and Yang.
Its rising clouds billow in my chest.
Homecoming birds fly through my wide-open eyes.
I should climb to the summit
and in one glance see all other mountains dwarfed.


- Translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping



Gaze Into the Distance at the Five Sacred Mountains

What does one think of the eternal Mt. Tai?
From Qi to Lu green colors without limits
Only deities and Nature can create such elegance
At daybreak one mountainside bright and sunny, the other side in dark shadows, at dusk they trade light and dark like the yin and yang.

Mind-heart emerges, clearing away the overlapping clouds
Out of the corner of my eye, birds come together to enter the mountains
Later I will tower aloft from the highest peak
With one look, numerous small mountains down below.

LES AVENTURES DE ROBERT FORTUNE ou comment le thé fut volé aux Chinois

Phjong

Murray Christmas

Watch of the Week: Brevet Triple Date

The Hippopotamus

Similiter et omnes revereantur Diaconos, ut mandatum Jesu Christi; et Episcopum, ut Jesum Christum, existentem filium Patris; Presbyteros autem, ut concilium Dei et conjunctionem Apostolorum. Sine his Ecclesia non vocatur; de quibus suadeo vos sic habeo.

S. Ignatii Ad Trallianos.

And when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans.

THE BROAD-BACKED hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.

The ’potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo’s voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus’s day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way—
The Church can sleep and feed at once.

I saw the ’potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

T.S Eliot

2016

Why Central Banks Should Offer Bank Accounts to Everyone

The World's Longest Palindrome

http://norvig.com/palindrome.html

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Rowen, Adam Alexi-Malle, Haydn, a str, a blighter, a gamone, Dana, ASS, a bargeman, AID, a craneman, Airedale, Davene, Galle, Skee-Ball, Ewer, a fgn, Aron, a leg, Ducasse, Nevis, Iredale, Mara, Calles, Salene, Danyelle, Kootenay, Caron, a scare, Decadron, a praemunire, katana, Mler, epistases, Neman, Oira, MOIG, Adana, Reni, Adron, a sonar, Eddana, Ima, Lahti, Peter Buneman, a weaponeer, Gallinas, Thestor, a baseman, a deadlight, Ronal, Chane, Mai, Shaitan, Giselle, Holle, Hanoi, Tati, Pace, Darelle, Hasseman, Oita, Sil, a gel, Linares, Ubana, Sat, a rom, a nibbana, Sad, Line, Baer, a bdl, an ordn, a sneer, Gayel, Warrenne, Kennan, an afreet, a gelatin, Urbana, Eri, ATS, a der, Freya, Brenner, a wavelet, a cider, Paolo, Pire, Tayler, a matter, a palace, Danelle, Habana, Marabelle, Smithson, a grub, Anson, a guanosine, Basir, Benares, Abana, Eno, Labana, a cabana, Nona, Bellaire, Tamayo, Nov, Anne, Jane Greer, a caner, a cetane, Naara, Manisha Koirala, Shane, Manat, Terra, BLE, Jameson, 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an ana, Sis, a banana, Leah, Caresa, Tanana, Sumy, novenae, Nap, Mace, Len Adleman, a nay, Ara, Natala, globigerinas, a mon, a leman, Vera, Stassen, Evita, Genaro, Donavon, a villein, a delight, Nica, Janik, Fulahs, Komarek, a ter, a canal, Panama!

Rebels

Su Dongpo

Angela Carter

Watch of the Week: IWC Automatic 36

Super Mario Excel

It's a test, designed to provoke an emotional response

The Old World

Mario - TP OK Jazz - Franco Luambo Makiadi

Howard Carter and Tutankhamun's Tomb

Jack Radey

Measurement of the Earth’s rotation: 720 BC to AD 2015

How was the speed of light determined and who found it, when?

Although Galileo was the first person of record to try to determine the speed of light, he was not successful. His experiments took place over terrestrial distances and the timing methods available to him were far to crude to make a successful determination given such distances and the very great speed of light.

It was the Danish astronomer, Olaus Rømer , who, in 1676, first successfully measured the speed of light. His method was based on observations of the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter (by Jupiter).

Rømer noted that the observed time interval between successive eclipses of a given moon was about seven minutes greater when the observations were carried out when the earth in its orbit was moving away from Jupiter than when it was moving toward Jupiter. He reasoned that, when the earth was moving away from Jupiter, the observed time between eclipses was increased above the true value (by about 3.5 minutes) due to the extra distance that the light from each successive eclipse had to travel to reach the earth. Conversely, when the earth was moving toward Jupiter, the observed interval between eclipses was decreased (by about 3.5 minutes) because of the decreased distance that the light had to travel on each successive eclipse.

Had the earth not been moving, the light from successive eclipses would have to travel the same distance to the earth, so that the true interval between eclipses would be observed. However, when the earth was moving away from Jupiter, the light had to travel a greater distance to reach the earth from each successive eclipse, and conversely a smaller distance when the earth was moving toward Jupiter. Since the speed of the earth in its orbit was known, the distance that the earth had moved between eclipses could be calculated. The speed of light was then estimated to account for the seven minute overall variation of the observed interval between successive eclipses.

Rømer's estimate for the speed of light was 140,000 miles/second, which is remarkably good (186,282 miles/second) considering the method employed.

Three years' wanderings in the northern provinces of China, including a visit to the tea, silk, and cotton countries; with an account of the agriculture and horticulture of the Chinese, new plants, etc.

IJN Mikasa

Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.



Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.



The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—

They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled

Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.



Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.


EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Lourids Brigge) (1910)

The Shores of Oblivion (1889) Bracht

The Fall of Rome - Auden

The piers are pummelled by the waves;

In a lonely field the rain

Lashes an abandoned train;

Outlaws fill the mountain caves.



Fantastic grow the evening gowns;

Agents of the Fisc pursue

Absconding tax-defaulters through

The sewers of provincial towns.



Private rites of magic send

The temple prostitutes to sleep;

All the literati keep

An imaginary friend.



Cerebrotonic Cato may

Extol the Ancient Disciplines,

But the muscle-bound Marines

Mutiny for food and pay.



Caesar’s double-bed is warm

As an unimportant clerk

Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK

On a pink official form.



Unendowed with wealth or pity,

Little birds with scarlet legs,

Sitting on their speckled eggs,

Eye each flu-infected city.



Altogether elsewhere, vast

Herds of reindeer move across

Miles and miles of golden moss,

Silently and very fast.

Guan Yu the Immortal

Miracle on the Vistula

One of the most easily overlooked, yet momentous short wars of the 20th century was the swift-moving clash between the post-World War I Polish Republic and Russia’s brand-new Bolshevik regime of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Reaching a climax during the summer of 1920, the Russo-Polish War is often regarded as the final episode of the Russian Civil War. In fact, it was much more — at once a reflection of the age-old enmity between two Slavic neighbors and a Marxist crusade bent on varying the torch of revolution into the heart of Europe. The campaign featured a remarkable cast of characters on both sides and mixed ferocious cavalry charges with early blitzkrieg tactics in quest of exceptional objectives.

The roots of the war ran deep. For a century and a quarter, the once-formidable Polish nation was a political nonentity, having been dismembered by Prussia, Austria and Russia in the infamous partitions of 1772, 1793 and 1795. Three national insurrections had failed to dislodge the occupying powers; severe Germanization and Russification efforts, aimed at the destruction of the Polish language and culture, were imposed upon the population during the 19th century. Although such campaigns had little effect, by the turn of the century only the most optimistic Polish patriots could still dream of independence.

Yet World War I provided exactly the right set of circumstances for the Poles. On November 6, 1916, Austria-Hungary and Germany, in a desperate bid to ensure the loyalty of their Polish populations, jointly agreed to the formation of a semi-autonomous ‘Kingdom of Poland.’ In Paris, France, Polish spokesmen beat the ears of Allied statesmen on behalf of an independent Poland, but none of the Western powers cared to antagonize their imperial Russian ally, which was opposed to such a move. In 1917, however, Russia had dropped into a violent vortex of chaos and revolution. Partly in consequence to that development, the Fourteen Points for peace drafted by United States President Woodrow Wilson included the creation of an independent Poland and its recognition as ‘an allied belligerent nation’ as of June 3, 1918. On October 7, 1918, with the Central Powers clearly on the brink of defeat, the Regency Council in Warsaw declared Polish independence. After the guns of war fell silent on November 11, the three torn pieces of the Polish nation were triumphantly reunited.

The representatives of France, Great Britain, Italy and the united States met in the mirrored halls of Versailles in 1919 to dismember the German and Austro-Hungarian empires and set the world right. Russia, the erstwhile ally that in November 1917 had established the world’s first Communist government, was shunned by the Western Allies; Lenin’s decision to make a separate peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk in the spring of 1918 would not be forgiven just then. Moscow’s absence form the Versailles conference later proved to be a costly blunder. While the Allies were able to produce a tentative settlement for Poland’s western frontiers, they had no means of establishing any agree-upon border between the new Polish state and the Russian colossus.

The resurgent Poles, meanwhile, quickly established a Western-style parliamentary government and chose a 51-year-old romantic, a conspiratorial and avidly Russophobic military hero named Jozef Klemens Pilsudski as chief of state. Pilsudski, a longtime member of the Polish Socialist Party’s right wing, had always placed the achievement of Polish independence ahead of the social reforms advocated by some of his more ideological colleagues. As a young man he had felt the brutality of tsarist justice, spending five years in Siberian exile for revolutionary activity. During World War I, he organized and commanded a Polish legion under Austrian auspices on the Eastern Front, convinced that Russia was the chief enemy of his country’s independence. He soon became disillusioned with vague Austrian promises in favor of Polish independence, however, and refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Central Powers. Arrested and imprisoned in Magdeburg for two years, he was released on November 10, 1918, and returned home to be acclaimed as a national hero.

Pilsudski possessed an iron will and a quick mind. He clearly regarded the new Polish army as his special province, and himself as the guarantor of independence. The republic’s forces, still motley and ill-equipped, would soon be put to the test as the commander in chief turned his attention eastward.

The re-establishment of Poland’s pre-partition 1772 frontiers, which included substantial parts of the Ukraine and Belorussia (‘White Russia,’ now Belarus), was a matter of top priority for Pilsudski. To accomplish that goal, the veteran revolutionary resurrected the old Polish idea of federalism, first championed in the Middle Ages by the kings of the Jagiellonian dynasty. Put simply, the plan called for an East European federation consisting of the independent republics of the Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania, bound together with Poland. The latter nation would, according to the Pilsudski scheme, play the leading role.

This incredibly ambitious designed was destined to disintegrate almost immediately. The Lithuanians, former partners in the old Polish kingdom, were intensely nationalistic, after their own long submergence in the Russian empire, and they zealously sought to protect their own newly proclaimed independence in the wake of the tsar’s fall. They wanted no part of Pilsudski’s federalist notions. The Ukrainians, while keenly desiring independence, were naturally suspicious of the Polish leader’s motives, realizing how much of the Ukraine was intended for incorporation within the Polish state. The Belorussians, for centuries caught in the crossroads of Roman Catholic Poland and Orthodox Russia, had no outstanding national consciousness yet and were frankly interested in neither in independence nor in Pilsudski’s proposals of union. The Polish argument that none of those three nations could stand next to Russia alone fell on deaf ears. To all three of the potential federal members, it appeared that they might be exchanging the former Russian yoke for a Polish one.

The Western Allies, too, were decidedly against Pilsudski’s plans. Both Britain and France accused the Polish chief of state of imperialism at Russia’s expense, and they urged Poland to limit its eastern frontiers to the farthest extent of clear-cut Polish ethnicity. As for Russian Bolshevism, London and Paris saw that not as a threat, but a temporary disease, soon to be destroyed by the anti-Communist White forces, which the Allies supported in the ten-raging Russian Civil War.

The new Bolshevik government, besieged by a multitude of armies commanded by a politically diverse collection of generals ranging from tsarist aristocrats to disillusioned socialists to provincial warlords, had its hands full at the time. The White forces of Generals Anton Denikin, Nikolai Yudenich and Piotr Wrangel, and Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, supported by Western and Japanese armies and funds, had to be stopped. The Reds had little time in 1918 to worry about Polish schemes to expand on Russia’s western periphery.

Lenin’s dynamic associate Leon Trotsky organized the Red Army to meet the White threat. By using powerful idealism awakened in the revolution, and invovling fears that the landowning aristocrats might return to power, Trotsky built a formidable force of workers, peasants and ex-soldiers of the old imperial army, complete with a tough cavalry corps, to protect the Bolshevik regime. Throughout 1918and 1919, the Reds turned the tables on their foes, one by one.

At that moment of chaos and civil war in Russia, the Poles struck. In February 1919, Pilsudski sent his troops northeast, occupying as much territory as possible for the purpose of presenting a fait accompli to the Allied Supreme Council. That body would then be forced to recognize Poland’s expanded eastern boundaries.

The Polish forces encountered little resistance and advanced rapidly, soon capturing Wilno (Vilius), a historically Polish city, from the Lithuanians, who had proclaimed it the capital of their new republic. By the autumn of 1919, the Polish red-and-white banner was flying over large sections of Belorussia and the western Galician part of the Ukraine was well.

Pilsudski ordered a halt at that point, his intelligence service having informed him that the Whites under General Denikin were pressuring Moscow from the south and could possibly capture the seat of the Bolshevik regime. The Poles surmised that a White government bent on the reconstruction of the old empire would prove more recalcitrant than the hard-pressed Bolsheviks. Denikin was willing to allow Poland to exist up to the borders of Privislanski Kaj, a former Russian province carved from Poland, in exchange for Polish participation in an anti-Communist crusade, but since those terms would deprive Poland of half the territory Pilsudski wanted, the Polish commander in chief rejected that and other White offers. Although Pilsudski secretly negotiated with the Reds for an acceptable eastern frontier, he was by no means convinced of Lenin’s sincerity.

In December, the British foreign minister, Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, proposed a frontier that roughly corresponded to the ethnic limits of Poland but failed to include the two predominantly Polish cities of Lwow and Wilno. Ironically, the ‘Curzon Line,’ as it was later dubbed, was to become the eastern border of post-World War II Poland. The border proposed by the British, although never meant to be a final frontier, was rejected by the Poles, for they had already pushed beyond it.

When it became evident to Pilsudski that the Bolsheviks had turned the tide in the civil war and the Whites appeared doomed, Polish-Soviet negotiations were broken off and the Poles prepared for another thrust into Belorussia and the Ukraine. Such an action, the Poles knew, would be tantamount to a full-blown anti-Soviet war.

Before pressing forward,d Pilsudski shopped around for an ally and found one in the anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian Ataman Semyon Pelyura, whose bedraggled troops had fought both Denikin’s Whites and Trotsky’s Reds for possession of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. Nothing loess than complete Ukrainian independence was Petlyura’s goal, but he concluded the Poles were decidedly the lesser evil compared to either the White or Red Russians. Overcoming severe objections of several of his nationalist associates, the Ukrainian leader came to Poland to ask Pilsudski’s help and, on December 2, 1919, signed a treaty granting eastern Galicia and western Volhynia to Poland in return for Polish support of Petlyura’s efforts to recapture Kiev and extend the Ukraine’s borders to the western bank of the Dnieper River.

Immediately after the collapse of the Polish-Soviet negotiations, Pilsudski ordered several Polish divisions to move north and assist Latvian troops in dislodging the Bolsheviks from the banks of the Dvina River. The campaign resulted in the capture of the crucial fortress of Dvinski on January 3, 1920, and frightened the Soviets into resuming negotiations with the Poles.

Pilsudski rejected Lenin’s offer of a frontier settlement that corresponded somewhat to the existing front line; he deliberately dragged his feet, convinced that the Red offer was insincere, a ploy masking Moscow’s real intentions — a transfer of troops from the crumbling White fronts to the Polish line. As a gesture of good faith, Pilsudski insisted that the peace talks should be conducted at Borissov, a small Belorussian town near the front. The Soviets’ insistent rejection of that demand apparently convinced the Polish leader that an attack on his position was imminent.

While playing the Bolshevik negotiating game throughout the winter months, Pilsudski prepared for battle. Determined to strike first, he managed to station 100,000 Polish troops on the front, but they were spread out a line more than 600 miles long. Meanwhile, Warsaw’s intelligence service kept Pilsudski informed of every detail of Soviet troops movements toward the front while the talks continued.

By that time, London and Paris were greatly alarmed at the reports they were getting of the Polish war preparations. Foreign Secretary Curzon fired a sharply worded telegram to Pilsudski on February 9, warning him that Poland should expect ‘neither help nor support’ from Great Britain. The Allied Supreme Council followed suit two weeks later with a stern admonition. Pilsudski ignored both messages.

Polish spies reported to Warsaw that more Red troops, fresh from victory over the Whites, were transferring west to the front every day. By spring, Pilsudski could wait no longer. On April 21, the Polish chief of state signed a military agreement with Peltyura and his Ukrainian National Council for a pre-emptive expedition against the Bolsheviks. Should the campaign prove successful, the Ukrainians were pledged to enter a federal union with Poland. Four days after the pact was signed, Pilsudski launched a daring offensive deep into the Ukraine.

The Western Allies were as dumbfounded as the Reds by the Polish commander’s audacity. How could a newly restored Poland, whose population had suffered terribly during World War I and whose economy was virtually nonexistent, even contemplate — let alone mount — a full-scale attack on Russia? Undeterred by the protestations of the Western Allies, Pilsudski pushed his forces all the way to the Dnieper in less than a fortnight. On the tips of their lances, the Polish cavalrymen carried a proclamation written by their chief of state that promised ‘all inhabitants of Ukraine, without distinction of class, race or religion’ the brotherly protection of Poland; it exhorted the Ukraine to drive out the Bolshevik intruders ‘to win freedom for itself with the help of the Polish Republic.’

By May 7, Kiev had fallen to the Poles without resistance. For the fourth time since 1918, the Ukrainian Soviet government under Christian Rakovsky was forced to flee its capital; once again, the anti-Bolshevik regime of Petlyura ensconced itself in the city and announced the end of Russian domination of the Ukraine. The capture of Kiev boosted Pilsudski’s popularity at home. Even his political enemies, the National Democrats, changed their minds about the ‘Ukrainian adventure’ and ceased their verbal attacks. The Polish government passed a resolution of praise for Pilsudski on May 18, and a Te Deum Mass was sung in his honor in every Polish church. Portraits of the bushy-browed, heavily mustachioed old revolutionary were hung in all public buildings. Hardly an honor remained unbestowed on him, for he had already been promoted to the rank of marshal in March.

The celebrations would be short-lived. Red Army Commissar Trotsky, no longer concerned about the White threat, was able to muster a sizeable and battle-tested force for action against the Poles. Pilsudski’s swift drive to Kiev had severely overextended his supply lines, and his troops found little comfort in the Ukraine, whose population, though anti-Russian, was also historically anti-Polish.

The initial Bolshevik response came in late May, with the appearance of the most famous unit of the civil war, the First Red Cavalry Army, or Konarmiya. Consisting of 16,000 saber-swinging horse soldiers backed up by five armored trains, it was commanded by 37-year-old General Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny, described by a British military historian as a ‘hard-riding, spectacular savage of great personal courage.’ On June 5, the Red Cavalry crashed through the rear of the Polish lines south of Kiev, pausing to burn down a Polish military hospital filled with hundreds of wounded men. The thinly stretched Polish forces could not contain the Soviet counterattack and immediately retreated westward toward Volhynia and Podolia.

Kiev was abandoned on June 11, and the hapless Petlyura and his Ukrainian National Council fled the city for the last time. The fierce Soviet counterattack was part of a two-pronged strategy. While Budyonny’s horsemen of the Southern Front pushed the Poles out of the Ukraine, a northern attempt at evicting the Poles from Lithuanian and Belorussian territory was underway. Five Red armies, estimated at 160,000 troops. opened a massive campaign at the beginning of July.

The commander of this Northern Front, General Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky, was a 27-year-old former tsarist lieutenant who had joined Lenin’s cause shortly after the Bolshevik triumph in 1917. Considered something of a military genius, Tukhachevsky had rendered invaluable to the Reds throughout the civil war; it was he who brutally suppressed the Kronstadt sailors’ rebellion in St. Petersburg. Now the so-called ‘Demon of the Civil War’ would turn his considerable talents against the Poles. On July 5, Tukhachevsky opened his campaign in the north, his right flank led by another remarkable character, the Armenian cavalry general Chaia Dmitreyevich Ghai, whose hard-riding Caucasian III Cavalry Corps consistently outflanked the Poles and drove them toward Warsaw.

Undersupplied, outgunned, outnumbered and outmaneuvered, the Poles fought hard but could not stop the Urssians’ northern drive. On July 12, Minsk, the Belorussian capital, fell to the Red,s followed by Wilno on the 14th and Grodno on the 19th. In his order of the day for July 20, Tukhachevsky sounded an ominous note: ‘The fate of the world revolution is being decided in the west; the way leads over the corpse of Poland to a universal conflagration…To Warsaw!’

Western military observers were as surprised by the Bolshevik onslaught as they had been by Pilsudski’s before it. The flames of World War I had been extinguished not two years, and memories of the long months of preparation necessary to advance a few yards at a time from the trenches were still keen. Yet here was a conflict of swift movement spearheaded by cavalry, a branch that had long been pronounced useless. The question was, where and when would the Bolsheviks stop their advance?

The Soviet government at first had met the serious Polish challenge by appealing to the Russian people, not for the sake of Bolshevism, but for nationalist reasons. Even the old aristocratic old tsarist General Aleksei Brusilov, the last Imperial Army commander, responded to this approach and joined in an anti-Polish campaign; many other patriotic ex-tsarist officers followed his example. But now that the Poles had been evicted from Belorussia and the Ukraine, ideology overwhelmed nationalism. The intoxicating success of Budyonny and Tukhachevsky revived in Lenin’s mind an old Bolshevik dream: the Red Army breaking through Poland to Germany, where it would assist the strong and well-organized German Communist Party in establishing a socialist republic in the homeland of Karl Marx.

Several key members of the Bolshevik Central Committee, including Trotsky and Josef Stalin, strenuously objected to Lenin’s plans to reach Germany. Karol Radek, the Soviet expert on foreign policy, opined that the Polish and German people were not prepared to accept communism. Why not make peace with the Poles on the basis of the British-proposed Curzon line of 1919? In the heated arguments that followed, Lenin vehemently and repeatedly insisted that the time was right to spread the revolution westward. Supported by Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev, the Bolshevik leader’s point of view held sway; Stalin and several others changed their minds when the crucial vote was taken, giving Lenin the victory.

The Soviet plans became readily apparent when Tukhachevsky’s troops reached ethnically Polish territory. In the city of Bialystok, the Russians installed a ‘Polish Revolutionary Committee,: headed by Felix Dzerzhinski, Julian Marchlevski and Felix Kon, longtime Communists known for their opposition to Polish independence. On August 3, the committee issued a ‘Manifesto to the Polish Working People of Town and Country,’ proclaiming a revolutionary socialist government.

To Lenin’s great surprise, the promulgations of this Moscow-organized regime fell on deaf ears. None of the committee’s members had the remotest link to the Polish working class; indeed, one of the Bialystok group’s most important members, Dzezhinski, was Lenin’s close associate and the head of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. The mere mention of the ‘Polish Revolutionary Committee’ was enough to send thousands of Polish workers flocking to the national colors to defend their capital. Still, the uncharacteristically impatient Lenin disregarded those ominous signs and insisted on the immediate capture of Warsaw. The Bolshevik leader’s political advisers warned him not to count on a proletarian insurrection anywhere in Poland. Bitter, centuries-long memories of Polish oppression could not be raised by raising the revolutionary red flag in Warsaw. Trotsky, who seconded that gloomy appraisal, also warned Lenin that the speedy capture of the Polish capital could only be achieved by stretching the Red Army’s supply lines to precariously thin limits. Again, Lenin rejected the opinions of the doubters in his midst.

Meanwhile, the rapid Soviet advance on Warsaw caused a serious political crisis that resulted in the collapse of the Polish cabinet. After 15 days of haggling, Prime Minister Wladislaw Grabski finally managed to form a crisis government. He then appeared, hat in hand, before the Allied Supreme Council at Spa, Belgium to appeal for help in defending the Polish capital, only to be subjected to bitter criticism of Pilsudski’s eastern policy. If the Poles expected the Supreme Council to help arrange a truce with the angered Bolsheviks, the price would be high. On July 10, Grabski, having little choice, signed the Protocol of Spa, in which Poland agreed to accept the council’s recommendations on the disputed Polish-Czechoslovakian and Polish-Lithuanian frontiers; to return Wilno to Lithuanian control; to respect the Allies’ solution for the Polish use of the port of Danizg; to abide by any future decision on the status of Ukrainian-inhabited eastern Galicia; and finally, to pull all Polish troops behind the Curzon Line until an armistice could be arranged.

The severity of those terms masked the actual alarm felt by the Allies as Tukhachevsky’s forces crossed the Bug River and headed for Warsaw. Frantic appeals from the Polish capital for arms and ammunition underscored the urgency of the situation. Torn between saying ‘You made your bed, now sleep in it,’ and providing the requested assistance, the Western Allies decided they had no alternative but to render aid to the beleaguered Poles, lest the Red Army thrust its way into the heart of Europe.

Accordingly, the French and British sent high-powered civilian and military missions to Warsaw. The combined Allied mission reached the city on July 25. The French contingent featured the prominent General Maxime Weygand, Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s chief of staff during World War I. The celebrated Frenchman brought along his aide-de-camp, a trim and proper junior officer names Charles de Gaulle. The British were represented by Viscount Edgar Vincent d’Abernon and Maj. Gen. Percy de B. Radcliffe, an old-time cavalryman with a reputation for logical thinking.

The Western military experts swiftly proceeded to show the battered Poles how the Red Army could be stopped. Fed information on the existing situation by French officers attached as advisers to the Polish army, the Allied mission came to believe that Marshal Pilsudski had seriously underestimated the gravity of the Soviet threat. The British felt it necessary under these circumstances to force the Poles to accept Weygand as de facto commander of the Polish forces. The Poles steadfastly refused, although they feigned deference to the great French general’s advice rather than jeopardize their source of supplies. In reality, Weygand was excluded form the decision making whenever possible.

By July 22, the day Tukhachevsky’s troops crossed the Bug into indisputably Polish territory, the defenders’ resistance had stiffened considerably. Pilsudski was reported to have been quite surprised that the Soviets had dared traverse the Curzon Line, the truce frontier suggested by the British. By August 1, the Polish leader realized that the Bolsheviks intended destination was Warsaw. On that day, the fortress town of Brest-Litovsk fell to the invaders; the capital lay only 130 miles west.

Pilsudski knew that a dramatic counteroffensive was the only possible way to save Warsaw, but where, he wondered, could he muster the forces necessary for such a move? The entire Polish army was committed to the defense of the country. Despite the more pressing threat posed by Tukhachevsky in the north, the Poles were reluctant to pull out their troops facing Budyonny on the Southern Front — the Galician region that had never been under Russian control, not even temporarily. They preferred to build their military strength by conscription and volunteers.

Time was obviously of the essence. Pilsudski finally decided that the war would be decided in the north. But for effective resistance, the Poles were in desperate need of Allied war supplies, which became increasingly difficult to obtain. The problem came from pro-Bolshevik German and Czech railroad workers, and even some British dockworkers, who refused to load the Polish-bound equipment in their countries. Some of the materiel could reach Poland only through the Baltic port of Danzig, the Free City under League of Nations administration. There too, German dockworkers — convinced by Bolshevik and German propaganda that a Soviet victory would unite Danzig with Germany — obstructed delivery. French marine infantry had to be sent to Danzig to expedite the unloading of munitions.

On Aguust 8, Tukhacehvsky, confident the Poles were on the verge of collapse, issued his orders for the capture of Warsaw. He intended to bypass the city’s northern defenses, move on to the lower Vistula River and attack from the northwest. The Red Sixteenth Army was to proceed from the east, while its flank was to be protected only by the 8,000-man Mozyr Group. Although Moscow had detached Budyonny’s cavalry from General Aleksandr Yegorov’s Southern Front and assigned the horsemen to Tukhachevsky, the latter appears not to have planned to use those additional forces for the protection of his flank. The Bolshevik commander apparently believed that the Poles posed no danger to his exposed periphery. Additionally, Lenin wanted Warsaw delivered as soon as possible.

As Tukhachevsky planned his strategy, the Polish forces had grown much stronger than his 150,000 men. Pilsudski’s army had grown to 185,000 by August 12, and in two more weeks the Poles could count 370,000 hastily trained, poorly equipped soldiers on their rolls, including almost 30,000 cavalry. Included in this force was General Jozef Haller’s army of Polish-Americans, which had seen Western Front service in World War I, and the 7th Eskadra ‘Kosciuszko,’ a squadron of daring young American volunteer pilots. The capital’s defense was augmented by a motley but enthusiastic force of 80,000 workers and peasants. The crisis government of Prime Minister Wincenty Witos, which had replaced the Grabski cabinet on July 24, had done its job well.

In spite of the progress of the Polish defense plans, the situation remained grave. Marshal Pilsudski, having little time left, issued his orders for a bold and imaginative counterattack on August 6, several days before he learned of Tukhachevsky’s plans to encircle Warsaw. The Polish commander had finally brought several key units up from the south. A 20,000-man strike force, commanded by General Edward Smigly-Rydz, was to smash through Tukhachevsky’s Mozyr Group and begin a sweeping, encircling movement to cut off the Soviet northern forces. The Polish Fifth Army under the able General Wladislaw Sikorski was to hold the crucial Wkra River line north of the capital. The city itself was defended by a 46,000-man garrison aided by the worker-peasant volunteer brigades, while the Third and Fourth armies were to support the strike force.

By August 12, it was apparent to the Allied military mission in Warsaw that Tukhachevsky intended to attack the city from the northwest. Weygand expressed grave reservations about the Poles’ ability to defend the Wkra River line, where they were severely outnumbered. The Allied commission even recommended that a more effective Polish defense might be mounted west of the Vistula, though that would mean abandoning Warsaw. The next morning, Bolshevik infantry units broke through Polish lines and captured Radzymin, only 15 miles form the capital. Bloody hand-to-hand combat ensued until the arrival of reinforcements enabled the Poles to recapture the town on the 15th.

Meanwhile, General Sikorski’s Fifth Army attacked the Red Fourth Army northwest of Warsaw and broke through, seriously exposing the Polish flank in the process. The Russian failure to capitalize on such an opportunity was the result of a lack of communications — disrupted by the Poles — and a lack of cooperation among the Bolshevik commanders. In addition to a poor coordination among Tukhachevsky’s army commanders around Warsaw, the headstrong Budyonny (possibly on Stalin’s advice) had ignored Tukhachevsky’s call to join him, instead remaining in the Lwow area to the southeast.

Sikorski, quick to take advantage of the chaos among the Reds, continued his advance, raiding the Red Fourth Army headquarters at Ciechanow and capturing its plans and ciphers. Using tanks, trucks, armored cars and mobile columns, the Polish general has been credited with employing the first blitzkrieg tactics of the 20th century. Instead of attacking Sikorski’s vulnerable left flank, the Red cavalry commander Ghai, who refused to support the Fourth Army, busied himself cutting Polish railway lines some 40 miles west.

In those desperate days of mid-August, more Allied supplies finally arrived. At Warsaw’s Mokotow Airfield, Polish mechanics labored day and night assembling former Royal Air force figher planes in order to deny the Soviets any aerial reconnaissance. On the 16th, when Budyonny’s Cossacks finally crossed the Bug River and began their advance on the city of Lwow, aircraft of the III Dyon (air division), comprised of the 5th, 6th, 7th and 15th Eskasdri, began three days of bombing and strafing in an effort to stem the onslaught. Flying a total of 190 sorties, dropping nine tons of bombs, Polish and American airmen managed to slow Budyonny’s advance to only a few miles a day, buying precious time for Polish land forces to move to counter the Soviet threat.

On August 16, too, Marshal Pilsidski ordered his strike force into action. Covering toughly 70 miles in three days, the Polish northward movement encountered almost no resistance. Breaking through the gap in the Bolshevik ranks, the Polish Fourth Army, supported by 12 French-built Renault M-17FT light tanks, reached Brest-Litovsk and in the process cut off and trapped the Red Sixteenth Army. While Sikorski’s troops kept the Bolsheviks in a state of confusion, Pilsidski, who traveled in the back of a truck with his forward units, pushed his forces farther north.

The Allies, meanwhile, had arranged for another round of Polish-Soviet peace negotiations, apparently believing that only a truce could save Warsaw now. On August 17, delegates from both sides met in Mink, where Moscow presented its conditions for a cease-fire: the Polish army was to be dismantled and the Allied military commission was to be sent packing. The Curzon Line was the only acceptable frontier, declared the Soviet delegates, with some small alterations in favor of the Poles.

News from the front, where Pilsidski’s success astonished everyone, including the marshal himself, made the Bolshevik peace terms sound ludicrous. By August 18, Tukhachevsky realized that he had been completely outflanked and ordered what amounted to a general retreat — it was, in reality, a rout. Those Red units in a position to do so immediately bolted for the East Prussian border before the Poles could close the ring. Some groups, such as Ghai’s cavalry and the Red Fourth Army, were locked in battle with Sikorski’s troops and were trapped. Although badly mauled by ferocious encounters with pursuing Polish units, Ghai’s battered horsemen managed to reach East Prussia, where they were immediately interned by the German authorities. The Fourth Army could not escape and was forced to surrender in Poland.

By August 24, it was virtually over. Tukhachevsky’s forces had left behind more than 200 artillery pieces, more than 1,000 machine guns, 10,000 vehicles of every kind and nearly 66,000 prisoners of war. Total Soviet casualties were in the vicinity of 100,000; the Polish victory had cost 238 officers and 4,124 enlisted men killed, as well as 562 officers and 21,189 soldiers wounded.

There remained only the threat of Budyonny, whose cavalry had committed atrocities the Poles would not soon forget. Placing General Sikorski in command of the Third Army on August 27, Pilsudski then ordered h8im to oust Budyonny’s force from the Southern Front. On August 29, Sikorski’s vanguard Operation Group, consisting of the 13th Infantry Division and 1st Cavalry Division under the overall command of General Stanislaw Haller, confronted Budyonny’s Cossacks at Zamarsc. In an unusual battle by 20th century standards, Polish lancers rode at full gallop into the Red cavalry and tore the Russians to pieces. After a second engagement with Sikorsky’s forces that evening at Komarow, Budyonny quickly ordered a rearguard action and fled homeward, barely avoiding the complete annihilation of his army.

While Sikorski gave chase to Budyonny in the south, Pilsudski pursued Tukhachevsky’s battered legions into Belorussia. Catching up with the Reds on the Niemen River on September 26, the Poles smashed the Soviet defensive lines and inflicted another humiliating defeat on them, destroying their Third Army in the process. Pilsudski’s troops entered Grodno on the same day. Following up on September 27, the Poles pummeled Tukhachevsky’s beaten and de moralized troops yet again on the Szczara River, sending them scurrying back to Minsk. In the Battle of the Niemen River, the Russians lost another 50,000 prisoners and 160 cannons.

The rout now complete, Poland rejoiced in her hour of victory; Marshal Pilsudski’s prestige soared and the Allies breathed a sigh of relief. The Red Army had suffered its most disastrous defeat of the entire Russian Civil War period. An armistice was officially declared on October 12, followed by a protracted series of negotiations to formally end hostilities and settle the Polish-Soviet border question.

The result was the treaty of Riga, signed on March 18, 1921, in the Latvian capital. Poland received a significant portion of her pre-partition frontiers, including the city of Lwow, and took possession of territories inhabited by about 12 million Lithuanians, White Russians and Ukrainians.

Little remembered in the West, the Battle of Warsaw was in fact one of the most significant land engagements of the 20th century. Strategically, it reversed an ideological onslaught that might otherwise have carried Soviet Communism into Western Europe in 1920 — and eventuality the consequences of which can only be imagined by posterity. Militarily, the sudden counterattack by which Pilsudski and his lieutenants split and routed the Bolshevik forces — themselves led by one of the enemy’s most brilliant generals — deserves a place among the tactical masterpieces of history.

Sanada Yukimura

(真田 幸村, 1567 – June 3, 1615), actual name: Sanada Nobushige (真田 信繁), was a Japanese samurai warrior of the Sengoku period. He was especially known as the leading general on the defending side of the Siege of Osaka.

Yukimura was called "A Hero who may appear once in a hundred years", "Crimson Demon of War" and "The Last Sengoku Hero". The famed veteran of the invasion of Korea, Shimazu Tadatsune, called him the "Number one warrior in Japan" (日本一の兵)