So, I'm reading "The Boer War" by Eversley Belfield and came across this at the beginning of the chapter:

Dear Teddy, I came over here meaning to join the Boers, who I was told were Republicans fighting Monarchists; but when I got here I found the Boers talked Dutch, while the Britishers talked English, so I joined the latter.

This is possibly one of the most "American" things I have ever read...

TL DR: "I'm a heroic defender of democracy!...on second thought, I didn't want to learn Dutch."

From Bilder, Michael C., and James G. Bilder. A Foot Soldier for Patton: The Story of a "Red Diamond" Infantryman with the U.S. Third Army. Drexel Hill: Casemate Publishers, 2008.

I can't begin to describe how often replacements came into our ranks only to be killed a day or two later by snipers. We knew what to do and how to survive through our experience, but these green kids served as nothing more than target practice for German snipers. Yet despite their experience, even veterans made fatal errors on occasion. I remember one lieutenant colonel who was always preaching cover and concealment to us when it came to snipers. He forgot his own teaching one day, and stepped from a jeep and walked across an open field rather than hugging the tree line around it. He was struck by a sniper's bullet and dead before he hit the ground.

....

As I mentioned earlier, I was a survivor. As such, I was often assigned to look out as best I could for new recruits. The high casualties at Metz meant we were getting younger and younger replacements. These kids were often 18 or 19 years old and had been pulled from places like Air Corps schools, where they had been training for the non-pilot duties on bombers such as radio, navigation, and tail gunner positions. Suddenly, they were told that they were going to become riflemen in infantry companies.

....

I saw trucks of these kids arriving on the woods in assembly areas in our rear. I heard them say in an almost pleading voice things like, "But I've ever even fired a rifle before." They were issued the weapon all the same and told, "Don't worry, you'll learn." All most of them learned was how to die.

These kids tended to view me like baby chicks view their mother. When we were moving up or out on patrol, they tended to bunch up around me. "Spread out, don't get too close, you're gonna draw fire," I'd have to say. We saw their dead bodies carried away in mattress covers a day or two after their arrival.

There were so many dead that they were piled into trucks like debris. Two soldiers, each one holding an end of a mattress cover, would swing the body inside back and forth and then fling it up into a truck. I used to think if only the mothers of these poor boys could see how their sone were being treated what hell there would be to pay.

I did what I could for these kids. In fact, what was probably my most unselfish action in the war took place looking after these boys....

stories from the archives: a few weeks ago I found this file of documents (mostly letters), concerning a series of incidents that took place between a senior medical officer and a hospital matron in the British colonial service— I have a few letters that the nurse wrote while she was posted overseas, and in them you can almost see the doctor move from being a rather minimal presence in her working life to a major antagonist in it. Eventually he had her fired, and she never held a colonial post again.

I’ve literally thought about these letters every single day since I found them, I’m not sure why they’ve got such a hold over me! I think it’s just how vivid the letters are, emotionally, and how clearly her distress and humiliation come through even when she’s doing her best to be restrained and to put a good face on it. The real bummer is that even though seemingly (?) everyone in the professional-medical world felt that she’d been trying her best (except for the medical officer, obviously), the colonial secretary told her lawyer that they’d probably write “temperamentally unsuitable” on her reference.

The letters are also super detailed— like, almost too detailed. I’ve ended up doing a lot of extra research (side project!) trying to prise out the significance/ meaning of various events mentioned or people named, etc. But it’s very fun because each time I come back to the letters, I find that I do understand more than I did before, and I spend a lot less time going "huh, wonder what this means!"

Just as I suspected.

My brother is a senior in highschool and is getting senoiritis. He is in AP European History and elected to write a 25 page research paper as opposed 3 smaller research papers.

He decided originally he wanted to write about the politics behind the start of the first world war, and how the war influenced politics after the war. He chose this subject because I am interested in WWI. I was estatic when he told me he wanted to write on the topic, so I got together some good books on the subject and told him to write his thesis he needed to peruse the books a bit to get an idea of where to take his argument.

Of course he didn't listen and now needs to rewrite his thesis or pick another one entirely. He's got senoritis because he really doesn't want to sit down and do the reading to make any sort of effective argument. I'm more than happy to give him resources and talk about his thesis and paper, but I'm not going to do it for him, even though at times it feels like he wants me to effectively hand him a written paper.

I hope he does well though, he's got it in him, he just needs to apply himself a bit.

Max Hastings, Antony Beevor, Ian Toll, Rick Atkinson, who else writes great narrative or history that doesn't just focus on battles and great men, but also includes POV from soldiers and civilians?

Is anyone familiar with Timothy Snyder? In his book The Road to Unfreedom, how legit is it that Putin is obsessed with Ivan Illyin? Seems a bit overblown. One of my professor’s wife is Russian and says that Snyder’s representation of the the importance of Illyin in Russian thought is not nearly as prominent as Snyder offers.

i want to know about ancient or medievals books containing political theory or war strategy like art of war, or the Arthasastra by Kautilya.. help me please

What are some good resources for researching the propaganda war aspect of World War 1? I'm starting a final paper on it soon and I'm still in the research phase. Someone recommended Ferguson's Pity of War as an intro to WW1

Whilst rereading bits of Tonio Andrade's The Gunpowder Age for some answers over the past couple of days, I noticed something that I hadn't before. According to Andrade the Fuzhou Arsenal suffered because of a 'lack of dedicated funding', and that 'by the late 1880s, the shipyard was faltering'. He goes on to contrast this with Japan's Yokosuka Shipyard and how it had much better financial backing. There's only one slight niggle with this bit of analysis.

The French effectively annihilated both the Arsenal and the Fujian Fleet in 1884 as a result of the Battle of Fuzhou. The problem wasn't a 'lack of dedicated funding', it was the loss of all of the existing infrastructure which forced it to be rebuilt from scratch!

It seems to me from what I hear about Caligula that maybe he was a God, a trickster God. Especially how he plays with tradition in ways that insult the institutions just seems so much like a God would do.