What's At Stake In a column in the New York Times, Abbas El-Zein, whose grandmother was killed fleeing the Israeli Army during the invasion in 1978, writes:

"More is at stake now than the fate of Lebanon. If the West does not persuade Israel to stop its attacks, that failure will add to a creeping sense that , in its fight with Islamic fundamentalism, the West has abandoned its claim to moral superiority based on respect for human rights and international law, and is pursuing instead a war based increasingly on tribal solidarity.

"What a tragedy this would be, especially for those of us who crave a modern, peaceful Middle East. And what a triumph for the varied strains of bin Ladenism -- Muslim, Christian and Jewish alike."  ¶ 9:24 AM 0 comments

  A Roman Siege Tower















A model of a Roman siege tower. You can't see them, but it actually rolls on wheels.  ¶ 8:32 PM 0 comments

  The Defeat of the Aduatuci Here's an excerpt from Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars, from a translation by Rex Warner:

"When our army reached their territory (the Aduatuci, descendants of the Cimbri and the Teutones, who had gone on a rampage in the Roman province in Gaul a generation earlier and had been defeated by Caesar's uncle Marius) they at first made a number of sorties from the town and fought a number of minor engagements with our troops.

"Afterwards, when we had surrounded them with an earthwork twelve feet high and five miles in circumference, with redoubts at frequent intervals, they stayed inside their own fortifications.

"We brought up our mantlets (protective screens) and began to build a ramp, and soon the enemy could see us erecting a siege tower at a considerable distance from their lines. This sight at first caused them a good deal of amusement.

"They would stand on their walls and shout insults at us. What on earth, they asked, were we doing setting up such a huge machine so far away? As a rule, the Gauls look down on us for being so short of stature compared with their own larger selves; and so now they inquired how little creatures like us, with our weak hands and feeble physiques could possibly imagine we were going to lift up so massive a tower and place it on top of their wall.

"However, when they saw the tower actually moving and drawing near to the fortifications, they were completely unnerved. It was something which they had neither seen nor expected to see, and they sent a deputation to me to ask for peace.

"'It seems to us,' thy said, 'that you Romans must have divine help in your warfare, since you can move up engines of such a size so quickly.'

The Aduatuci surrendered to Caesar, but said they would be massacred by their neighbors if they had to give up their arms. Caesar said they had to surrender their arms, but he would forbid their neighbors to do them any harm. They pretended to agree to this and dumped lots of their arms outside the walls, but they kept about a third of them and launched a surprise attack on the Romans in the middle of the night.

Did they catch them by surprise? Of course not. "I had already given the necessary instructions for for dealing with such an attack," says Caesar (the Warner translation uses the first person).

"The alarm was quickly given by means of flares and detachments from the nearest redoubts came running up to the point of danger. The enemy fought fiercely, as was to be expected considering that they were brave men and fighting desperately for their lives.

"The ground was against them, and we were able to hurl down weapons from our rampart and towers, so that courage was the only thing that could give them any hope of survival. About four thousand of them were killed and the rest forced back into the town.

"Next day we met with no opposition. The gates were smashed open and the soldiers let in. I sold the whole population of the place by auction in one lot. The purchasers reported that the total number of persons sold came to fifty-three thousand."

If it seems that the Romans are being unduly mean to the Gauls, remember the Gauls had sacked Rome just 350 years before.  ¶ 8:08 PM 0 comments

  The Duke of Vincenza
Armand Caulaincourt, Duke of Vincenza, Master of Horse to the Emperor Napoleon, actually returned to France with Napoleon after the retreat from Moscow in the famous Berlin Coach.  ¶ 3:14 PM 0 comments

  To Sleep Is To Die This passage is from With Napoleon in Russia by General Armand Caulaincourt, Napoleon's Master of Horse during the invasion of Russia, and describes conditions during their disastrous retreat from Moscow:

"The cold was so intense that bivouacking was no longer supportable. Bad luck for those who fell asleep by a camp-fire! One constantly found men who, overcome by the cold, had been forced to drop out and had fallen to the ground, too weak or too numb to stand.

"Ought one to help them along -- which practicallly meant carrying them? They begged one to be let alone. There were bivouacs all along the road -- ought one to take them to a camp-fire?

"Once these poor wretches fell asleep, they were dead. If they resisted the craving for sleep, another passer-by would help them along a little farther, thus prolonging their agony for a short while but not saving them; for in this condition the drowsiness engendered by cold is irresistably strong. Sleep comes inevitably; and to sleep is to die.

"I tried in vain to save a number of these unfortunates. The only words they uttered were to beg me, for the love of God, to go away and let them sleep. To hear them, one would have thought this sleep was their salvation. Unhappily, it was a poor wretch's last wish; but at least he ceased to suffer, without pain or agony.

"Gratitude, and even a smile, was imprinted on his discoloured lips.

"What I have related about the effects of extreme cold, and of this kind of death by freezing, is based on what I saw happen to thousands of individuals. The road was covered with their corpses."

You or I might be upset by this kind of experience, but Caulaincourt and the rest of the emperor's staff didn't let it get them down.

"Since we were all in it together, we were generally gay, careless, even full of raillery. Unquestionably, despite our sufferings, our headquarters were in as good a humour as were the Russian headquarters."  ¶ 5:16 PM 0 comments

  With Napoleon in Russia Armand Augustin Louis, Marquis de Caulaincourt in his own right, was a French aristocrat who lived through the Revolution because he was serving in the army, where he had been promoted on his own merits in the revolutionary government's struggles with invasions by French aristrocrats and the royalist governments they had rallied to their cause.

Once, on his way to rejoin his regiment, he was actually denounced as an aristocrat and thrown into prison, but the gaoler's wife was "a woman whose poverty Caulaincourt's mother had relieved." He escaped and made it back to his regiment. To make a long story short, he served as Napoleon's ambassador to Russia from 1807 to 1811.

He then became Napoleon's master of horse, basically the number two guy in the empire. By then Napoleon had divorced Josephine (big mistake; it was all downhill from there) declared himself emperor and married an Austrian princess.

Anyway, after serving as an ambassador to Tsar Alexander and actually forming a personal friendship with him, Caulaincourt had to oversee all the logistics of the invasion of Russia.

He tells us all about it in his memoirs With Napoleon in Russia, which, for complicated reasons, was not published until 1933.

Caulaincourt had argued vehemently against the invasion -- Napoleon's subordinates were encouraged to speak their minds -- and advanced carefully reasoned arguments that it was the wrong thing to do from every angle. The Russians would simply withdraw, he predicted, and rely on the severity of the winter.

But Napoleon was not to be persuaded. Using as a pretext the fact that Russia was allowing American ships to enter the Baltic ports and violating the embargo he was trying to impose on England, he invaded that Russia with about 400,000 men, who were later reinforced by about 100,000 more. And Caulaincourt, despite his opposition to the idea, had to arrange all the horses and transport and oversee the emperor's household and run the communication systems and all kinds of other things.

That's why it came to pass that Caulaincourt was with Napoleon throughout the campaign and even accompanied him in the famous Berlin coach when he abandoned the army and headed back to Paris. They did a lot of talking in the coach, all of which Caulaincourt wrote down, and it's very revealing about the emperor, and about Caulaincourt as well.

Here's what Dorothy Canfield had to say about this book: (Canfield was a best-selling author as well as an education reformer who brought the Montessori method to the United States. She was on the Book of the Month selection committee.)

"I base on four facts my claim to be the right person to report on this book: I am one of those people who, because they never can keep Russian names straight are never quite sure who is who among the characters in Russian books.

"I have always been incapable of reading a tactical description of a regular battle. As soon as 'the right wing was drawn up on such-and-such Heights with the cavalry deployed in such-and-such formation,' I painlessly fade from the book.

"Thirdly, having ruefully observed how hard it is for human beings to tell the truth about what happened to them personally, I am invincibly sceptical about the accuracy of any author's account of what happened to him.

"And lastly, detesting war as a relic of savagery, I am apt to feel that military affairs and details are of no more interest or importance to civilized people than the names of mediaeval armor.

"Such being certain infirmities and mental habits of mine, it can be imagined with what lack of enthusiasm I began this account of the Russian campaign written by Napoleon's Master of Horse.

"The quality of this book can, perhaps, be judged when I report that (after a slight difficulty in getting started) I could hardly lift my eyes from the page before I had read much more slowly and with closer attention than is my usual habit, every word of the volume."

That's why I haven't posted for a while. I picked up this book to look for a passage I was thinking about, and I have had to reread the entire book.  ¶ 3:45 PM 0 comments

  An Upheaval of the Earth Gaius Sallustius Crispus, known as Sallust, describes Rome after the defeat of Carthage in 146 BCE:

(This passage is from "A history of Rome from its origins to 529 A.D. as told by the Roman historians" prepared by Moses Hadas.)

The nobility turned its dignity, and the populace its liberty, into license, and every man robbed and pillaged and plundered for himself. The body politic was split into two parties, and between them the state was rent apart.

The nobility was powerful because of its organization; plebian strength was less effective because it was not centralized but dispersed among a crowd. A handful of men manipulated policy at home and in the field; the treasury, the provinces, the magistracies, the glories and triumphs, were their monopoly.

The people were burdened with military service and poverty; the spoils of war generals divided with the few. In the meanwhile the parents of the soldiers and their little children were driven from their homes, the more powerful their neighbors the quicker.

Along with power, then, there was an invasion of greed, measureless and ruthless; it tainted and spoiled everything, without scruple or reverence, until it hastened its own downfall. For as soon as nobles were found who preferred true glory to dishonest power, the state began to stir and civil dissension to arise like an upheaval of the earth.  ¶ 9:25 PM 0 comments

  A Cabal of Warmongers A war connived at by a cabal of right-wing warmongers in Washington, an occupation resulting in the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of local inhabitants. Surely this catastrophic blunder by the Bush administration is unprecedented in American history.

Not.

George F. Kennan, in his lecture series, later published in book form, American Diplomacy 1900-1950, outlines the causes of the Spanish American War, which had nothing to do with the security of the United States and everything to do with an ambitious assistant secretary of the Navy.

Spain, Kennan explains, had done virtually everything reasonably possible to comply with American demands, but a small, vocal cabal of warmongers, or jingoists, as they were then known, capitalized on the sinking of the battleship Maine, which the Spanish had nothing to do with, to incite the nation to war.

"Thus our government, to the accompaniment of great congressional and popular acclaim, inaugurated hostilities against another country in a situation of which it can only be said that the possibilities of settlement by measures short of war had by no means been exhausted."

So Congress passed a resolution authorizing the president to use force to expel the Spanish from Cuba. Eleven days later, Admiral George Dewey attacked and destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. Okay, that could have been to prevent the Spanish fleet from attacking the US.

But why did the US send an army to occupy the Philippines, since any threat from the Spanish had been removed? Our occupation of the islands was as disastrous as our occupation of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of people died with no benefit whatever to the United States.

I urge you to read Kennan's account in its entirety, because it's rather complicated. But here are some excerpts:

"We know that Theodore Roosevelt, who was the young Assistant Secretary of the Navy, had long felt we ought to take the Philippines; that he wangled Dewey's appointment to the command of the Asiatic fleet; that both he and Dewey wanted war; and that he had some sort of a prior understanding with Dewey to the effect that Dewey would attack Manila, regardless of the circumstances of the origin or the purpose of the war."

"And we can only say that it looks very much as though, in this case, the action of the United States government had been determined primarily on the basis of a very able intrigue by a few strategically placed persons in Washington, an intrigue which received absolution, forgiveness, and a sort of public blessing by virtue of war hysteria."

And so, for the first time in history, the United States flag was planted in conquest, and we acquired territory with no intention of extending citizenship to its inhabitants. We claimed to be liberators, but became occupiers, causing terrible, needless slaughter. All to further one man's political ambitions.  ¶ 9:13 PM 1 comments

  The Morals of Augustus Got a very insightful comment from a reader in Arlington, Massachusetts, who asks how I can deplore rape and murder by American soldiers in Iraq and still say that Augustus Caesar was "quite a guy" for bringing centuries of peace and prosperity to the Mediterranean World.

I'm always delighted by comments, but in this case I'm especially delighted because it makes a perfect introduction to the morals of the ancient world, a very fun topic. The Romans and the Greeks and everyone else in the ancient world did lots of despicable things, and lots of despicable practices were institutionalized.

I would hate to have to defend the morals of Augustus or Julius Caesar, or the Romans, or the Greeks, or even Socrates, or the morals of the societies in which they lived.

But I think people have always had a sense of what is despicable and sickening, and this crime in Iraq is despicable and sickening and our whole country is to blame.

I think people should be judged by what they deemed right in the context of their times. Washington owned slaves. Lincoln could not envision black people and white people living together. Franklin Roosevelt couldn't propose a federal law against lynching. But each one brought us a little further along the path.

Also, Iraq is, we hear, our ally, so, in the Roman army, the soldier in question would have been tied to a stake and beaten to death by his fellow legionaries.

Thirdly, it would have been bad form, even for a Roman soldier, to murder the victim, the parents, and the seven-year-old sister. Not for moral reasons, but because of the resale value.

Fourthly, Do you see any peace? Do you see any prosperity?

During his early career, Augustus had to form an alliance with Marc Anthony and some other guy whose name I can't remember, Lepidus, maybe. It was called the second triumverate, the first tirumverate being the one made by Julius Caesar, Pompey and Crassus.

The deal was that each of the triumvirs had to allow the others to kill anyone they wanted. Marc Anthony hated Cicero, the famous orator, and had him killed and had his head and hands nailed to the podium in the forum. Antony's wife pulled the tongue out and stabbed it with a knitting needle.

Many years later, after Anthony, Lepidus, Crassus, Pompey, and, of course, Julius Caesar were all dead, that is, five out of six of the triumvirs, the emperor Augustus found one of his grandsons reading a work by Cicero, a crime that could have been punished by death. The boy tried to hide the scroll, but Augustus saw it and took it from him and began reading it.

He then handed the scroll back to his grandson and said, "He was a learned man, dear child, a learned man who loved his country."

As the Tralfamadoreans would say, "So it goes."  ¶ 8:53 PM 2 comments

  A Short Manifesto The founding principle of this blog has always been that it's not about me, but about the books. That's a good principle, but as Nero Wolfe's sidekick Archie Goodwin says, "There are times when a principle should take a nap."

In the light of recent events, I cannot fail to say to each and every Republican in America, "You are damned to hell."

You thought you were so cute arranging the election of your puppet to the presidency. And you thought it was really funny when he created a vast pool of desperate unemployed people who would work for you without paid holidays or health insurance. I'm sure you chuckled all the way to the bank.

But your puppet has destroyed the hopes of all humanity for a decent world and you are responsible. The horror and destruction that the future will bring -- it's your fault.

The rape of an Iraqi teenager and the murder of her family, including her seven-year-old sister, that's your fault. You did it and Saint Peter, although he himself betrayed Jesus three times, will not waste two seconds on you. You betray Jesus every day in everything you do, contaminating the environment for your own gain and trampling the hopes of honest workers for a decent life.

Do you expect to blame it all on the slack-jawed moron you selected as your puppet? Everyone knows he has fewer brains than Alfred E. Newman. He's your man. He's doing your bidding and you will be held responsible.

Damn you to hell. I and all the decent people of America are your enemies forever.

You could try praying to the Lord, but it's way too late.  ¶ 10:08 PM 1 comments

  A Short Disquisition on the London Derrière There was a bit I wanted very much to put into my story on West Ireland, but it just didn't fit. It took too long to explain and as it turns out, I really didn't understand it myself at the time. But I've had a chance to think about it and like the trip, and the writing of the story, it involved a voyage of self-exploration.

Now I know that there are many fine people, in Boston and in Ireland and in many other places on this good Earth, who could live a long happy life without ever again hearing "The Londonderry Air" or, as it is more widely known, "Danny Boy." I am not one of them. My darling daughter is, though. She and her friends referred to the piece as the "London Derrière."

I also admit that I am a person of unsophisticated musical tastes, but I was a chorister at the age of eight and I have sung Mozart's "Ave Verum" and Palestrina's "In Monte Oliveti," so I have heard beautiful melodies.

The problem is, at least for a lot of people in America, that in our country this song has become a kind of tour de force for tenors who fancy that they have an exceptional set of pipes.

This has had unfortunate results, and I myself have come face to face with the very worst of it. I heard "Danny Boy" rendered by a New Hampshire State Senator who shall forever remain nameless. It is a woman's song and men have no business singing it.

That's why, when the singers at Bunratty Castle reached the end of their program, and we all knew it was coming, I was delighted when they invited their audience not to join in, and we heard "Danny Boy" sung by angelic womens' voices with a brilliant fiddler doing the fills.

It's a song about loss. It's about finding love in a sad and sorry world and then some guy starts honking on a pigskin in the next glen over and the one you love is taken from you forever and all you have left is the love.

It took me back to my boyhood in Boston, from which I am now forty years removed, in a town that celebrates all that is Irish, and to the culmination of that celebration when a bright young Irish lad became president of the United States.

Like most people in America and nearly everyone in Ireland, I loved this bright young president who called on each of us to do what we could do for our country.

And then he was shot dead in the street and no one in public life then or now seems to give a rat's ass who did it. With him died his dream, and Washington's dream and Lincoln's dream, of America as a powerful force for good in this world.

And all that's left is the love. That's the news from the GODFORSAKEN country of America which sends soldiers to other countries to commit rape and murder.  ¶ 9:46 PM 2 comments