Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 35

Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow

A giant snow storm is incoming. If you don't hear from me when you expect to starting tomorrow, I'm fine but have lost internet access.

Crestline is expecting 8 - 12 inches of snow! I have obtained plenty of wood and my generators are charged, so I will be quite cozy. My gas oven has electrical components so it doesn't work (even the burners) in a power outage, but I can cook on the woodburning stove in a pinch.

I do need to clean out the chicken coop and pile up new bedding today so they'll be cozy, get all the wood out of my car and park the car on the street so it doesn't get stranded, etc. In between clients, as I see them on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. (Wednesday this week being somewhat doubtful.)

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Biggles Defies the Swastika, by W. E. Johns

During WWII, Biggles is sent to Norway under a fake identity to map out possible airfields in case it gets invaded, on the understanding that he'll be pulled well before that could happen. He joins a private flying club so he has a reason to fly all around the country.

But one morning he wakes up in his hotel room to a strange lack of the usual morning noises. When he gets up to investigate, he finds that the streets are full of German troops. Norway has been invaded, and he's in the middle of it. I love the creeping "Something seems off" feeling, and it's evoked very well here.

I won't say more about the plot outside of a cut as it has so many delightful twists and turns and reversals, and it's more fun coming in cold.

This is one of the very best Biggles books, up there with Biggles Flies East - exciting, fun, well-plotted, and full of clever bits. If you like secret identities and people juggling multiple identities and going undercover and other forms of identity porn, this book is GREAT for it. Between that and some incredibly brazen bluffs Biggles pulls, the book has a bit of an early Vorkosigan novel feel. Algy particularly shines in this book, but Ginger is great too and even the minor characters are well-drawn. It's also, somewhat embarrassingly, excellent for Biggles/von Stalhein interaction.

Disclaimer so my ancestors don't rise from the grave and slap me so hard my head flies off: My headcanon for all WWII books is that von Stalhein was either a double agent during WWII or was secretly working with "let's murder Hitler" forces within Germany or both, believing that it was the only way to save Germany from itself. And then his handler dies or hangs him out to dry, his plots fail, and he ends up depressed and bitter and unable to ever go back. Honestly it would explain a lot. (Particularly in this book, actually.)

I'm okay with this as 1) I consider the Biggles/Worrals books similar to long-running comics canon in that there's enough weird inconsistencies that you can pick and choose your canon, 2) this series has a genuinely unique issue in that von Stalhein was introduced well before WWII happened in RL, written into the WWII books while the war was literally ongoing, vanished for the rest of the war while Johns clearly thought better of it and reappeared afterward in a different role while everyone decided to just forget that ever happened, 3) Johns himself was explicitly and very vocally anti-Nazi.

Anyway, below the cut you will learn all about how great this book is. Don't click if there's any chance you'll read it - it's really such a fun ride and best unspoiled.

( Read more... )

I'm happy to email an epub of this or any other Biggles book - just ask if you want one.

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The Bloody Red Baron by Kim Newman (DNF)

This is book two of Anno Dracula, a series of historical fantasy in which real and fictional characters of the time co-exist, and also there's vampires. (Much like Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.) I checked it out because philomytha and blackbentley tipped me off that it's bonkers and also Biggles appears.

Despite the utterly batshit content, the author's style is incredibly boring. IIRC I attempted to read Kim Newman once before and had the same problem. In fact it might have even been the first book of this series. But here's what I got in the first 20% or so:

- It's WWI and there's an incredible number of vampires. They are publicly known and accepted. Many pilots are vampires, including Biggles and his pals (which include Ginger and Bertie) and also basically every famous RL ace like the von Richthofen and Alfred Ball.

There are a huge number of pilots, there's no attempt at reminding readers of who they are, and they're mostly indistinguishable in terms of characterization. To be fair to Newman, I might have had an easier time if I wasn't jumping in at book two, but I don't think any of the pilots were in book one.

- Long, extremely boring explanation of how vampires caused WWI and everyone is vampires. All famous people, fictional or nonfictional, from vaguely this period are vampires. Winston Churchill is a vampire who sucks on a Madeira-spiked rabbit during a meeting. Mycroft Holmes is a vampire. Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand is a vampire. Etc.

- Von Stalhein (here called Stalhein) is an ace pilot in von Richthofen's squadron. They're all vampires. Some vampires can shapeshift which is apparently big in Richthofen's circus. One pilot has antlers even in human form because this is trendy. (????) (Is this practical for flying a triplane???)

Von Richthofen produces a small live wild boar to hunt INSIDE THE BUILDING and the vampires go nuts. He skewers it on his arm lengthwise because he has grown claws and waves it around like it's an opera glove he's wearing. I'm not sure how that even works as that suggests it's the size of a small dog, but that's pretty pathetic for the Red Baron to dramatically murder a piglet so it's presumably at least the size of a German Shepherd in which case it seems difficult to wave at the end of your arm. Probably I'm thinking this through more than Kim Newman did. Anyway, he throws it to the vampire pilots who rip it to shreds. Stalhein lurks in a corner and gnaws an ear.

I gave up at that point but apparently later Stalhein transforms into a moon-powered triplane.

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CandyHeartSex and Rare Femslash Art and Fic Recs

Art

Batman & Superman comics

Shadow and Light. Clark Kent & Bruce Wayne. Rated G.

A beautiful, moody painting with a fun theme. I especially love Clark's glasses.

A Game of Thrones

a foreign invasion. Yara Greyjoy/Ellaria Sand. Rated T.

Gorgeous, hot art of Yara and Ellaria kissing. It's mostly worksafe but you can see a nipple if you look closely, and I know I did.

Fic

The fic is mostly dependent on knowing canon, but you could read "Archie Meets Pavlov" and "Worrals Takes a Chance" without knowing more than the first is about very young male WWI pilots and the second is about very young female WWII pilots. They both very much have the feel of the canon, but with sex.

Biggles - W. E. Johns

Archie Meets Pavlov. 1527 words. Algy/Biggles. Rated M.

Biggles and Algy seize some opportunities in WWI. Very hot, very funny, and understatedly heartbreaking. It sounds exactly like the WWI stories if they were R-rated

Three Kisses. 1898 words. Algy/Ginger. Rated T.

What it says on the tin: three kisses across three time periods. Sweet, touching, tender.

A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin

Dreaming of Dragons. 1376 words. Rhaenys Targaryen (daughter of Rhaegar & Elia) & Balerion (cat) & Balerion (dragon). Rated G.

A beautiful, dreamy story in which Rhaenys has a gift that saves her.

Tillerman Cycle - Cynthia Voigt

remember me to one who lives there. Maybeth & her friends and family. 2455 words. Rated G.

A cleverly structured and beautifully detailed set of vignettes from Maybeth's life, with prose and concerns that are uncannily like Voigt's.

True Detective

True Colors. Marty & Rust. 771 word. Rated T.

An absolutely pitch-perfect funny-tragic vignette of synesthesia, barbecue, and bickering in a car.

Worrals - W. E. Johns

Worrals Takes a Chance. Frecks/Worrals.

A very funny and sweet get-together in a Canadian Swiss shack. Frecks' dialogue is particularly hilarious.

Let me know if you enjoyed anything!

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Sometimes I Lie, by Alice Feeney

sholio read a completely insane domestic thriller (that's the genre of Colleen Hoover's completely insane novel Verity), so I decided to check out a different book by the same author and see if it was equally bonkers.

For the first half, it was disappointingly tame. And then the WTF began!

This is the blurb:

My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me:
1. I’m in a coma.
2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore.
3. Sometimes I lie.

Given that, I went in assuming that everything was a lie and it would be something like Justine Larbalestier's Liar, in which by the end of the book I had no idea whether or not the protagonist was a werewolf, a murderer, pregnant, had some kind of genetic disease, had had sex with someone who was murderered, was in jail, or was in a mental hospital. I was also not sure whether any of the major events in the book actually happened. That was a very frustrating experience.

Sometimes I Lie is not like that. The narrator is wildly unreliable, but by the end of the book you do know what happened in the book.

It had three time tracks. In the present, the narrator, Amber Reynolds is in a coma in a hospital after a car crash. She can hear but not see or communicate. In the weeks leading up to the accident, we get a look at her life. The third track is a childhood diary from age ten.

This book is nuts. The first half is setup for the second half, which is a cascade of increasingly WTF twists. It's nonsensical but I can't say it's not entertaining, though I really could have done without the graphic rape.

A lot of the book consists of something happening, then for the narrator to reveal that it didn't really happen. Almost all of the twists were things that the narrator knew upfront, but didn't tell the reader or lied to the reader about. There's a handwavey suggestion that the narrator lies to herself, but basically it's the author being misleading rather than anything justified by the plot.

I have copied below my emailed liveblogging of the book. Contains spoilers for the entire book, all the way down to the completely insane final page.

( Read more... )

Content notes: Multiple rapes including an explicit on-page rape of a comatose woman. Stalking. Bullying. Abusive parents. Murder. Miscarriage. Fakeout implying that babies burn to death (they're fine actually.) Dead goldfish. (But the dog doesn't die.)

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Emergency Room, by Caroline Cooney

The book takes place over three hours in an ER in the ominously named The City, with chapters broken up among many points of view and labeled with their exact time. It's going for an Arthur Hailey/James Michener-esque epic in a very short space, and it does succeed in capturing that type of feel.

The characters we follow include a college student who's hit by a stray bullet in a gang shootout, a gangster who shows up at the ER to finish off the guy he shot on purpose, and a high school student who crashes a motorcycle. The characters I cared the most about are interestingly both there not for medical reasons but to escape their homes: a teenage mother of twins at the end of her rope, and an eight-year-old neglected child there who brought her younger siblings with her because there's air conditioning and crayons.

The main characters are a pair of aspiring medical students volunteering at the ER, Seth and Diana. Seth is humorless and arrogant. Diana is insecure and sharp-tongued. The book had other problems but they were one of the biggest. I neither liked nor cared about either of them.

The book was written in 1997 and you can tell, in good, bad, and historically interesting ways. An HIV positive baby is going to die, period. The City is a complete urban hellscape where it's dangerous to go outside because you WILL get shot... which is actually true of America to some degree, but it's described in a very 1997 way.

Cooney goes well out of her way to not be racist about what is essentially a racist trope, and succeeds to some extent (she has a multiracial cast of all sorts of people) but accidentally shines light on exactly how racist that trope is. I kept being brought up short by her gangsters being white (or at least some of them are, I forget), because they're described in a way that is pretty much always reserved for teenage Black gangsters. Calling it the City was a mistake, IMO; just inventing a city with a name would have worked better. The allegorical name clashes with the realistic details and also adds to the sense of "cities are terrifying hellscapes filled with scary people of color" except Cooney clearly doesn't agree with that part so she kept everything but that, highlighting how completely nonsensical the trope is - it has literally no basis beyond racism.

I was hoping this would be along the lines of Flight #116 is Down! and it kind of is, but it's nowhere near as good. It's not a failure by any means - it wants to tell an exciting and informative story about what a big-city ER is like - but that's all it is. It's a perfectly fine example of what it is, but Flight #116 is Down! is above and beyond what it is.

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Freeze Tag, by Caroline B. Cooney

The sun was going down like a circle of construction paper falling off a bulletin board. No longer the yellow bulb of daytime, it was a sinking orange half circle. Meghan yearned to run toward the sun and catch it before it vanished.

An unusual YA dark fantasy/understated horror novel, best read without knowing anything about it beyond the premise, which is that a creepy neglected girl in the neighborhood, Lannie, has a strange power.

Following Cooney's usual MO, this book is much better than it needs to be. Some of the writing is very beautiful, some is quite funny, and it's unexpectedly observant in unexpected ways. It shifts between various tight-third person POVs and an omniscient POV which points out truths about teenagers that only an adult would know. The worlds of the teenagers can be extremely petty and small, but they're simultaneously dealing with very big emotional issues and also life-or-death situations.

There's a remarkably well-done and delicate balance between very mundane daily life, unsettling horror, real moral dilemmas, and fantasy metaphors for real-life concerns. This book looks like throwaway horror, but it's much much more than that.

I went in knowing nothing but the premise, and that was a very good way to read it. I recommend it.

( Spoilers for the entire book. )

Content notes: There's nothing explicit or graphic, but the book is centrally about consent and violating consent, abuse in various forms (control, neglect, lack of love), and other emotionally difficult/complex topics. A dog probably dies.

I now feel like reading more Cooney. Any suggestions?

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The Guinea Pig Club: Stranger Than Fiction

My internet rabbit hole on pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe and the Guinea Pig Club (WWII aviators who were burned and got reconstructive surgery) produced a remarkable amount of !!! from Wikipedia alone. A number of them had distinctly "you can't make this shit up" lives. (There's also one who possibly did make some shit up.)

For your interest, I present some of my favorite bits.

I had a row with a German.

Tom Gleave

"Gleave was shot down on his first sortie after restoration of his command, on 31 August 1940, and badly burned. Initially treated at Orpington Hospital, he regained consciousness underneath a bed during an air raid. His wife was called to his bedside and asked the heavily bandaged Gleave "what on earth have you been doing with yourself?" "I had a row with a German" was his characteristically laconic reply."

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If you click through to just one article, make it this one.

Alois Šiška

This guy's story is incredible from beginning to end. Here's ONE section:

"Šiska was a member of an illegal cell through which he helped Jews and others escape to Poland and later to Hungary. He remained in the republic until the outbreak of war. At that time, fear grew that the Germans would discover a hidden prototype of the Z-XIII aircraft. In order not to fall into their hands, it was decided within the illegal group that the prototype must fly to the Balkans. However, this plan failed.

Together with Alois Bača, they fled across the frozen river Morava to Slovakia, then with the help of a Hungarian pastor, they crossed the Slovak-Hungarian border and continued by train to the border with Yugoslavia. There they were arrested by a Hungarian border guard and imprisoned in Hodmezövasárhely prison for several weeks. After a failed escape attempt, they were deported to the Citadella in Budapest.

Here they were held in harsh conditions together with another hundred and twenty Czechs and a similar number of Poles. An opportunity to escape did not come until 30 March 1940, when Šiška reported to the doctor suffering from scabies. He managed to escape his guards and took a taxi to the French consulate."

Now imagine that sequence of getting captured and imprisoned, then escaping repeating several more times, interspersed with a shipwreck, a lengthy life raft survival situation, and only escaping getting his feet amputated because he seemingly dropped dead.

This line in his Wikipedia entry caused me some confusion when I attempted to search for his memoir: Šiška authored the book No Response KX-B.

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The OTHER pilot who flew in combat with two prosthetic legs.

Colin Hodgkinson

This guy had both his legs amputated, then returned to being a fighter pilot! There were at least two men who did this during WWII.

"On 24 November 1943, during a high-altitude weather reconnaissance mission from 11.50, in Amiens area his oxygen supply failed 6 m E. of Hardelot, causing him to crash land in a field. He was dragged from his burning Spitfire by two farm workers, losing an artificial leg in the process. For the next 10 months he was held in Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp, before being repatriated and deemed "no further use to his country". He was again treated by McIndoe and he continued to fly until his release from service in 1946."

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On the bright side, a shell severed the control lever and the throttle got stuck on open.

Eric Lock

"On 8 November 1940 his Spitfire was badly damaged during a skirmish with several Bf 109s over Beachy Head in East Sussex. The Spitfire was so badly damaged that Lock crash-landed in a ploughed field, but was able to walk away. On 17 November 1940 No. 41 Squadron attacked a formation of 70 Bf 109s that were top cover for a bomber raid on London. After shooting down one Bf 109, and setting another on fire, Lock's Spitfire was hit by a volley of cannon shells, which severely injured Lock's right arm and both legs.

The rounds also knocked the throttle permanently open by severing the control lever. The open throttle enabled the Spitfire to accelerate swiftly to 400 mph, leaving the Bf 109s in his wake, without Lock having to attempt to operate it with his injured right arm.

At 20,000 feet (6,100 m) he began to descend and with little control and no means of slowing the fighter down, he could not execute a safe landing; being too badly injured to parachute to safety, Lock was in a perilous situation. After losing height to 2,000 feet (610 m), Lock switched the engine off and found a suitable crash site near RAF Martlesham Heath, Suffolk, into which he glided the stricken fighter for a "wheels down" landing.

Lying in the aircraft for some two hours, he was found by two patrolling British Army soldiers and carried two miles (3 km) on an improvised stretcher made of their Enfield rifles and Army issue winter coats—made after instruction from Lock. By this point, Lock had lost so much blood that he was unconscious, and so unable to feel the additional pain of being dropped three times, once into a dyke of water."

Like the war wasn't bad enough.

Jackie Mann.

"Jackie Mann, CBE, DFM was a Royal Air Force fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, who in later life was kidnapped by Islamists in Lebanon in May 1989 and held hostage for more than two years."

A single swipe of a spade.

Richard Pape

"He became a sergeant navigator in a Short Stirling bomber. On a 1941 mission he was shot down close to the German/Dutch border, was twice captured and twice escaped. Following his second capture he was tortured by the Gestapo. He was repatriated by the Germans on health grounds in 1944.

In November of that year he was on a retraining course when he was burnt in a drunken motorcycle accident on the Isle of Man, which led to his being hospitalised at Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, for pioneer plastic surgery under Archibald McIndoe: he thus became a member of the Guinea Pig Club."

Also, he was mad at the Beatles.

An Amazon review of his book: Time and time again I thought that what I was reading did not have a ring of truth about it, and in some cases the account was simply unbelievable. A good example of the latter is a story of a fight between two prisoners where one cuts off the other's head with a single swipe of a spade.

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Wait for the last line.

Mollie Lentaigne was not a member of the club herself, but a nurse and artist on the medical staff.

"Lentaigne worked as a Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, West Sussex, where her duties included drawing the experimental operations of Archibald McIndoe and his fellow surgeons. She needed to work quickly in the operating theatre and so used pencil but subsequently added ink and colour to some of her work.

Around 300 of Lentaigne's drawings have been preserved at the East Grinstead Museum, as the Mollie Lentaigne Collection. After the surviving Guinea Pig Club members used social media to search for Lentaigne and found her living in Zimbabwe, she returned to East Grinstead in 2013 to be reunited with her work."

She was 93 at the time, and is still alive at the age of 103.

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Shot Down in Flames: A World War II Fighter Pilot's Remarkable Tale of Survival, by Geoffrey Page

In the bar we practiced the noble art of medicine. We knew the sickness and the remedy. "Ailment - death of a close friend or companion: remedy - wash the brain wound well with alcohol until the infected area becomes numb to the touch. Continue the treatment until the wound closes. A scar will remain, but this will not show after a while.

Another fighter pilot's memoir! This one is from WWII. He was shot down and badly burned, had his hands and face reconstructed by pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe, became a member of the Guinea Pig Club where he knew Richard Hillary, goes back to being a pilot, vows to bring down fifteen planes for each of his fifteen surgeries, does it, breaks his back in another crash, is sent back to McIndoe for treatment for that, and finally becomes a test pilot right in time for the war to end. No one can say this guy had an uneventful life.

Heartbreakingly, McIndoe didn't want to certify either Page or Hillary as fit to return to duty; he spent so much time getting to know them and putting them back together, he didn't want to give them his stamp of approval to go back and most likely be killed.

One thing puzzled me. Page writes that when Hillary died in a training accident, some people thought it was suicide, but Page believed there was no way Hillary would have killed his observer along with himself. Enigmatically, he writes that he knew Hillary and he knows why he crashed. But he doesn't say why. Anyone have any idea what was up with that?

Another minor bit that I found interesting was a funny anecdote in which he meets two beautiful young women at a party and mentions that he needs to find a place to crash. They invite him to come home with them. He eagerly accepts, thinking he's in for a threesome, but is disappointed when they show him to a bedroom and close the door. In fact, he writes, they were lesbians and very much in love. I mention this because it's an incident from the middle of WWII, in which two women were living together, it was known at least within their friend circle that they were lesbians, and it was no big deal - the joke here was very much on Page and his assumptions.

Page is a very good writer for the most part, and writes with equal vividness of flying, of combat, and of his hospital experience. If von Richthofen's memoir was emotionally one-note, this was the remedy: Page details the rage, fear, camaraderie, grief, joy, bloodlust, revenge, lust, humor, and exhaustion that was his war experience. Of course he had the benefit of hindsight, as this was written well after the war ended.

I've meant to read this since 2018, when I read Hillary's memoir followed by a much more dry account of The Guinea Pig's Club. Better late than never!

The end trails off into somewhat random anecdotes about his postwar job experiences, but other than that, this is an excellent book. Recommended.

This prompted me to take a deep dive into the Guinea Pig Club. The Wikipedia entry is now way more useful than the last time I checked, providing a complete list of memoirs by members, many still available (though not the one with the deadpan or perhaps merely factual title I Burned My Fingers), and also a list of pages of individual members. The latter is a trip and I will post some of my findings tomorrow.

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The Red Baron, by Manfred von Richthofen

My opponent fell, shot through the head, one hundred and fifty feet behind our line. His machine gun was dug out of the ground and it ornaments the entrance to my dwelling.

The memoir of the Red Baron himself, the greatest flying ace of WWI, with 80 planes shot down. He painted his plane red, and the pilots in his squadron also painted theirs, so they were known as the flying circus. (If you thought clowns were scary...) He won a ton of medals, was a celebrity at the time, ordered trophy cups to be made for himself to commemorate his victories, and collected bits of the planes he shot down to decorate his room.

He was shot in the head while flying, but returned to duty with a bandage covering a wound that exposed his skull. At the age of 25 he was shot through the heart, probably by an Australian rifleman, while chasing a very inexperienced Canadian pilot.

Von Richthofen's memoir is quite short. It recounts his early life and how he began in the cavalry and then became an observer before becoming a fighter pilot. There's some good anecdotes of funny occurrences and snapshot portraits of other pilots, plus some dog stories which remarkably do not all end tragically. He endearingly refers to another pilot's dog as "doggie" and to his own enormous hound as "my lap-dog." (Given that, he might have been more amused than offended by Snoopy's battles with the Red Baron.)

He wasn't a good pilot immediately, and struggled with it early on. He's very dismissive of acrobatics and says that courage and a cool head is much more important than being a fancy flyer or even a good shot, noting that Boelke was a terrible shot on the ground but a master in the air. The bright, individually painted planes of his circus wasn't done as a showoff or intimidation tactic (though it definitely became the latter) but because you can't camouflage a plane in the air anyway, so it made more sense for his squadron to be individually recognizable to each other as they knew each other's strengths and weaknesses, and could make use of that when fighting.

But most of the book goes basically like this: "I bagged an Englishman today. He was my 33rd. I was very happy. I ordered a silver trophy cup to commemorate it, and I took the aeroplane's serial number and put it up in my bedroom."

He was an enthusiastic hunter, and he writes about combat exactly as if he was writing about hunting animals for sport. It's especially noticeable because he enjoys hunting on his days off, so you get an account of shooting a bison and an account of shooting a man and they're identical in all but the details.

He doesn't hate his enemies, and he respects the ones who fight well. When he lands beside a plane he downed where both pilot and observer are uninjured, he's pleased to be able to talk with them. (The best hunters respect their prey and appreciate their qualities even as they stalk them.)

I've read war memoirs where people take trophies, enjoy the adrenaline rush of combat, or find war an overall good and rewarding experience--that's all pretty common--and I've read a couple, mostly by colonial-era Englishmen, who find war a tremendously fun game. But I've never read anything quite like this. It's like "The Most Dangerous Game" from the point of view of the hunters, and it takes the cake for the creepiest war memoir I have ever read.

The context for its writing is that the German government asked him to write it as propaganda. They sent him a stenographer and had him talk to her. She took down his stories, which were edited into a manuscript and apparently heavily censored. And I read it in translation. So that's already at least three layers of distance and distortion between whatever von Richthofen actually said, let alone what he actually thought, and what I read. I'd be very curious to hear from anyone who read it in the original German, because with a translation I always wonder about accuracy and tone.

If the war hadn't happened, I don't think he'd have become a serial killer; he doesn't like hunting humans more than he likes hunting animals, just equally. (For me, that made it more chilling rather than less. And also, I have read a lot of war memoirs, and this is the first one I've read where that thought even crossed my mind.) I think he'd have been your basic rich kid who spends his life hunting and playing sports, and is admired within his circle of similar friends. But the war did happen, and so his particular attributes made him ideally suited, useful, valuable, and remembered.

Von Richthofen wrote an essay about a year afterward, which is included in some editions, in which he says he regrets the "insolent" tone of his memoir and isn't finding war quite as fun anymore. I wonder how he would have felt about it all if he'd survived the war, but considering Germany's next war effort, probably it's just as well he didn't.

On the other hand, people don't change until they do. The war memoir I've read that's closest in tone to this one was Lahore to Lucknow by Arthur Lang, by an English officer in India during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. It was his private diary, not intended for publication and only discovered after his death. To him, it's all a wonderful, thrilling game.

It continues in this tone right up until literally the last two pages, in which his best friend is caught in an accidental explosion and is horrifically burned but stays conscious. Lang remains with him until he dies that night. The last diary entry is a eulogy concluding by saying that his death ruined his enjoyment of the entire war. A postscript says that Lang became a public works engineer, and spent the rest of his life building roads in India.

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