Wholesome History Reads Group discussion
What I'm Reading
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Escapees, of whom there were many - pursued by bounty-hunting natives, and facing illimitable distances, dark forests, wide rivers, rapids, swamps, trackless wastes, and killing frosts - had little chance to survive. Peasants often placed conciliatory offerings of bread, milk, or soup on the windowsills of their huts, but inevitably "during the spring thaw," wrote one nineteenth-century traveler, "when the snow commences to melt, a large number of corpses of 'unknown persons' are found in the forests ... And this is so common the people call them 'podsnieshniks' or 'snowflowers'."
East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia by Benson Bobrick
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"In between, bounty-hunting Buryats were willing for a few pounds of flour to hunt escapees down like 'vermin,' and on the lower Amur Gilyaks brought them in for three rubles a head. 'If you shoot a squirrel, you get only his skin,' one told a traveler, 'but if you shoot a varnak you get his skin and his clothing, too'."
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"Wayfarers made easy targets, and the byroads of Siberia were strewn with the bodies of those who had been assaulted, robbed, murdered, or raped. Occasionally, major highways and even cities came under bold attack. The road between Tomsk and Achinsk was especially dangerous, and some areas had to be patrolled by mounted police. In February 1886, Tomsk itself was 'terrorized by a band of criminals who had made a practice of riding through the city in sleighs at night and catching belated wayfarers with sharp grappling hooks.' In Eastern Siberia, desperadoes became such a wide-spread menace the government offered a bounty of three rubles for each one dead or alive. Peasants made no allowance for their predations, large or small. In the Marinsk district east of Tomsk, for example, when a thief was caught, ground glass was forced into his eyes."
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"Three centuries after the town bell of Uglich had been exiled, it received an imperial pardon, on May 20, 1892. Reconsecrated and repaired, it was duly restored to its original abode, where, we are told, 'the people lines the piers and river embankment to give a rousing welcome to the steamer that was bringing the alarm bell home. The bell was placed on special stretchers and borne into the city to the loud cheers of the crowd. The city's dignitaries stood as a guard of honor over the bell till the following morning, when in the presence of five thousand fellow townsmen, the sexton rang it'."
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"Under the Russians, digging up mammoths became a kind of heavy industry, and between 1650 and 1900 the tusks of an estimated 40,750 mammoths (each tusk weighing from 150 to 200 pounds) were taken out of Siberia. Between 1825 and 1831, the annual shipment exceeded 60,000 pounds as great quantities of fossil ivory were collected with each summer's thaw from crumbling embankments along the Arctic coast, and especially from two islands in the New Siberian group, known as the 'isles of bones'. On the international market, Russian ivory, as it was called, competed successfully with that from Africa, India and Ceylon."
The mammoth ivory trade:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/201...
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"The Orthodox enthusiasm for icons was also emulated by the half-converted natives in a worship of graven images of any kind. In one hut near Anadyrsk, for example, a portrait cut from Harper's Weekly was posted up in a corner and adored as a Russian saint. 'A gilded candle was burning before his smoky features,' writes Kennan, 'and every night and morning a dozen natives said their prayers to a major-general in the United States Army.' In another hut he found the walls transformed into a kind of secular iconostasis with cut-outs from the Illustrated London News."
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Ex-cons were also pervasive among the hired help. At Akatui, the warden was waited upon by a chambermaid who had split her husband's skull in two, and when a quest expressed unease, he explained: "But I always employ assassins. They make far better servants than thieves. My 'Yamshchik' [driver] is also a murderer."
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"The seatless, springless carts in which wayfarers were customarily obliged to travel (with their knees squeezed up to mitigate the joint-wrenching jolts) were notoriously uncomfortable, and even the stalwart Kennan found traveling by telega, as such vehicles were called, almost too much for him. 'On a bad, rough road,' he wrote, it 'will simply jolt a man's soul out in less than twenty-four hours. Before we had travelled sixty miles ... I was so exhausted that I could hardly sit upright; my head and spine ached so violently, and had become so sensitive to shock, that every jolt was as painful as a blow from a club'."
East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia by Benson Bobrick
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"Extending eventually 5,500 miles through seven time zones from Chelyabinsk in the Urals to Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan, the Trans-Siberian Railway was destined to be by far the longest railway in the world."
I have this unread book on the subject as well:
To The Edge Of The World by Christian Wolmar
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"He robbed banks, pillaged villages, plundered passing trains for supplies, and on one occasion allowed a subordinate to shoot ten boxcars full of prisoners just to show that 'shootings can be carried out on Sunday as well as any other day.' By his own admission, he couldn't sleep at night unless he had killed someone during the day."
Grigory Semyenov:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory...
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"Stalin's economic 'pilot project' had been the building of the Baltic- White Sea Canal, where between 1931 and 1933, 250,000 prisoners had labored on a 168-mile-long strategic waterway to join the lakes of Soviet Karelia by canals to link the White and Baltic seas. In order to hoard its hard currency, the government decided to build the canal by hand. Pile drivers, normally powered by steam, were driven by people, forced into giant human treadmills; food was rationed according to output; cold and hunger killed up to seven hundred a day. Anyone trying to escape was shot. By the time it opened in August 1933, it had cost over sixty thousand lives."
The Baltic- White Sea Canal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_S...
Some interesting photos from the Gulag:
http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexh...
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"The plain threat of starvation, that is, became the main incentive to productivity; at the same time, it deliberately led by stages through ever lower levels of nutrition (since to work well you have to have strength) to progressive debilitation and death. Everyone suffered from deficiency diseases like scurvy and pellagra, from undernourishment, swelling of the feet, face, and eventually the abdomen, and in the northern camps, from frostbite and gangrene. To keep the system going, these laborers had to be replaced. As one camp doctor told a victim in 1949: 'You are not brought her to live but to suffer and die ... if you live ... it means that you are guilty of one of two things: either you worked less than was assigned you of you ate more than was your proper due'."
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"Under the tsars, moreover, the death penalty had been an exceptional measure, and even between 1876 and 1904, when revolutionary terrorism was at its height, only 486 people were executed, or an average of 17 per year, including criminals. From 1905 to 1908, the number dramatically increased to 45 a month, but was as nothing compared to what ensured. After the Bolsheviks took power, by 1938 the annual average reached 28,000 or more. And 'by early 1939,' one historian tells us, 'at least one in 20 of the population had been arrested; some 8 million were being held in prisons and camps, where 90 percent of them would die. Two million inmates had already died in the previous two years, not counting another million that had been executed.' In just one camp cluster during the year of the Great Terror, fifty thousand prisoners were 'tied up with wire like logs, stacked in trucks, driven out to a selected area, and shot.' Prisoners were also shot to 'check epidemics'; other herded into barges and sunk in the Arctic seas."
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"Although the region's forbidding cold and isolation clearly rendered the area unfit for ordinary human habitation, in 1935 the NKVD marked off a square of polar tundra for a camp, arrested several hundred mining engineers to supply the requisite technical personnel (sine almost no one would go there voluntarily), a few doctors to look after them, arbitrarily charged them all with sabotage and sentenced them to ten years. In the summer of 1936, the first five thousand convicts (selected for youth and strength of constitution) were shipped up the Yenisey with tools, food and tents."
Grim reading Rick, it sounds like you quite enjoyed that one. Thanks for all the posts. Is it worth a look?
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"Starvation drove prisoners to eat the rotting corpses of animals, lubricating grease, or 'Iceland-moss, like deer.' Those unable to march to work themselves were dragged there on sledges by their compatriots, and those who lagged behind were beaten with clubs and torn by dogs. Although working in -50 degrees Fahrenheit, 'they were forbidden even to warm themselves by a fire.' One prisoners who worked as a nurse in the prison hospital in Magadan remembers that the surgeon routinely went down the line of cots snipping off the frostbitten fingers and toes."
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"In 1942, camp authorities got sacks of vitiated white floor, cartons of Spam, and a huge new bulldozer from the United States courtesy of the 'Lend-Lease' program extended to Russia during World War II by the Allies. The flour and Spam (served up in infinitesimal quantities) scarcely improved the prison diet, and was additionally resented as tasteless. But the barrel of American machine grease for the bulldozer, wrote Varlam Shalamov, an inmate, was 'immediately attacked by a crowd of starving men who knocked out the bottom on the spot with a stone.' The first thing the American bulldozer was used for was to dig a mass grave."
Thanks for sharing those excerpts, Aussie Rick. Did your book include any detail on the exploits of the Czecho-Slovak Legion in the First World War? I think it's one of the most fascinating events I've read about in history.
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I am currently reading
A History Of The Czechs And Slovaks by Robert William Seton-Watson.This book was first published in 1943. The author was an expert in Central European history, and was an important adviser to the British government in the First World War and in the peace treaties that followed. The book is a general survey of Czech and Slovak (though mostly Czech) history, beginning in the seventh century, though very quickly progressing through the early history until the Medieval period. I've read up until the World War I and have learned a great deal. Unfortunately, in the United States, we learn nothing about the history of the Czechs even when it has a large impact on the greater world (as in the Hussite Wars). Below, I'll share some of the most interesting excerpts.
The Thirty Years War is often regarded as a tragic period for Germany, and rightly so, for armies ravaged and pillaged the various German estates with impunity for years on end. Yet, little thought is given to the lands of neighboring Bohemia. Seton-Watson writes that,
It would be hard to exaggerate the state of misery and prostration in which Bohemia found herself at the conclusion of peace...Historians such as Gindely and Huber have estimated that her population had fallen from three million to 800,000; another version is from 2.5 million to 700,000. In 1618 the number of landed peasant families in Bohemia was reckoned at 150,000; in 1645 the Estates reported to the Crown that their number was only 30,000...Although the ancient Czech nobility and gentry had been almost rooted out, and replaced by crowds of foreign favourites and military adventurers, although the peasantry had sunk still further in the scale and lost the last semblance of liberty, and although all creeds save one had been strenuously rooted out, it is sometimes argued that the profoundest change of all was wrought in the towns. The ruin worked by expulsion, persecution, plunder, fire and plague is well illustrated by the fact that in Brno out of 1,356 houses 928 were in ruins, and 260 half-destroyed, in Königgrätz (Králové Hradec) 495 in ruins and only 495 inhabitated, in Komotau only 139 out of 545 inhabited. Olomouc, which had 30,000 inhabitants in 1630, only had 1,675 left in 1650. (130)
The war was just as disastrous for Bohemia’s political standing. For the next three centuries they remained a powerless subject of the Habsburg Empire.
To sum of the situation, within a few years of the [battle of] White Mountain Bohemia was bound helplessly to the Habsburg war chariot, and exploited in the interests of absolutism and militant Catholicism; so militant as to frighten a Roman pontiff and a French cardinal, Urban VIII and Richelieu, into giving political support to the Protestant North. Moreover, the broad outlines of these events may help is to an understanding of our own times; for it is no exaggeration to say that just as the seizure of Czechoslovakia opened up to Hitler the path of strategic ascendancy in Europe, so the collapse of Bohemia in 1620 turned the scale in favour of Ferdinand and the Counter-Reformation, as against the Protestant Union, drove Protestantism on to the defensive and infinitely prolonged the struggle.
These years provide eloquent testimony to Bismarck’s famous definition of Bohemia as a fortress whose possession meant the mastery of Central Europe. (117)
To make matters worse, the Czechs were now subjected to a ruthless process of religious persecution as Emperor Ferdinand II and the Jesuits did their best to eradicate Protestantism from Bohemia.
Forced conversion on a large scale were supplemented by the wholesale destruction of books in the vernacular (but also of many German books, for the German districts of Homeia had been quite as strongly infected by heresy as the Czech.), and by the insidious institution of confession registers. (131)
Bohemia also suffered greatly during the wars in the mid-eighteenth century: the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War. Here's another excerpt:Professor Kerner has shown more clearly than earlier writers the extent of Bohemia’s sufferings in this war. Summing up her financial history, he points out that ‘Bohemia, of all the Lands, was most devastated by military expeditions, yet at the same time paid into the coffers of the Treasury the largest sums of any state belonging to the monarchy. Besides carrying between 32 and 49% of the ordinary public revenue of the Monarchy, Bohemia alone contributed four times as much as all the Hungarian lands, and if both the ordinary and extraordinary war revenues were counted, it contributed between 20 and 40% more than the Netherlands, the next richest source of revenue. Such facts are astounding. They also account for the famine and misery and commercial depression which came upon Bohemia after the war.’ Bohemia, it should be borne in mind, was then one-quarter the size of Hungary, with only one-third of the latter’s population, and yet throughout the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century contributed infinitely more both in money and recruits. (147)
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For God and Kaiser: The Imperial Austrian Army, 1619-1918 by Richard Bassett
'Aussie Rick' wrote: "All very interesting periods of history mentioned there Elliot. I am sure you may enjoy reading; "For God and Kaiser: The Imperial Austrian Army, 1619-1918" by Richard Bassett which I think you hav..."Yes, I would definitely like to read that book, though I fear it might be difficult to find a copy.
One of my reading goals for the year it's to read three trilogies during 2020; I finished the first, James Holland's Mediterranean trilogy, tonight. My review of
Italy's Sorrow A Year Of War, 1944 45 is up here:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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The history of the Slovaks is quite separate from that of the Czechs, despite their linguistic similarities. Seton-Watson spent the first 250 pages on Czech history up to the First World War, and then devoted a chapter to Slovak history. He moves quickly through the early history and focuses mostly on the period in the 19th century under the Dual-Monarchy and the Hungarian oppression. In the law courts very concrete linguistic rights were assured to the non-Magyars. But in 1868 the whole judicial system of Hungary was already under consideration, and two years later was completely revised by a new law, from which all the rights laid down in the Law of Nationalities were bodily omitted, in utter defiance of non-Magyar protests. Henceforward the proceedings of all courts of first, second or final instance were conducted exclusively in the Magyar language, and the official interpreters, when provided, were no longer provided gratis, as originally laid down. The Slovak leader, Father Hlinka, raised an outcry throughout Hungary when in 1906, in defending himself before a chauvinistic Magyar jury court, he declared that the Slovak peasant stood like an ox before the courts of his native land; he was stating but the bare truth, and therein lay his main crime. It was specially laid down that the high administrative posts of High Sheriff and Vice-Sheriff…should be filled by non-Magyars in non-Magyar counties; but though the Roumanians and Slovaks respectively formed a majority varying from 66 to 96% in eleven and seven counties, not a single non-Magyar was ever appointed to such an office during the Dualist era.
Still more glaring was the educational situation. By article 17 of Law XLIV it was laid down in theory that ‘all citizens of whatever nationality living together in considerable numbers shall be able in the neighbourhood of their homes to obtain instruction in their mother-tongue, up to the point where the highest academic culture begins.’ In actual fact, throughout the Dualist period the entire state school system was Magyarized, and not a single state school, primary or secondary, was provided for non-Magyars; while parallel with this went the deliberate tendency to reduce wherever possible the scanty number of denominational schools on which alone the non-Magyar depended for instruction in the mother-tongue. In actual fact, from 1875 to 1918 the Slovaks were entirely without secondary schools, the Ruthenes in Hungary never possessed one at all…The case of the Slovaks was, however, more than usually crass, since not merely the three gymnasia which they themselves had erected at great sacrifice were dissolved, but between 1869 and 1911 their primary schools were reduced, by a deliberate government policy, from 1921 to 440! (268)
Regarding electoral oppression,
Above all, the predominance secured to the ruling class [in Hungary] by a narrow franchise, was still further entrenched by the maintenance of open voting instead of the ballot, by an elaborate system of ‘electoral geometry’ (with only one polling booth in each constituency), and by corruption and intimidation on a grand scale. It often happened that votes of dead men were recorded, votes were deliberately credited to the wrong candidate or conveniently ‘lost’; candidates were disqualified on the flimsiest of pretexts, sometimes even expelled from the constituency or placed under arrest until all was over. The whole administrative apparatus was placed at the disposal of the Government candidates—military cordons being drawn to keep obnoxious voters from the poll, or roads being suddenly closed, or veterinary restrictions imposed. At the general elections of 1896 the casualties were 32 killed and 70 wounded, in 1901 (despite the new lay against corrupt and illegal practices) 7 killed and 19 wounded; in 1910 there were fewer casualties for the excellent reason that, according to official admissions in the Parliaments of Budapest and Vienna, ‘only 194 battalions of infantry and 114 squadrons of cavalry were employed to enforce the Government party’s will. [If battalion and squadron be reckoned at 600 and 500 men on a peace footing, that means 173,000 men.] (269-270)
And finally,
Meanwhile the key to political events lay in the backward agricultural and industrial conditions of Hungary, giving increased power to the feudal magnate class, sealing the decay of the gentry, and incidentally promoting the rise of the Jewish capitalist, advocate and intellectual. At the turn of the century there was a floating agricultural population of one and a half millions, badly housed, wretchedly paid—earning even in summer on an average only two to two and a half crowns a day (1s. 6d. to 1s. 9d.), often for a working day of sixteen hours—ravaged by alcohol in the mountain districts…and by tuberculosis even in the rich wheat lands of the south…
The acute unrest was reflected in the gigantic emigration figures of this period. Before 1898 emigration had averaged 25,000 a year; in 1901 it reached 71,000, in 1903 119,000, in 1905 170,000 (including 43,000 women), and in 1907 203,000 out of a total population of 19,000,000. The stringent emigration laws of 1903 and 1908 proved quite unavailing to check either the flow of emigrants, who were almost exclusively peasants, or their shocking exploitation by the big shipping companies and the Jewish touts and agents.
…If politically the Middle Ages did not end in Hungary till 1848, it might quite plausibly be argued that economically they continued till 1918. The phrase ‘Extra Hungariam non est vita [There is no life outside Hungary]’ made its appeal to the ruling class, and the cynic was amply entitled to add, ‘aut si vita, non est ita [if there is, it is not like it].’ It was in this strange world, hitherto so isolated from the major currents of European affairs, that the Slovaks were still living; and it is essential to an understanding of the subsequent narrative to realize the extreme difference of milieu between Slovaks and Czechs, the extent to which the Czechs had in the last century before the war repaired their own backwardness under the more enlightened rule of Austria, and above all the fact that the Czechs were free to go forward at a growing pace, while the Slovaks were falling behind in the race, if not actually beginning to go backwards. (280)
Yesterday I finished reading A History Of The Czechs And Slovaks by Robert William Seton-Watson. I learned a lot from this book, and it also sparked my interest in some of the authors other books.Here is my review (warning, it is very long):
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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Thanks Elliott. I'm sneaking in a quick read of
Black Tulip: The Life and Myth of Erich Hartmann, the World's Top Fighter AceVery interesting premise, hopefully the author can carry through with his thesis.
Well, that didn't take long. I really enjoyed it, it was a nice challenge to preconceptions and the accepted thread. There are a few thoughts in my usual rambling style here:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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Well, it's a bit of an odd time so I thought I could maybe gain a little solace from the trials of the past... giving
The Scourging Angel: The Black Death in the British Islesa run through. Probably not for laughs though.
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The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, The Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly
I am nearly finished with the book 
Czechs & Germans: A Study Of The Struggle In The Historic Provinces Of Bohemia And Moravia by Elizabeth Wiskemann.Here is an amusing and revealing episode which takes place in the Austrian Reichsrat (parliament) in 1861. I hope it is entertaining even without the full context. One of the German members had attacked a policy of Czech nationalists, claiming that the Czechs “were trying to intoxicate the masses. In response, the Czech deputy, Rieger, said,
‘We know that it is as difficult for nations as for individuals to be as just towards others as towards themselves. We have certainly found it to be so with the Germans and we still repeat this sad experience every day.’ At this point the President of the chamber, Hein, a Silesian German, called him to order and requested him to resume his seat. Rieger, protesting, said, “I appeal to the House—have I said anything insulting?’ whereupon Hein told him that what he had said was certainly insulting to the German nation, and was cheered from the left where the German Liberals sat. Rieger declared at once that he had had no such intention and was allowed to speak again. ‘I will say no more about the national question,’ he continued, ‘since I see that freedom of speech is fettered here.’ Hein immediately broke in again requesting him to sit down since he had accused the President of suppressing freedom of speech. Rieger, in a voice of thunder, cried out, ‘Long live the freedom of speech which prevails in the Austrian Reichsrat!’ and was finally compelled to sit down. In such circumstances it is not altogether surprising that the Czechs withdrew from the Parliament in Vienna in 1863, and did not reappear until in 1879 a new era had evidently dawned. (32)
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[book:Czechs & Germans: A Study Of The Struggle I..."Very funny story Elliot, things haven't change that much in some current parliament's around the world today!
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"The early winter months of 1316 brought more suffering. As food grew costlier, people ate bird dung, family pets, mildewed wheat, corn and finally in desperation, they ate one another. In Ireland, where the thud of shovels and the tearing of flesh from bone echoed through the dark, wet nights, the starving 'extracted bodies of the dead from the cemeteries and dug out the flesh from their skulls and ate it.' In England, where they consider the Irish indecorous, only prisoners ate one another. 'Incarcerated thieves,' wrote the monk John de Trokelowe, ' ... devoured each other when they were half alive.' As the hunger intensified, the unspeakable became spoken about. 'Certain people ... because of excessive hunger devoured their own children,' wrote a German monk; another contemporary reported, 'In many places, parents, after slaying their children, and children their parents, devoured the remains'."
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, The Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly
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Dead rats in the east,
Dead rats in the west!
As if they were tigers,
Indeed are the people scared.
A few days following the deaths of the rats,
Men pass away like falling walls!
Deaths in one day are numberless,
The hazy sun is covered by sombre clouds.
While three men are walking together,
Two drop dead within ten steps!
People die in the night,
Nobody dares weep over the dead!
The coming of the demon of pestilence
Suddenly makes the lamp go dim,
Then it is blown out,
Leaving man, ghost, and corpse in the dark room.
The crows caw incessantly,
The dogs howl bitterly!
Man and ghost are one,
While the spirit is taken for a human being!
The land is filled with human bones,
There in the fields are crops,
To be reaped by none;
And the officials collect no tax!
I hope to ride on a firey dragon
To see the God and Goddess in heaven,
Begging them to spread heavenly milk,
And make the dead come to life again.
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"I has been estimated that two black rats breeding continuously for three years could produce 329 million offspring, as long as no offspring died and all were paired (fortunately, all very big ifs)."
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, The Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly
'Aussie Rick' wrote: "How about this bit of information from the book; "The Great Mortality":"I has been estimated that two black rats breeding continuously for three years could produce 329 million offspring, as long..."
Yikes! That reminds me of some math problems I did in high-school about the exponential growth of rabits.
Yesterday I finished reading
Czechs & Germans: A Study Of The Struggle In The Historic Provinces Of Bohemia And Moravia by Elizabeth WiskemannThis book is primarily a case study of the ethnic Germans who were living in Czechoslovakia between the two world wars. I thought the book was a very thorough and objective account of such a heated subject (at the time). Here is my review, though I had some difficulty expressing my thoughts well. I hope it is coherent as it is:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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[book:Czechs & Germans: A Study Of The Struggle In The H..."A very detailed and informative review Elliot, thanks for sharing your thoughts on the book with the rest of the group.
'Aussie Rick' wrote: "How about this bit of information from the book; "The Great Mortality":"I has been estimated that two black rats breeding continuously for three years could produce 329 million offspring, as long..."
Busy little monsters, aren't they?
The Scourging Angel: The Black Death in the British Isles starts with the Battle of Neville's Cross (not too far to the south, at Durham), where the Scots were defeated by a force from Northumberland and County Durham. I particularly enjoyed this description of the aftermath of the battle:
"As the light faded, the monks returned to the priory with their miraculous shroud, [of St. Cuthbert] which had, (at least for now) protected them from financial ruin. Survivors rifled through the remains of the fallen,whilst prisoners were led away. Among them was King David, found hiding in the River Browney, under a bridge, by a Northumbrian yeoman named John Copeland. (Pugnacious to the last, David knocked out two of Copeland's front teeth in a final effort to avoid capture). William Douglas, too, had been apprehended, seized while trying to escape back north. It was left to Henry Percy to find safe captivity for this prize prisoner. The best he could do was to haul him off to Tynemouth Priory, arriving well after dark, where Henry was assured a good welcome: the Percys had given generously to the monastery and Prior Thomas was Henry's confessor. Greeting the weary band in person, Thomas de la Mare cut a handsome figure against Douglas's gashed, muddy and exhausted frame. Prior Thomas took them all inside, where a table had been prepared. Two days earlier the Scot had ordered de la Mare to have breakfast ready for him: Douglas was a little late but the Prior delighted in serving the Scot nonetheless, telling him that he could not have come in more desirable a manner. Douglas could be forgiven for his grudging response, for how the Englishman's sarcasm must have stuck in the proud Scot's throat."
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Lake Nyos, in northwest Cameroon, 1986:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obsc...
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"Soon Messina, like Constantinople, became two cities, the city of the infected - a municipality of pain and despair - and the city of the uninfected, where fear and hate ruled. 'The disease bred such loathing,' says Friar Michele, 'that if a son fell ill ... his father flatly refused to stay with him.' That autumn many in Messina died, not only absent the consolation of a parent or a child, but without a priest to hear confession or a notary to make out a will. Only Messina's animals maintained the old traditions of loyalty and faithfulness. 'Cats and ... livestock followed their masters to death,' says Friar Michele."
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, The Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly
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"Not only did the plague more or less strike out of the blue, it produced death on a scale no one had ever seen, no one have ever imagined possible - death not in the hundreds or thousands, but in the hundreds of thousands, and in the millions. Moreover, it was a death capable of obliterating whole networks of people in a matter of hours. One day, wrote a contemporary, 'a man, wanting to make his will, died along with the notary, the priest who heard his confession, and the people summoned to witness his will, and they were all buried together on the following day'."
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, The Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly
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"In many parts of Siena, very wide trenches were made and in these, they placed the bodies, throwing them in and covering them with but a little dirt."
"After that they put in the same trench many other bodies and covered them also with earth and so they laid the layer upon layer, until the trench was full."
"Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could without a priest, without divine offices."
"Some of the dead were ... so ill covered that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city."
And the concluding sentence for 1348 was:
"And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands."
The extension to the cathedral in Siena was never finished due to the Black Death that hit the city in 1348:
https://www.discovertuscany.com/siena...
Wholesome History Reads Group
Books mentioned in this topic
The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780 (other topics)A Campaign of Giants—The Battle for Petersburg, Vol. 2: From the Crater's Aftermath to the Battle of Burgess Mill (other topics)
The Secret Expedition: The Anglo-Russian Invasion of Holland 1799 (other topics)
Saipan: The Battle That Doomed Japan in World War II (other topics)
Defeat In Detail: The Ottoman Army in the Balkans, 1912-1913 (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Rick Atkinson (other topics)A. Wilson Greene (other topics)
Geert van Uythoven (other topics)
James H. Hallas (other topics)
Edward J. Erickson (other topics)
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"Strangely enough, the first Siberian exile was neither a common criminal nor an enemy of the state. It was a bell - the 700-pound town bell of Uglich - punished for sounding the alarm at the assassination of the tsarevich Dmitry in 1581. Those who participated in the brief uprising that followed were whipped and had their tongues cut out. The bell was likewise flogged, its 'tongue' wrenched from its socket, and (to complete the superstitious elaboration of its chastisement) it was ignominiously dragged across the Urals to Tobolsk, where it was banned forever from being rung again."
The bell of Uglich:
http://nicholaskotar.com/2017/05/30/c...