Rain Gryphon (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rain_gryphon) wrote2005-11-22 05:47 am
rain_gryphon) wrote2005-11-22 05:47 am
On the Edge of Memory
Asteroid Itokawa. That's not really how I'd imagined asteroids looking. That's an interesting-looking smooth patch at the back. It's a pity the little hopper robot didn't work.
*****
The last man of the 1914 BEF has died. "He was our last surviving link with a time that shimmers on the edge of our folk memory." It gives me an odd feeling to read that. I've talked with a great many WWI veterans in my life, and heard strange and marvellous stories. I spent hours talking to the lonely old man who had been in charge of drainage and tent placement for the American receiving camp at Cherbourg, and to a one-eyed German infantryman who'd been gassed with Lewisite, and still felt the effects. I suppose they're dead now as well.
When I was little, I knew a janitor (he worked next door to where a friend lived) who had been a pilot in the Czech air force during the Sudetenland crisis in '38. His squadron was stationed forward in their open cockpit biplanes (I'm guessing the Avia B-34), ready for war when the news came that Chamberlain was going to sacrifice Czechlovakia. He told me that as they flew their planes back into what was left of Czechoslovakia, the Messerschmidt pilots flew alongside and waved at them.
That image always stuck with me, for some reason. I wonder if they were waving to taunt them, or to assure them that it was nothing personal. I've always figured the latter. Wars generally start out much with much more restraint and chivalry than they finish with.
*****
Two Australians went on a vandalism spree so mighty that they may actually be sentenced to life in prison. They even tipped a bus over. This simultaneously fulfills all of my worst and best expectations of Australians.
*****
It's the anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. I recall nothing of the day itself, but I have distant, half-formed memories of watching the funeral on TV with my mother.
*****
The last man of the 1914 BEF has died. "He was our last surviving link with a time that shimmers on the edge of our folk memory." It gives me an odd feeling to read that. I've talked with a great many WWI veterans in my life, and heard strange and marvellous stories. I spent hours talking to the lonely old man who had been in charge of drainage and tent placement for the American receiving camp at Cherbourg, and to a one-eyed German infantryman who'd been gassed with Lewisite, and still felt the effects. I suppose they're dead now as well.
When I was little, I knew a janitor (he worked next door to where a friend lived) who had been a pilot in the Czech air force during the Sudetenland crisis in '38. His squadron was stationed forward in their open cockpit biplanes (I'm guessing the Avia B-34), ready for war when the news came that Chamberlain was going to sacrifice Czechlovakia. He told me that as they flew their planes back into what was left of Czechoslovakia, the Messerschmidt pilots flew alongside and waved at them.
That image always stuck with me, for some reason. I wonder if they were waving to taunt them, or to assure them that it was nothing personal. I've always figured the latter. Wars generally start out much with much more restraint and chivalry than they finish with.
*****
Two Australians went on a vandalism spree so mighty that they may actually be sentenced to life in prison. They even tipped a bus over. This simultaneously fulfills all of my worst and best expectations of Australians.
*****
It's the anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. I recall nothing of the day itself, but I have distant, half-formed memories of watching the funeral on TV with my mother.
no subject
I wish I'd gotten a chance to know one. I suppose we can take comfort in the fact that with this as a precident there will probably be WWII veterans around well into the 2030s to get accquanted with.
no subject
You never actually talked to a WWI soldier? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surviving_Veterans_of_the_First_World_War) ()
no subject
Nope. Not personally, anyway. I may have seen one at a talks at school... I have dim memories of *possibly* that, somewhere around 1983, but... I've never known one. My great grandfather was apparently a "doughboy", and his uniform jacket hung in my closet for a long time, but he died shortly before I was born.
Oddly enough I'd grown too large to wear that jacket at about age eleven.
I wonder if there are more surviving WWI airplanes then there are veterans. 101 probably makes it pretty close.
no subject
A lot of histories of WWI mention the impact on French morale of seeing the Americans up close, since our soldiers were apparently much larger and more impressive than theirs.