Vis Nulla Resolvet

A lovely print I've just stumbled across in the VD-16 electronic library, while looking for something else. It was made to celebrate the 1685 union of Maximilian Emmanuel of Bavaria and Maria Antonia of Austria. I like the underlying suggestion that love is more effective at achieving consensus and peace than force. Although this marriage was successful in producing a possible male heir to succeed the Habsburg king of Spain Charles II, the Infante Joseph Ferdinand, Prince of the Asturias, died in 1699 at the age of seven.

The marriage was unhappy, to say the least, and did not live up to the words spoken by the two in this engraving: 'Whatever happiness I will find comes with him/ her.' A great image, though, which can be downloaded here.

"Yea, I put eyes to see/ Into the face of fire, and gave to him/ A fount of vision that before was dim."

A few of my posts recently have noted men who were of the classicist scholar-warrior tradition. On a break today I read a review of John Lewis-Stempel's Six Weeks: The Short but Gallant Life of the British Officer in the Great War, from which I take another example of the typology. Apparently when the future British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was seriously wounded at the Somme, where he was shot in the left thigh and pelvis, he took refuge in a shell hole for three days until rescued. Whilst there he read, in between bouts of unconsciousness, the pocket edition of the Greek text of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound he had been carrying in his tunic, a work he found 'not inappropriate to my position...' I've read elsewhere that it was actually only a day reading Aeschylus in a slit-trench, which I think only slightly diminishes the story.

I've taken the title from the play. These words of Prometheus make the claim that he was responsible for awakening man's higher instincts. I'm not sure it's the most appropriate extract of the play for this entry, but there's something about it that I like. The full passage is as follows:

"Fulfilment bear; I read the inward mind
Of the unintended word and the stray sign
Met by the road. . . .
Thus man to knowledge came of things to be,
Deep hid before. Yea, I put eyes to see
Into the face of fire, and gave to him
A fount of vision that before was dim."

Thermopylae II

THERMOPYLAE 1941

J.E. Brookes

A private soldier doubtless suffers less 
from his privations than from ignorance 
of what is going on; in terms of chess, 
he is a pawn. But the significance 
of our deployment on the forward slopes 
of this position was not lost on us.
No purpose served consulting horoscopes 
at Delphi; students of Herodotus 
would know withdrawal to Thermopylae 
and putting up barbed wire could only mean 
fighting a rearguard action Q.E.D., 
as Euclid would have put it. 
We had been deposited into the warlike lap 
of ancient deities. I said to Blue, 
my Aussie mate, "There was this famous chap 
Leonidas, he was the Spartan 
who defended it with just 300 men 
against an army." Bluey took a draw 
upon his cigarette. "Well stuff'im then!" 
a pungent comment on the art of war. 
Foreboding we looked back across the plain 
which we had crossed, towards Lamia, towards 
the north just as the Spartans must have lain 
with spear and sword and watched the Persian hordes 
amassing for the battle long ago.
It was deserted, a proscenium 
where once Leonidas heard trumpets blow, 
a theatre whose auditorium, 
the home of gods, was mountains, and whose stage 
was lapped by Homer's wine-dark seas as blue 
as lapis lazuli, where in a rage
Poseidon wrecked Odysseus and his crew 
and siren voices tempted. In the wings 
of history we waited for a roll 
of other drums and strident trumpetings
to usher in the gods of war. 
The soul of Sparta stirred, could but the brave 
Leonidas renew his mortal span 
instead of merely turning in his grave, 
and all his hoplites, perished to a man, 
but resurrect themselves. . . . I said "They wore 
long hair, the Spartans, a visible proof 
that they were free, not helots, and before 
the battle they would gravely sit aloof 
and garland it with flowers." Bluey spat.
Continuing to watch the empty road 
across the plain he took off his tin-hat 
(a proof that he was bald) and said "A load 
of bloody poufdahs!" Thus he laid the ghost 
of brave Leonidas. Herodotus 
informs us Xerxes, leader of the host, 
when told was equally incredulous, 
though whether from a soldier's point of view 
of army discipline or on the grounds 
of social prejudice like my mate Blue, 
was not elaborated. With the sounds 
of planes we kept our heads down. After dark 
we dug slit-trenches neath the April moon 
in silence broken only by the bark 
of some Greek shepherd's dog while our platoon
commander and the sergeant walked about 
discussing fields of fire. We lit a smoke,
which made the section corporal shout "Put out 
that bloody light!" It was the Colonel broke 
the news, like some deus ex machina
descending from above.  THEY SHALL NOT PASS...
THE LAST LINE OF DEFENCE etcetera, 
all sentiments of which Leonidas 
would have approved, and as he disappeared 
into the moonlight, with a martial air, 
a crown and two pips, everybody cheered 
instead of putting flowers in their hair, 
but muted just in case the Germans were
in earshot and from feeling (for myself
at any rate) that we should much prefer
that history did not repeat itself. 
And later with our cigarettes concealed
behind cupped hands we peered into the night 
across the darkened plain and it revealed
first one and then another point of light,
and then a hundred of them, moving down 
the distant backcloth, shining off and on 
like tiny jewels sparkling on a crown 
of moonlit mountains, a phenomenon 
caused by the winding path of their descent 
round liair-pin bends cascading from the heights 
beyond Lamia, our first presentiment 
of evil genius - they were the lights 
of Hitler's war machines! So fate had cast 
us in the role of heroes in the same
arena where the heroes of the past 
had closed their ranks and perished in the name 
of freedom. Was there one of those among 
the Spartans who, at the eleventh hour 
upon the eve of battle, while he hung 
his hair with many a patient-wreathed flower, 
prayed that some unpredictable event 
like Xerxes dropping dead, some miracle, 
might even yet occur and thus prevent 
the battle being joined the oracle 
at Delphi notwithstanding? "Time to pick 
the flowers Blue, that bloom upon the steep 
hillside" I said "make daisy-chains and stick 
the buggers in our hair !" He was asleep. 
So all night long I watched and when the skies 
had lightened with the dawn (doubtless the last 
that I should ever see with mortal eyes 
before we joined those heroes of the past 
in the Elysian fields) and bold day broke
across the misted plain on mythic banks 
of white and yellow asphodel he woke
and heard combustion engines. German tanks?

I said a private soldier suffers less 
from his privations than from ignorance
of what is going on, but we could guess
that some extraordinary circumstance 
had made the sergeant, full pack, rifle slung, 
rise up before us blotting out the sun.
Phoebus Apollo? Götterdämmerung
more likely! GREEKS CAPITULATED ... HUN 
MIGHT CUT US OFF ... NO PANIC ... GET EMBUSSED ...
YES 3-TON TRUCKS HAVE JUST ARRIVED ... I thanked
the Lord for it and meanwhile Bluey cussed 
and our lance-corporal said he'd been outflanked 
at Passchendaele and got away with it.
As Bluey put it "if some bloody mug
brasshat had only warned us, used a bit
of common sense we never need have dug 
that something something slit-trench!' (Stuff 'im then?) 
But as we drove away I must confess 
it felt like a desertion. Those few men 
with flowers in their hair were heroes! Yes!

Written April 25, 1941, in Salonika P.O.W camp.

Since I posted a link to this poem a few weeks' ago, I've kept returning to thinking on it, wondering amongst other things, whether I should post it here. It's made me think that I'd like to track down the collection of John Brookes' work, Verses: Private and General (Badger Press, 1989), as I'd like to see if  Brookes' other work is this dense with structure, classical mythology and empathy. I've only read one other of his poems, which has the same wry British take on Australians and their sense of humour which this does. 

A few links: a discussion, including more biographical details from a relation of J.E. Brookes, here and also on the Salamander Poets site here and a blog on Brookes here with links to one of his other poems. 

"Ah, it goes, is lost"/ "am sustineant onus/ siluae laborantes, geluque/ flumina constiterint acuto."

A quick entry on a few obituaries I've found moving recently, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Cy Twombly, men of the old-school they don't make 'em like that variety steeped in a vigorous classicism and a seemingly indefatigable capacity for making connections between things that ought not to be connected. 

I'd seen Cy Twombly's work before I actually saw it. I'd seen a few pictures somewhere, walked past the Studies of the Temaire at the Art Gallery of NSW around 2003, was vaguely aware of the name. But on a trip to London in 2004 I was gobsmacked by Twombly's work when I read an exhibition catalogue that was a permanent fixture on (or beneath) my brother's coffee table. I was slowly killing an afternoon, waiting for something or someone when I picked it up in an incidental reach of the arm. Within moments, I was sstruck dumb by the realization that there was an artist who in a weird twist of genealogy had, even years before I was even born, pinched and funneled all my ideas about ancient history and classical mythology and art and how human experience of the present can be illuminated by the human experience of the past in one mighty flash of everything all at once that Twombly has at his best. 

Scrawled across the painting of Twombly's I've seen the most in person,  the Quattro Stagioni in the Tate Modern, are the words "Ah, it goes, is lost," which struck me as being a great cry of loss in both the realms of the personal and our shared experience, speaking of the human experience as we grow, lose our old selves to our new selves in a constant cycle of remaking and reshaping, as violent and destructive as it is beautiful and nurturing. Spring's torrents are soon winter's dearth (death?)  But there is also something else to Twombly's work, which speaks of how humans experience  history, the giant thing of the past, both chasm and monolith, both noise and silence. "Ah, it goes, is lost..."

I know far less about Patrick Leigh Fermor, but was struck by obituaries by James Campbell in The Guardian and one by Christopher Hitchens at  The Slate. In particular, I liked the story of his wartime mission to kidnap the German general Heinrich Kreipe, who was then overseeing the Nazi occupation of Crete. The mission was successful and the kidnapping party hid in a cave until it was safe to move the general to Europe. Looking out onto snow-capped mountains, bored, the general recited a few lines of Horace's ode 1.9, Ad Thaliarchum. Leigh Fermor said later, "As luck had it, this was one I knew by heart" and when the general's memory ran out, he carried it on until its end (this happens a lot among my friends, you know, recital of Roman poets in Latin from memory. What do you mean, this doesn't happen in the circles you move in...?)

Roman poets, love of Greece, wanderers, married to European aristocrats, dead in the same week...  

A Richness of Martens II

A note about my post A Richness of Martens.

I've just noticed in Jennifer Mori's latest book, The culture of Diplomacy: Britain in Europe, c.1750-1830 a reference to G.F. Martens' Summary of the Law of Nations. It's an interesting reference that's reminded me why I'm interested in the general sweep of international political and diplomatic history.

She says that an early-nineteenth century English diplomat, James Justinian (known to his family as Jem), commented that he wanted to get another edition of Martens as the 1795 English edition he owned

had been translated into English by "that rogue [William] Cobbett..."

She continues by making a comment on how we can see what contemporary diplomats thought about international relations by looking at the ideas contained in the books they owned. In Jem's case, this edition of Martens and Vattel's Law of Nations. These books, she says, 'both presented the European community as a system of states bound together by an enlightened self-interest that drove its members to co-operate with each other, even in times of war. Utility, rather than civility or abstract morality, was therefore the invisible hand at the heart of international relations...'

It's a good point, one that academic historians tend to forget repeatedly and which I've been waiting quite a long time to hear. Rather than being a mechanism that was formed solely as an extension or expression of competitiveness, mutual suspicion and Machiavellian agitation between states, the formation of systems of diplomacy should be interpreted as doing fundamentally useful things in the moderation of politics between states. Not taking this idea at least on board, and academics run the risk of relegating the diplomat  to being performer in the meaningless rituals of courtly life or, at worst, as little more than a spy.  It's  a point one that I've been thinking about ever since I decided that diplomatic history of the early modern period has been not sufficiently studied. Or, I think sometimes, that when it has been studied, it's been looked at the wrong way.

You can download a copy of Cobbett's translation of Martens from google books here. And even if I'm never going to read any of the books that archive.org have about and by Cobbett, how can I resist a link to them?

I said to Blue, my Aussie mate, "There was this famous chap..."

This was in something I was reading the other day: "Plutarch tells of a temple dedicated to Diana in Artemisium. On one of its pillars was carved a verse commemorating the dead of the naval battle between Persian and Greek in the straits of Euboea: With numerous tribes from Asia’s regions brought/ The sons of Athens on these waters fought;/ Erecting, after they had quelled the Mede,/ To Artemis this record of the deed.

There is still a place still to be seen upon this shore, where, in the middle of a great heap of sand, they take out from the bottom a dark powder of ashes, or something that has passed the fire; and here, it is supposed, the shipwrecks and bodies of the dead were burnt.’"

It made me think I should start keeping a record of the way battles have been commemorated as I come across them, to build up some kind of collection from which something interesting may emerge at some point. Of course, this would have much to do with not only commemorating particular battles, but the ways in which cultures choose what to commemorate in the present, particularly when we're talking about not just years or decades between battles and their commemoration but centuries or milennia. 

A good example is the land battle at Thermopylae in 481 BC, which happened simultaneously to the Persian-Greek sea battle at straits of Artemesium that Plutarch was talking about. Thermopylae is perhaps best known for the legend of Leonidas and the 300 Spartans holding the narrow pass, the Hot Gates/ Pillars (thermo pylae), against Xerxes' far-stronger army. 


The 300 were eventually slaughtered and were buried under a mound of earth, topped by a slab with a famous commemorative verse by Simonides carved in it:   "Stranger, announce to the Spartans that here/ We lie, having fulfilled their orders." Indeed, there is still a memorial with these words upon it at Thermopylae, although not the one described by Herodotus, but one made more recently in 1955. A further modern monument commemorated Leonidas himself (pictured above), which was dedicated in the same year by King Paul of Greece. Lastly, there is an even more recent memorial from 1997, recognising the seven hundred Thespians who also died in the battle.  

What makes the interplay of history and historical memory here even more interesting is that this location has been one that has been the site of significant battles more than once in history. In 279BC  Greek and Gaulish armies clashd here; 191BC saw Antiochus III of Syria's army attempting to repeat Spartan heroics against Rome. Similarly, in more modern times, the Battle of Alamana in 1821, part of the  Greek War of Independence, saw Athanasios Diakos and his men make a stand against a far-superior Turkish army, in which Diakos was captured. (One account suggests that when he was offered a choice between conversion to Islam and death, he ended up being barbecued on a spit by his captors (above, his memorial at Thermopylae.)

Lastly, the area was the site of another battle in the Second World War, this time between German and British/ ANZAC forces, actually the only joint ANZAC action in the Second World War. NZ units were actually deployed in the same pass as Leonidas' Spartans so many years before, so it's appropriate that it also became known as the Battle of Thermopylae.  This action is commemorated in the Australian-Hellenic Monument in Canberra, which is just opposite the Australian War Memorial. This is an amphitheatre with a corridor cut through it symbolising pass at Thermopylae, which I know well from long-past lunch breaks, having once been employed at the AWM soon after I left school. The 1941 battle is also commemorated by the larger monument in Crete that covers the whole Greek campaign of 1941.  I wonder if there's any onsite commemoration of this battle, as there is for so many other conflicts of the World Wars last century.  

There's a good account of the five battles of Thermopylae here. An outstanding poem written by an Australian soldier who was there in 1941 is here. It's where I got the title of this post too, in case you were wondering...

"And then there are French cameramen..."/"...but the dead are the mightiest, they can rend bits of heaven..."

Two pieces from toady's Observer. The first follows on from my last post about photographers covering wars. It's an extract from Janine di Giovanni's autobiography of her life as a war correspondent. Her book Madness Visible is on my longlist of things to read. I can't say I'm that keen for the film of it, as it's been by Julia Robert's production company and I suffered through about twenty minutes of Eat, Pray, Love on my last intercontinental flight.

The second is an article about a piece of historical detective work I'd also like to read more about. The historian Miguel Caballero Pérez claims that he has solved the mystery of Federico Garcia Lorca's death in the Spanish Civil War by looking into Spanish police and military archives. I'll be keen to see if the  archaeology backs him up. Here's a link to a poem of his, Abandoned Church (Ballad of the Great War), which I think has themes that dovetail with di Giovanni's article.

Now, could someone do the same kind of mystery solving for Walter Benjamin's death?

War photographers...

The Guardian has a feature on war photography in which ten photographers who have worked in combat zones around the world over the last few decades talk about "the shot that almost got me." It's a stunning collection of shots that is both confronting and moving. Instead of using one of their shots to illustrate this post I've turned to two photographs of the great archetypal war photographer Robert Capa, who famously said "If the shots are no good, you're not close enough."  Above is one of the images from the D-Day landings on Omaha Beach of 6th June 1944 that survived a careless lab assistant's melting of all but ten of the frames he shot that day in his eagerness to see the shots. 

I was lucky enough to see a retrospective exhibition of his war photos at the Photographer's Gallery in London in 1997 (as well as one on his wife, the incredibly under-rated Gerda Taro, at the Barbican in 2008.) The second photo was on a wall by itself, the only wall in the gallery that was painted red. It's the last image he took, whilst he was accompanying French forces in the Indochina war in May 1954. After taking it he stepped onto a landmine and died soon after. A reminder that it's not always seeking the most dramatic shot that does for war photographers.

Frances Hutcheson

Today, a link to a text on a site I only discovered a few days ago that looks quite useful, the Online Library of Liberty. It's to the last chapter of a work of moral philosophy from 1747 by Francis Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy or in its Latin original Philosophiae moralis institutio compendiaria. Hutcheson was one of the greatest influence on the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment and, arguably, upon the thought that underpinned the American founding fathers and Jefferson’s drafting of the Declaration of Independence.


It’s interesting because the last chapter of this work is on international law, diplomacy and treaty making - as its Latin title puts it aptly for this blog De Foederibus, Legatis, et Civitatum Interitu. One of the key elements of Hutcheson’s thought is that humans are implanted with a  sense of moral virtue, which lead us to feel satisfied with actions and behaviours that are morally good, whilst being naturally dissatisfied with those that are not. By extension, his theory of morals, called the “benevolent theory” by some, which sees all human action as finding its origin in a natural sense of good will towards others, rather than in the perspective of earlier thinkers on international relations and law, particularly Samuel Pufendorf, whose work Hutcheson attacked directly, and Hobbes, who Pufendorf drew significantly upon, which suggest that the central drive of human behaviour is our self-interest and thus, by extension, states exist to protect us from ourselves. Hutcheson said specifically that he disagreed with Pufendorf’s view that “men were driven in society only for the sake of external advantage, and for fear of external evils, but in opposition to their natural turn of mind and to all natural affections and appetites.”


I should point out that I claim no expertise in Hutcheson, the precise details of the philosophical or legal debate he was involved in, nor in the intricacies of international thought of the mid-eighteenth century. What I find interesting, though, is that he was another early or pre-modern thinker – like Erasmus – who extended an idea of the goodness of individuals and extends this into a framework of inter-state politics, and in doing so, should be seen as part of the long and long-understudied tradition of international thought that is not driven by what have come to be called realist concerns.

Richtoffen cobblers?

This picture is of one of the fur boots worn by Manfred von Richthofen, the ace German fighter pilot of the First World War known as The Red Baron. It’s one of my favourite objects in the Australian War Memorial, a place I’ve been visiting quite often since I returned to Australia a few months ago. It’s in a cabinet with a few other souvenirs taken from the dead body of von Richtofen: the brass compass that was mounted on von Richthofen’s Fokker Triplane; a piece of one the plane’s struts painted in the red paint that gave him his nickname, described by a contemporary as being ‘the colour of dried blood; also the control column of the Fokker he was flying, which eyewitness accounts say that his lifeless hands had to be prised from.

The Red Baron is said to have taken these boots himself from a British pilot that he shot down. I’ve recently tried to find the source of this story, as I’m not sure whether I quite believe it or not. The closest I could find is the suggestion that L.G. Hawker, the British VC-winning ace pilot both pioneered the knee-high fur flying boot and was a victim of von Richthofen.  Von Richthofen talks about his defeat of Hawker in his 1917 autobiography, where although there is no mention of any such fur boots, there is a claim that '[Hawker's] machine gun was dug out of the ground and it ornaments the entrance of my dwelling.' I found this statement abated slightly an ongoing pang of sympathy I felt when standing in front of the AWM tableau of objects associated with him, a sympathy for a dead man whose bleeding and lacerated corpse was  stripped of his possessions by souvenir hunters whilst his body was still warm. Elsewhere in the biography there is an account of MvR travelling by car to see a British plane he had shot down earlier, so the provenance of the fur boots is possible. 

There is, however, another story about the Red Baron's  footwear that I'm convinced is actually a load of old cobblers. When I first arrived in Oxford several years ago, I was told repeatedly - both by reputable individuals and by websites that shouldn't always be trusted - that The Red Baron had been a student at Lincoln College, Oxford, who had his shoes made at at Ducker and Son, a shoe maker that still stands opposite Lincoln on The Turl. The story suggested that he  returned to Germany when war broke out in such a rush that he left his account there unpaid until a descendent was lured into the shop years later and presented with the bill. 

There are many reasons to like Ducker and Son. It is the last remaining independent shoe maker/ seller in Oxford out of the twenty there when it opened in 1898 and, in this, is a reminder that once English towns once had independent retailers in every business and trade, rather than high streets made up solely of multinational and chain shops. Indeed, I saw the evidence of this over my years there: the last antiquarian bookshop on the High Street closed two years ago, to be replaced by a brand-spankingly new store called Ye Olde Sweete Shoppe, seemingly with no irony whatsoever; four independent music shops in town closed over the same years, as well as the huge Virgin on Cornmarket; the ironmongers Gill and Co., who moved to Chipping Norton last year after five-hundred years (!) of trading in the same location, tucked down an alley off The High. And so on, and so it goes, as Bob Ellis' chorus goes. Enough! Enough about the inevitable tide of human progress on the English high street and back to the Baron v.R!

So, over the last few years my wife and I bought several pairs of shoes at Ducker. On our last trip there, since we were now repeat customers I thought myself able to ask whether I could see Richthofen's famous entry in the the leather-bound ledgers kept in the back of the shop (seen on the right here), into which every new customer is still entered, even customers like ourselves who fall far short of being able to afford bespoke rather than ready-to-wear shoes. The appropriate volume was pulled down and the page found. Richtofen, in the years just before war broke out, Lincoln College, an order for several pairs including patent leather shoes and a pair of "Beagling Pumps", presumably shoes suitable for wearing with the traditional green coat and white stocking of the beagler over fields in the middle of winter, following dogs intent on ripping apart a hare...

However, this account isn't for The Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, but his cousin, Baron Wilhelm von Richthofen, a German Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1913, who gave an interesting 'to those that could follow him' defence of German foreign policy to the Oxford Union the following year. WvR was, apparently courting officials at the German embassy in London in the 1920s, it seems he was unemployed and fishing around for work. His 1927 publication, Brito-Germania: Europe's Salvation suggested that a sickly European political landscape could only be ameliorated by the political union of the two nations, although Germany was to take a subservient role to Britain in this arrangement. According to the British Library catalogue, he's also W. Freiherr v. Richthofen who wrote Zurückgehaltenes und Unterdrücktes aus vier Kriegsjahren, in which he describes his military career as an officer in the Great War. 

It's an understandable mistake, seeing as the German title Freiherr can be held simultaneously by several family members, unlike the equivalent anglophone Baron. And, incidentally, one that the official Ducker website doesn't make itself, as it advertises "Baron von Richthofen" as one of its significant customers over its long history. 

 I should add that this by no means diminishes how I feel about Ducker and Son's shoes, how lovely the owners Bob and Isobel are and how you should buy a pair of their shoes if you're in the area. Moreover, that since those ledgers do contain the accounts of writers JRR Tolkein, Evelyn Waugh and others, the lack of MvR there does not mean they are any less important as historical documents. 

NB: there is one pack of Beagles that survives in Oxford, the Christ Church and Farley Hill Beagles. 

A richness of Martens...

As an undergraduate I noticed occasionally that quite often my bibliographies - alphabetically speaking - were particularly stacked around certain letters or in one particular part of the alphabet. It's something that I found in diplomatic compilations in even a more pronounced way: three scholars drawn to international law, compilations of peace treaties and diplomacy with the same surname.

In the first case it's not incredibly surprising as the work of  the German jurist and diplomat Georg F. Martens (above), best known as the editor of the  Nouvelle recueil des traites, was continued on his death,  by his nephew,  Karl von Martens. The younger Martens shared his uncle's interests; as well as editing his own treaty series, he also wrote a guide to famous cases of international law in history and the widely-read practical guide for the diplomat Le guide diplomatique, I was lucky enough to pick up for only a few pounds before I left the UK in the 2nd edition of 1832. 

The third Martens was a Russian legal scholar who was active around the turn of the twentieth century, Fedor Fedorovich Martens (1845-1909.) He represented Russia at the first Hague Convention of 1899  and drafted the clause that became known as the "Martens Clause", which stated: "Until a more complete code of the laws of war is issued, the High Contracting Parties think it right to declare that in cases not included in the Regulations adopted by them, populations and belligerents remain under the protection and empire of the principles of international law, as they result from the usages established between civilized nations, from the laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience." In more plain words, just because certain principles or acts are not prohibited in the stipulations of treaties it does not necessarily follow that those principles or acts are legal. Moreover, it also recognises that international law is not only adjudicated by those that shape it and their appointed arbiters, but that it also should be subject to the public conscience. 

He wrote many works on international law, including a series on Russian treaties with other powers that stretched to fifteen volumes and a more general studies of war and peace, and international law, Traité de droit international. See also the biography of him by V.V. Poustogarov Our Martens: F.F. Martens, International Lawyer and Architect of Peace (Kluwer Law International, 2000)

The title is an excuse to deviate from the subject slightly. A richness is the collective noun referring to the furry kind of marten related to minks and weasels (rather than those related to international jurists, I couldn't find a collective term for them. Perhaps a martens?) While we're off the subject, in looking about to find this piece of information I also found out another piece of useless information which I quite liked: the mobile phone company Nokia is named after a stream near where the company started in Finland, the Nokianvirter or stream of the nokia marten, which lived there in great numbers.

Hugh Trevor-Roper's Rules of Writing...

Not a post particularly within the usual scope of this blog, but I thought I should post this. Trevor-Roper's rules of writing, which circulated widely among his students and colleagues at Cambridge in the seventies and eighties. So I believe because I was given them by one of my supervisors a few years ago, who suggested that they passed in samizdat form from scholar's hand to scholars' hands. He had been examined by HT-R, newly made Lord Dacre of Glanton, in the mid-1980s, around the time when he had just made his misguided assessment of the Hitler Diaries for the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times. 


Dacre realised that the diaries were, in fact, not genuine on Saturday afternoon, around the time that the Times production line started up. Told this, Murdoch ordered the presses to roll regardless, with the famous blunt and graceless comment that you can find here, where is appears alongside HT-R's far more restrained judgment of Murdoch as "a megalomaniac twister, surrounded by yes men and hatchet men..." A shame that this error of judgment is what HT-R's remembered for the most, rather than the superb account of Hitler's last days published in 1947 and reworked at various points up until his death.


I'm not sure they're on the web, so thought I'd put these points on writing up as I've found them quite useful in thinking about how to write history. Or, for that matter, how to write almost anything more complicated than a shopping list...

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF WRITING

1 Thou shalt know thine own argument and cleave fast to it, and shall not digress nor deviate from it without the knowledge and consent of the reader, whom at all times thou shalt lead at a pace which he can follow and by a route which is clear to him as he goeth.

2. Thou shalt respect the autonomy of the paragraph, as commended by the authority and example of the historian Edward Gibbon; for it is the essential unit in the chain of argument. Therefore thou shalt keep it pure and self-contained, each paragraph having  within it a single central point to which all other observations in it shall be exactly subordinated by the proper use of the particles and inflexions given to us for this purpose.

3. Thou shalt aim always at clarity of exposition, to which all other literary aims shall be subordinated, remembering the rule “clarté prime, longeur secondaire.”* To this end thou shalt strive that no sentence be syntactically capable of any unintended meaning. To this end also thou shalt not fear to repeat thyself, if clarity require it, nor to state facts which thou thinkest as well known to others as to thyself; for it is better to remind the learned than to leave the unlearned in perplexity.

4. Thou shalt keep the structure of thy sentences clear, preferring short sentences to long and simple structures to complex, lest the reader lose his way in a labyrinth of subordinate clauses; and in particular, thou shalt not enclose one relative clause in another,  for this both betrays crudity of expression and is a fertile source of ambiguity.

5. Thou shalt preserve the unities of time and place,** placing thyself, in imagination, in one time and one place, and distinguishing all others to which thou mayest refer by a proper use of tenses and other forms of speech devised for this purpose; for unless we exploit the distinction between past and pluperfect tenses, and between imperfect and future conditional, we cannot attain perfect limpidity of style and argument.

6. Thou shalt not despise the subjunctive mood, a useful, subtle and graceful mood, blessed by Erasmus and venerated by George Moore, though cursed and anathematized by the Holy Inquisition, politicians and some of the media, and others who prefer to diminish language.***

7. Thou shalt always proceed in an orderly fashion, according to the rules of right reason: as, from the general to the particular when a generality is to be illustrated, but from the particular to the general when a generality is to be proved.

8. Thou shalt see what thou writest, and therefore shall not mix thy metaphors. For a mixed metaphor is proof that the image therein contained has not been seen worth the inner eye, and therefore such a metaphor is not a true metaphor, created out of the active eye of imagination, but from stale jargon idly drawn up from the stagnant sump of commonplace.

9. Thou shalt also hear what thou writest, with thine inner ear, so that no outer ear may be offended by jarring syllables or unmelodious rhythm; remembering herein with piety, though not striving to imitate, the rotundities of Sir Thomas Browne, and the clausulae of Cicero.

10. Thou shalt carefully expunge from thy writing all consciously written purple passages, lest they rise up to shame thee in thine old age.

                                                                                AMEN

* Some versions ascribe this to "the prophet Black."

** Another version adds "as commended by the High Priest Nicholas Boileau, (1636-1711)"

*** Another version has it ‘the Holy Inquisition, Pravda, and the late Lord Beaverbrook.’