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.