Tea at Trianon: Americans Who Died Fighting Communism

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, April 14, 2019

Americans Who Died Fighting Communism

From The National Review:

A little more than a century earlier, Napoleon had learned the hard way about the dangers of the Russian winter. Adolf Hitler would discover them anew in the 1940s. The American effort of 1918–19 lacked the ambition of those invasions, but it encountered the same hazards in an environment of permanent polar vortex. Temperatures dropped below 0 degrees Fahrenheit and continued to plunge. Americans could perform outdoor guard duty for only a few minutes at a time. They took care not to touch their bare skin to metal weapons for fear of freezing it and tearing it off. Supplies were limited as well. In a memoir, A Michigan Polar Bear Confronts the Bolsheviks, Private Godfrey Anderson describes wrapping the corpses of soldiers in blankets, laying them in coffins, and closing the lids. Later, a sergeant berates him: “Dead men don’t need no blankets.” Daylight was in short supply, too. In December at these high latitudes, the darkness lasted 20 hours.

It was enough to sap the morale even of patriotic troops. On November 14, Colonel George E. Stewart, commander of the forces, requested an immediate withdrawal. “We have performed most excellent service under the most trying conditions of cold and snow and wet and miry marshes,” he cabled. “Original object of expedition no longer exists.” His pleas changed nothing and the Polar Bears became confused about why they were still fighting and dying when the war supposedly had ended. As the weeks wore on, reports of mutinies made their way into the press. Historians have differed on the seriousness of the insubordination — some claim that reporters sensationalized ordinary disgruntlement — but there can be no doubt that the men badly wanted to return home (Read more.)