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Archive for November, 2007

Some of the dimensions of the 1914-18 war to end all wars:

• The conflict cost both sides a total of 8,5 million dead. Even on the quietest days, thousands of troops were killed or wounded - a process termed "wastage" by British officers.
• The western front soon bogged down into a stalemate from Belgium to
  Switzerland. Both sides built networks of trenches long enough in total, by some estimates, to circle the Earth. + German troops built the best trenches: they picked the high ground and designed their earthworks to be permanent. Sometimes their dugouts included wallpaper and varnished woodwork. Ramshackle British and French efforts were always wet and sometimes flooded. Opposing lines could be as close as seven metres.
• The front lines, especially during winter in low-lying Flanders, were a sea of trenches, craters, latrines, corpses, and vermin. Approaching troops could smell the trenches before they saw them.
• The men were small (by modern standards) and their packs heavy. The average British recruit weighed 132 pounds and carried accoutrements of 77 pounds, including a greatcoat that might weigh 20 to 50 pounds more when soggy. Wounded ~en drowned by the thousands in the mud; so did unlucky sleepers.
• By 1916, both sides had steel helmets instead of cloth hats.
• The enemy was rarely seen; his bullets and shells were more common. During heavy shelling, troops endured up to 30 shells a minute - a "thunderstorm" or "symphony" of sound that was felt as much as heard. Across the English Channel, the barrages of Flanders were plainly audible.
• Informal truces sprang up when barbed wire needed mending or there were soldiers to retrieve (the wounded might moan in no man's land for days).
• Big attacks were rarely surprises; they were preceded by heavy shelling and openings of the barbed wire. On July I, 1916, when the British attacked in the Sornme, they had 60,000 casualties - one man for every 18 inches of the front.
• Record heaps of munitions were used. For instance, south of Ypres, British miners tunnelled for a year to place a million pounds of high explosives into 21 shafts. On June 7, 1917, the complex was detonated; 19 shafts went up, burying 10,000 Germans and jolting the British prime minister 130 miles away in Downing Street. In 1955, another shaft exploded, jolting thevillage of Ploegsteert but causing no injuries. The last shaft, deep under Ploegsteert 'Vood, has yet to be heard from.
• Today; bones are still being discovered. The war's battlefields will yield their metal fragments for centuries, experts say. On a rainy day in Albert, France, near the Somme, the fields give off a smell of rusting iron. (Sources: The Great War and Modern Memory, Goodbye to All That, The First Day on the Somme, EyeDeep in Hell.)

Honor your soldier with one of these patriotic gifts from Cookie Gift Baskets.

October 4, 1957, saw the dawn of the space age. As the wire report from Moscow stated, "Russia announced today it has sent the world's first artificial moon streaking around the globe 560 miles (900 kilometres) out in space." It was the height of the Cold War; the world was electrified. In fact some Western experts said the satellite couldn't be seen from Earth.

• It was visible as a dull-red orbiting dot, but was often confused with its brighter launch rocket);
• It would last for years in orbit
  • It lasted 92 days
• It was spying on and mapping the Earth
  • It couldn’t do either
• Space travel by humans was still a long way off
  • It was only three years away

Obviously nothing much has changed in fifty years; you can’t believe nothing you hear in October.

October marked the end of the growing cycle, now completed with the harvesting of the grapes and the making of wine. It was vintage time for ancient Roman farmers, time to clean and fumigate the wine cellar. Early October was a busy time as the farmers gathered in the olives and bunches of ripe grapes. The grapes were then mounded in large batches on special pressing floors in the rural villas, where the pressed juice was then stored in large holding vessels called doliae as next year's wine.

Modern Ritual to Experience Nature and Oneness

Find a secluded place outside to meditate on a quiet October day. perhaps the sacred spot in your garden or a special retreat known only to you. Let all of your senses take in the beauty of nature. Think deeply on these thoughts as the Buddhist monk which that Hanh teaches us to honor this feeling of oneness and connection with nature and the divine:

Contemplate an autumn theme leaf, with its rich red or golden color as it hangs on the branch ready to fall to the ground at the slightest breeze. Consider that the leaf had been a mother to the tree. During the spring and summer, the leaf had worked to nourish the tree. Yet when it falls to the ground, as it must. and returns to the soil of Mother Earth, it continues to nourish the tree. Be comforted in the knowledge the dying leaf will again return to the branch of the tree, soon, next spring.

Modern Ritual to Honor Departed Ones

The final solemn days of October provide an opportunity to reconnect with those who have gone before. We already celebrate Halloween with images of ghosts, goblins, and skeletons connoting the season of death and endings. This is also the time to visit the graves of one's ancestors and bear bouquets of flowers or small offerings to the dead spirits.

Faith and Commitment

The unsettling time of October, the period of death and separation, can be bridged. Hope can be kindled during this somber dark time. Yet, faith and belief in the divine are required, and spiritual commitment is critical. For Apuleius, a Roman author of the second century C.E., and for many Romans, true belief was in the divine goddess Isis. With her, there was no dark abyss, no empty void.

The laws and representative institutions of England were first introduced into the New World in the settlement of Virginia: some years later a principle as unknown to England as it was to the greater part of Europe found its home in another colony, which received its name of Maryland from Henrietta Maria, the Queen of Charles the First. Calvert, Lord Baltimore, one of the best of the Stuart counselors, was forced by his conversion to Catholicism to seek a shelter for himself and colonists of his new faith in the district across the Potomac, and round the head of the Chesapeake. As a purely Catholic settlement was impossible, he resolved to open the new colony to men of every faith. "No person within this province," ran the earliest law of Maryland, "professing to believe in Jesus Christ, shall be in any ways troubled, molested, or discountenanced for his or her religion, or in the free exercise thereof."

Long however before Lord Baltimore's settlement in Maryland, only a few years indeed after the settlement of Smith in Virginia, the church of Brownist or Independent refugees, whom we saw driven in the reign of James to Amsterdam, had resolved to quit Holland and find a home in the wilds of the New World. They were little disheartened by the tidings of suffering which came from the Virginian settlement. "Weare well weaned," wrote their minister, John Robinson, "from the delicate milk of the mother-country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange land: the people are industrious and frugal. We are knit together as a body in a most sacred covenant of the Lord, of the violation whereof we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof we hold ourselves strictly tied to all care of each other's good and of the whole. It is not with us as with men whom small things can discourage."

Returning from Holland to Southampton, they started in two small vessels for the new land; but one of these soon put back, and only its companion, the Mayflower, a bark of a hundred and eighty tons, with forty-one emigrants and their families on board, persisted in prosecuting its voyage. The little company of the "Pilgrim Fathers," as after-times loved to call them, landed on the barren coast of Massachusetts at a spot to which they gave the name of Plymouth, in memory of the last English port at which they touched. They had soon to face the long hard winter of the north, to bear sickness and famine: even when these years of toil and suffering had passed there was a time when "they knew not at night where to have a bit in the morning." Resolute and industrious as they were, their progresses was very slow; and at the end of ten years they numbered only three hundred souls. But small as it was, the colony was now firmly established and the struggle for mere existence was over. "Let it not be grievous unto you," some of their brethren had written from England to the poor emigrants in the midst of their sufferings, "that you have been instrumental to break the ice for others. The honor shall be yours to the world's end."

From the moment of their establishment the eyes of the English Puritans were fixed on the little Puritan settlement in North America. Through the early years of Charles projects were canvassed for a new settlement beside the little Plymouth; and the aid which the merchants of Boston in Lincolnshire gave to the realization of this project was acknowledged in the name of its capital. At the moment when he was dissolving his third Parliament, Charles granted the charter which established the colony of Massachusetts; and by the Puritans at large the grant was at once regarded as a providential call. Out of the failure of their great constitutional struggle, and the pressing danger to "godliness" in England, rose the dream of a land in the West where religion and liberty could find a safe and lasting holiday home. The Parliament was hardly dissolved, when "conclusions" for the establishment of a great colony on the other side the Atlantic were circulating among gentry and traders, and descriptions of the new country of Massachusetts were talked over in every Puritan household.

The proposal was welcomed with the quiet, stern enthusiasm which marked the temper of the time; but the words of a well-known emigrant show how hard it was even for the sternest enthusiasts to tear themselves from their native land. "I shall call that my country," said the younger Winthrop, in answer to feelings of this sort, "where I may most glorify God and enjoy the presence of my dearest friends.' The answer was accepted, and the Puritan emigration began on a scale such as England had never before seen. The two hundred who first sailed for Salem were soon followed by John Winthrop with eight hundred men; and seven hundred more followed ere the first year of the king's personal rule had run its course. Nor were the emigrants, like the earlier colonists of the South, "broken men," adventurers, bankrupts, criminals; or simply poor men and artisans, like the Pilgrim Fathers of the Mayflower. They were in great part men of the professional and middle classes; some of them men of large landed estate some zealous clergymen like Cotton, Hooker, and Roger Williams, some shrewd London lawyers, or young scholars from Oxford.

The bulk of these were God-fearing farmers from Lincolnshire and the Eastern counties. They desired in fact "only the best" as sharers in their enterprise; men driven forth from their fatherland not by earthly want, or by the greed of gold, or by the lust of adventure, but by the fear of God, and the zeal for a godly worship. But strong as was their zeal, it was not without a wrench that they tore themselves from their English homes. "Farewell, dear England!" was the cry which burst from the first little company of emigrants as its shores faded from their sight. "Our hearts," wrote Winthrop's followers to the brethren whom they had left behind, "shall be fountains of tears for your everlasting welfare, when we shall be in our poor cottages in the wilderness."

During the next two years, as the sudden terror which had found so violent an outlet in Eliot's warnings died for the moment away, there was a lull in the emigration. But the measures of Laud soon revived the panic of the Puritans. The shrewdness of James had read the very heart of the man when Buckingham pressed for his first advancement to the see of St. David's. "He hath a restless spirit," said the old King," which cannot see when things are well, but loves to toss and change, and to bring matters to a pitch of reformation floating in his own brain. Take him with you, but by my soul you will repent it." Cold, pedantic, superstitious as he was (he notes in his diary the entry of a robin-redbreast into his study as a matter of grave moment), William Laud rose out of the mass of court-prelates by his industry, his personal unselfishness, his remarkable capacity for administration.

We can hardly wonder that with such a world around them "godly people in England began to apprehend a special hand of Providence in raising this plantation" in Massachusetts; "and their hearts were generally stirred to come over." It was in vain that weaker men returned to bring news of hardships and dangers, and told how two hundred of the new comers had perished with their first winter. A letter from Winthrop told how the rest toiled manfully on. "We now enjoy God and Jesus Christ," he wrote to those at home, "and is not that enough?

I thank God I like so well to be here as I do not repent my coming. I would not have altered my course though I had foreseen all these afflictions. I never had more content of mine'." With the strength and manliness of Puritanism, its bigotry and narrowness had crossed the Atlantic too. Roger Williams, a young minister who held the doctrine of freedom of conscience, was driven from the new settlement, to become a preacher among the settlers of Rhode Island. The bitter resentment stirred in the emigrants by persecution at home was seen in their rejection of Episcopacy and their prohibition of the use of the Book of Common Prayer. The intensity of its religious sentiments turned the colony into a theocracy. "To the end that the body of the Commons may be preserved of honest and good men, it was ordered and agreed that for the time to come no man shall be admitted to the freedom of the body politic but such as are members of some of the churches within the bounds of the same." As the contest grew hotter at home the number of Puritan emigrants rose fast. Three thousand new colonists arrived from England in a single year. The growing stream of emigrants marks the terrible pressure of the time. Between the sailing of Winthrop's expedition and the assembly of the Long Parliament, in the space, that is, of ten or eleven years, two hundred emigrant ships had crossed the
Atlantic, and twenty thousand Englishmen had found a refuge of hope for a better tomorrow.

Since that time, nearly four hundred years later, we continue to give renewing thanks at this time of year; that each and every tomorrow is better than all of our yester-years.  So as you celebrate with your family this year, think of all the hardships the early Americans faced.  And don't forget to check out our Thanksgiving gifts!

Some scary witch stories to tell at your next big Halloween party....don't forget to wear the witch costume too!  And a witch themed Halloween gift basket would be the perfect prize for the best story-teller.

When Grandmother Eiler was young she had a cow of her own raising, of which she was very proud. One evening at milking time, a certain woman passed through the barnyard, stopped, and looked the cow all over. "I was foolish enough to tell her all about the cow, how gentle she was, how much milk she was giving, and all that, and she said I certainly had a fine cow. Well, the next morning that cow couldn't stand on her feet, and there she lay in the stable till father came home from the mountain, where he was cutting wood. He said it was all plain enough, when I told him everything, but he wondered I hadn't had better sense. However, he knew just what to do. He rubbed the cow all over with asafetida, saying words all the time. And the next day, when I went into the barn, there she stood on her four legs, eating like a hound. Witches can't stand asafetida."

It was this witch-woman who, going to a neighbor's one day on an errand, prolonged her stay without apparent reason, till it was almost night. Though she was very uneasy all the time, and kept saying there was sickness at home and she ought to be there, still she didn't go. Finally, it was discovered that the broom had fallen across the door. When it was taken away, she fairly flew. Of course, this looked very suspicious. But, not to be rash in their judgment, the people of the house sought further proof. So, the next time she came, salt was thrown under her chair, and there she sat, as though bound until it was removed. Then, as her visits were now considered undesirable, nails were driven in her tracks, but the place in the ground marked, in case the footprints became obliterated. It was soon known that she was laid up with sore feet, which refused to heal until the nails were dug up.

Miss K's father, when a youth in Germany, had a friend whose rest was disturbed by nightmares. At last he concluded that a witch was troubling him, and proceeded to entrap her by stopping up every crevice and keyhole in the room. (Mindful of the fact, of course, that "for witches this is law-where they have entered in, there also they withdraw.") The next morning he found a beautiful girl cowering in the cupboard. He put her to work as a servant about the house. But eventually, thinking her reformation complete, he married her and lived happily for several years. Sometimes, though, she would sigh, and say she longed to see beautiful France again. One day she was missing, and her little child, just tall enough to reach the keyhole, told how she had removed the stopping for her. She was never seen again, having of course "taken French leave" through the keyhole. The same story is told of a miller in Frederick County. He, too, domesticated a witchmaiden, having caught her in the same way. But, years after, he incautiously opened the keyhole, and found himself a grass widower.