The Irish in WW I – a preview
I am some way into Sebastian Barry’s 2005, A Long Long Way. The language is so inventive and surprising that …
Category Archives: Europe
Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945
It is hard to visualize, walking around Modena or Cremona or Verona, Italy as I have recently, that gangs of …
The Twenty-Three Days of the City of Alba
World traveling, wine loving tourists might be forgiven for not associating the famed, vine-covered hills of Piemonte, Italy, with savage, civil …
Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War….
The civil war in Spain, 1936-1939, was the dark warning to the world of the war to follow, in almost every …
Refugees Today and Yesterday
This started out as a post about two movies — about refugees– but talking about movies before actualities seemed just …
Rome, Open City, 1945
The Nazi occupation of Rome ended on June 2, 1944, nine months after it had begun, four days before the …
WWI: The Government Abandons Paris
On September 3, 1914, a sentence surely found in the duplicative archives of human warfare, was released to the people …
WWI: August Dead
“According to Armées Françaises, French casualties in the month of August alone amounted to 206,515, including killed , wounded , …
WW I: Louvain Goes Up in Flames: 230,000 Volumes in Library
“On August 25 the burning of Louvain began. The medieval city on the road from Liège to Brussels was renowned …
WWI : 140,000 French Casualties; The French Master Plan Lies in Ruins
“During the Battle of the Frontiers … 70 French divisions, or about 1,250,000 men, were in combat at different times …
WW I: Children of Enemies Connect
A very nice article in the NY Times. Nicole Clark, who reports for the Times from Paris, recently retrieved her …
WW I: German Reprisals Against Belgian Civilians
“On August 23 placards signed by (German) General von Bülow were posted in Liège, Belgium, announcing that the people of …