Why Didn’t Napoleon Invade England?

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Between 1803 and 1805, Napoleon started planning for the invasion of England. His planning was financed by the sale of the Louisiana Purchase to the fledgling American Republic. Yet, the invasion never took place. Why?

According to Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, a French diplomat close to him, when asked why the invasion was called off, Bonaparte replied:

A great battle will be fought, which I shall gain; but I must count upon 30,000 men killed, wounded or taken prisoners. If I march on London a second battle will be fought. I shall suppose myself again victorious. But what shall I do in London with an army reduced three/fourths and without hope of reinforcements. It would be madness.

It is unfortunate that Napoleon did not apply the same reasoning in his invasion of Russia a few years later. There is a famous chart which shows graphically what happened to the French forces on the way to Moscow (shown in brown) and during the retreat (shown in black). The thickness of the line graphically illustrates the truth of Napoleon’s decision not to invade Britain.

Charles Minard’s Famous Graph of the Failure of Napoleon’s Russian Invasion

Somehow, over a period of some few years, did Napoleon’s military ability suddenly vanish?

Filament Filament Filament

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Walt Whitman (1819-1892) finds a beautiful metaphor for the questing human soul, namely: a spider constructing his web.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them.
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Yvette’s Children

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Humanitarian Yvette Pierpaoli (1938-1999)

Humanitarians tend to come off as pretty insufferable people. British author John le Carré (a.k.a. David Cornwell) tells of one who had a sense of humor. The story is told in le Carré’s The Pigeon Tunnel, an autobiographical work that traces the real-life antecedents of the characters in his books. This one tells of Yvette Pierpaoli’s efforts to save Cambodian children during the Khmer Rouge atrocities.

I made a couple more journeys to Phnom Penh before the city finally fell. By the time I left for the last time, the Indian shopkeepers and the girls in their rickshaws were shaping to be the last to get out: the traders because the greater the shortages, the higher the prices; the girls because in their innocence they believed their services would be in demand whoever won. In the event, they were recruited to the Khmer Rouge, or died of deprivation in the killing fields. From Saigon, as it still was, I had written to Graham Greene to tell him that I had reread The Quiet American, and that it stood up wonderfully. Improbably the letter reached him, and he wrote back urging me to visit the museum in Phnom Penh and admire the bowler hat with ostrich feathers with which Khmer kings had been crowned. I had to tell him that not only was there no bowler hat; there was no museum any more.

Yvette has become the subject of many wild tales, some apocryphal but many, despite their improbability, true. My favourite, which I heard from her own mouth—not always a guarantee of veracity—tells how in Phnom Penh’s final days she marched a troop of orphaned Khmer children into the French Consulate and demanded passports, one for each child.

“But whose children are they?” the besieged consular official protested.

“They are mine. I am their mother.”

“But they’re all the same age!”

“And I had many quadruplets, you idiot!”

Defeated, perhaps complicit, the Consul demanded to know their names. Yvette reeled them off: “Lundi, Mardi, Mercredi, Jeudi, Vendredi …” [The names of the days of the week in French]

The Stage to Lordsburg

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Scene from John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939)

This morning. I watched John Ford’s Stagecoach for the nth time. It is a film I love, partly because it was the director’s first great Western and the film that made John Wayne a star. (Of course, Ford had been making Westerns since 1917, when he filmed Straight Shooting with Harry Carey, Senior.)

I particularly love the scenes at the beginning, when the full stagecoach is making its way with a cavalry escort to Apache Wells. The scenes were shot in Arizona’s Monument Valley, which Ford made famous with his films. Every one of the characters on the stagecoach is interesting and has his or her say, from John Wayne to Thomas Mitchell, John Carradine, George Bancroft, Berton Churchill, Andy Devine, to Claire Trevor and the lovely Louise Platt.

When the stagecoach is attacked by Apaches as it nears Lordsburg, the Indians are real Indians—mostly Navajos.

In the years to come, Ford made many more great westerns, films like My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache and Three Godfathers (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Wagon Master and Rio Grande (1950), The Searchers (1956), Sergeant Rutledge (1960), Two Rode Together (1961), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

John Ford received more best director Oscars than any one else, yet none of them were for a Western. One of those Westerns, The Searchers, is considered by many (including myself) to be the greatest film ever made. (Will I be watching the Oscars on March 15? Nope!)

I will continue watching John Ford’s Westerns again and again, and they will continue to amaze me.

Disability

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Early this week, I filled out an application for a handicapped parking placard and left it with my physician to fill out the info on my disabilities. It’s difficult to admit it, but I am a little wobbly on my pins. Years ago, I had hip replacement surgery; and, lately, my knees has resisted any attempt to stand up and walk normally. So now, at the age of eighty-one, I now regard myself as disabled. And it doesn’t look as if I’ll qualify for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

No matter. I realize I can no longer regard myself as a young man. In fact, I never really could. Ever since my brain tumor at the age of twenty-one, I have seen myself as somehow outside of time. Am I really over eighty years old? The numbers don’t lie, so I won’t either.

The only difference the handicapped placard will make is that parking will be much easier. I don’t mind walking a bit, but I hate having to walk three blocks to catch a train downtown from the Bundy-Exposition Station because construction workers building a giant condo complex are taking up all the non-handicapped spaces. And it will be nice not having to carry a roll of quarters in my car for parking meters. (In California, I can now park by any on-street parking meter without having to pay.)

Does that mean I am now officially an old fart?

Do It Again!

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British Writer G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

As a voracious reader of books, I have always had my strange little reading traditions. For example, in most years, I have usually read a couple of G. K. Chesterton’s books every February. This year was no different: Since February 1, I have read The Club of Queer Trades (1911) — a re-read, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (1911), and All I Survey (1933). Below is a quote from his book Orthodoxy (1908) in which he demonstrates, by the following quote, that he knows children as well as he knows God:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

The Politics of Tea

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Antique Thomas J. Lipton Tea Tin

I am one of those strange people who don’t like coffee. Since early childhood, I have been addicted to tea. In my days, I have probably consumed over seventy-five pounds of tea leaves. At the present time, I begin every morning with one large cup of Ceylon, Darjeeling, or Assam tea sweetened with honey and with a squeeze of lime.

Until I read Roy Moxham’s Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire (2003), I had no idea that the history of the tea trade was so bloody. In the eighteenth century, it even figured in a war fought by the British East India Company and the Empire of China. The Chinese lost and were forced to take Indian opium in trade for their finest tea. (Read Maurice Collis’s Foreign Mud for a fascinating account of the “Opium War.”)

To avoid dealing with the Chinese, the British finally decided to grow their own tea. They began in the northeastern Indian state of Assam and eventually spread to other parts of the subcontinent, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and Africa.

I knew that both green tea and black tea come from the same plant, the Camellia sinensis, or Chinese camellia. It is only in the way they are processed that the resulting beverage is green or black.

Fortunately, the early planters found that the tea plant was also native to Assam, and that it was not really necessary to import plants or seeds from China. It is from these plants in Assam that most tea plantings outside of China were derived.

Where the tea trade became particularly bloody was during the nineteenth century. The native populations of the tea-growing areas in India and Ceylon did not care to become indentured agricultural workers at a tea plantation. The result was that the owners of tea plantations had to import coolies from outside the area. The way these coolies were treated by the British tea growers was shameful, resulting in many thousands of deaths.

All so that I could drink a nice cup of tea in the morning!

Talking Politics at Home

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It Has Become Dangerous to Talk Politics, Even at Home

I learned the lesson early in life. My father, otherwise an excellent man whom I loved, was a member of the American Independent Party and a supporter of Alabama Governor George C. Wallace’s politics. There have been presidential elections when my mother, my father, and I voted for different presidential candidates. I got used to loving members of my family irrespective of their politics.

Then, in 1987, I fell in love with Martine Hedges. Born in France, Martine is a typical stubborn Norman, with what the French call a tête Normande, a “Norman head.”. When Martine takes a position, there is no moving her from it. As it happens, she is a Republican who supports many positions taken by Donald Trump.

Do Martine and I talk politics at home? Not unless we want the temperature in our apartment plummet to freezing. She knows my politics, and I know hers. ’Nuff said.

As a result of traveling extensively in South America to countries which have suffered through heinous dictatorships and bloody insurgencies, I have learned not to take positions. In Argentina, there was the rule of the generals and the “disappearances”; in Chile, there was the rightist rule of General Pinochet Ugarte; in Peru, there was the insurgency of the Sendero Luminoso, or the Shining Path; and in Uruguay there were the Tupamaros.

And now the United States has become one of those countries where talking politics could be dangerous. There are guns everywhere, usually in the hands of people who are mentally disturbed. Back in the 1960s, I actively participated in protests against the Vietnam War. At one time, I was in a protest on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles that was attacked by Cuban rightists who converted their signs to clubs and commenced cracking skulls. Now I prefer to be more peaceable.

Although I have strong feelings about politics, I don’t write much about them in my Tarnmoor blog. Why should I? My readers will have no trouble finding vituperative blogs of different shades of opinion. I would prefer to write more about things that interest me.

“A Snake in the North Pole”

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Chilean Poet Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003)

He died at the age of fifty in Barcelona, thousands of miles from home in Chile. I am currently reading a collection of his short stories issued under the title The Return. It made me look up some of his poetry, where I found the following:

My Literary Career

Rejections from Anagrama, Grijalbo, Planeta, certainly also from Alfaguara,
Mondadori. A no from Muchnik, Seix Barral, Destino … all the publishers … all the readers
All the sales managers …
Under the bridge, while it rains, a golden opportunity
to take a look at myself:
like a snake in the North Pole, but writing.
Writing poetry in the land of idiots.
Writing with my son on my knee.
Writing until night falls
with the thunder of a thousand demons.
The demons who will carry me to hell,
but writing.

The proper names in the first two lines are the names of publishing companies, mostly in Spain where Bolaño was living at the time.

Back from the Dead?

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Preacher Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944)

Many’s the time I drove past the Angelus Temple on Glendale Boulevard and wondered about its founder, the late Aimee Semple McPherson. She regularly packed the five thousand seats of the temple with her fiery preaching. Then, suddenly, in 1926, she was reported missing after swimming in the Pacific at Venice Beach. Feared drowned, she was reported quite alive in Douglas, Arizona a month later under highly suspicious circumstances.

You can read the story of her re-emergence in this article from Arizona Highways magazine.

Whatever the reason for her disappearing act, she is one of the reasons that Southern California got such a squirrely reputation in the 1920s. That and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust and Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. I always wanted to read a biography of Aimee, but never got around to it. Maybe next Thursday, when I go to the Central Library for one of my Mindful Meditation sessions. (Wait! Does that make me sound like a squirrely Southern Californian?)

McPherson’s Angelus Temple in Echo Park

The Angelus Temple built for McPherson’s International Church of the Foursquare Gospel is situated just north of Echo Park Lake, which was the shooting location for a number of Laurel & Hardy two-reelers, most notably “Men O’War” (1929).

Within a few hundred feet is my favorite French restaurant in Los Angeles: Taix, pronounced “Tex.” It was founded in 1927, during Aimee’s “second act,” and is due to close forever on March 29 of this year.