Ok, correction, I actually wrote 3000 words yesterday. Hypergraphia much?
And this morning, I spent a nontrivial amount of time reading about listening posts in trench warfare.
Interestingly, I thought the WWI chapters would be hard, but they’re coming out very smoothly.
Photographs featured in the 11th of Novemberˏ 1916 issue of The Graphic newspaper.
Quite the oddball bunch of pets and mascots. Here are some zoomed versions of my three favourites 😅
Looks like the soldier with the cat may have been giving it some butt pats on the back 🤭 my cat poses in the same way with her tail up like that. So adorable.
Photographs featured in the 4th of Novemberˏ 1914 issue of The Tatler newspaper. This section was a small one focused on the pets that some soldiers have.
That second picture is not helping my kitten fever at all 🥹 both of my little kittens are all grown up now. How tiny it is standing on his cap and his hand. Those soldiers probably doted on that kitten like no other.
Arsenic, much like lead, is a substance with many useful properties. It provides a brilliant green hue for paint, it kills bacteria as an antibiotic, alloys can be used in semiconductors and batteries, a lovely white glaze can be made for ceramic with it, and it’s a fantastically effective insecticide!
Oh, that last one may have been a hint.
The lovely emerald green color was one of arsenic’s biggest uses well before anyone figured out that it’s also incredibly toxic. Its brightness made it the popular replacement for the previous favorite formulation, Scheele’s Green, which was made with copper.
Scheele’s Green became unpopular as people found it was poisonous but more importantly, tended to darken over time as the copper arsenide oxidized. Therefore, Paris Green came into vogue, which was slightly more stable.
You’ll find Paris Green, or copper(II) acetate triarsenite, in many famous paintings from the 1800s. Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on la Grande Jatte is the prime example of pointillism, and its bright green hues come from arsenic.
It was also used in wallpaper. In the 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman, a woman goes gradually insane looking at the yellowish wallpaper of a room in which she is confined. But it’s entirely possible the wallpaper was also literally driving her insane, depending on its formulation!
This is because as the arsenic pigment degrades, it would off-gas. Mold and moisture accelerate the process, which releases arsine gas into the environment. Despite its high lethality, it was never used in World War I as a chemical weapon because it’s also very flammable and would be dangerous to anyone trying to deploy it.
If you can smell the garlic scent of arsine, you’re already enveloped by a more than lethal dose.
But hey, at least the paint has a nice green hue to it.
Somehow, in the mid-1800s, farmers found out that Paris Green paint was also great for killing agricultural pests, including the potato beetle and mice, and went about spraying down crops with it. I don’t think I can even comment on how good an idea that is in retrospect. But it is also the world’s first widely-used insecticide.
(Please, Sherwin-Williams, it’s time to rethink that “COVER THE EARTH” slogan)
But the color! The bright color made it great for clothes too, so factories were dedicated to dyeing fabrics with the nice green tint, with workers dipping their arm into the vat of arsenic-based dye to apply it.
As for its use in medicine, well.. I guess in the era before penicillin, you have to take what you can get. Arsenic defeats bacteria by breaking down their cell membranes. It just has some rather unfortunate side effect on the human as well.
So that’s why we stopped using arsenic to treat bacterial infections. What’s that? We might have to start using it again? Antibiotic resistance is getting too strong for current antibiotics so we’re considering doping them with arsenic to increase potency?
We’re in for a fun future.
If one of the great ministers or diplomats of the past - the ones on whom aspiring members of their countries’ foreign services were still told to model themselves, a Talleyrand or a Bismarck - had risen from their graves to observe the First World War, they would certainly have wondered why sensible statemen had not decided to settle the war by some compromise before it destroyed the world of 1914. We must also wonder. Most non-revolutionary and non-ideological wars of the past had not been waged as struggles to death or total exhaustion. In 1914 ideology was certainly not what divided the belligerents, except insofar as the war had to be fought on both sides by mobilizing public opinion, i.e. by claiming some profound challenge to accepted national values, such as Russian barbarism against German culture, French and British democracy against German absolutism, or the like. Moreover there were statesmen who recommended some kind of compromise settlement even outside Russia and Austria-Hungary which lobbied their Allies in this sense with increasing desperation as defeat drew near. Why, then, was the First World War waged by the leading powers on both sides as a zero sum game, i.e. as a war which could only be totally won or totally lost? The reason was that this war, unlike earlier wars, which were typically waged for limited and specifiable objects, was waged for unlimited ends. In the Age of Empire, politics and economics had fused. International political rivalry was modelled on economic growth and competition, but the characteristic feature of this was precisely that it had no limit. ‘The “natural frontiers” of Standard Oil, the Deutsche Bank or the De Beers Diamond Corporation were at the end of the universe, or rather at the limits of their capacity to expand.’
Eric Hobsbawm — The Age of Extremes 1914–1991
In May 1915, a bi-plane landed on Agar’s Plough at Eton College.
Described by Dickie Harington in a letter to his parents, he also wrote about the War work that boys were undertaking while at school. This included making shells in Slough.
“Considerable Grief”: Dead Bodies, Mortuary Science, and Repatriation after the Great War
The burial and repatriation practices of the world wars were the culmination of a longer history that had consolidated by the turn of the twentieth century. In the United States after the Civil War, the public increasingly expected the government to bury the dead, and national cemeteries proliferated.5 The War Department first practiced returning bodies during the Spanish-American War in 1898. By World War I, the War Department again accepted that similar arrangements needed to be made.
Kitchener Volunteers’ from the Leicestershire Regiment 1915. All wearing the simplified 1914 SD jacket and 1914 leather equipment and armed with the obsolete long 1895 Lee-Enfield rifles. (FTP)
“Le Son des Souvenirs” d'Oliver Hermanus avec Paul Mescal, Josh O'Connor, Molly Price, Raphael Sbarge, Tom Nelis et les participations d'Alessandro Bedetti, Emma Canning, Hadley Robinson et Chris Cooper, mars 2026.
4. Fav historical period: Edwardian hands down. Very into “what were the gays doing during WWI” but also the fashion, the music, the literature, all of it. But like to broaden that but also at the same time narrow it down even deeper the history of sexuality and sexual self conceptions from idk, around 1860 to about 1921. The birth of sexology if you will. Basically, if it could be the setting of a Merchant/Ivory film I’m into it.
24. Uuuuggggggggggghhhh so hard to pick just one. In my heart of hearts Robbie Ross, but that’s not underrated enough so I will say Roger Senhouse?? Or Michael Llewelyn Davies. Tie ig. Roger Senhouse being Lytton Stratchy’s sub and last sexual partner b4 dying and Michael Llewelyn Davies being “the real Peter Pan” ie the person who inspired Peter Pan but also just was a muse to so many people and it seems like everyone that met him fell in love with him and then fell apart without him (after his mysterious death by drowning with a possible lover): Bob Boothby, Roger Senhouse, Lytton Stratchy, Clive Burt, Edward Marjoribanks, L. P. Hartley, Arthur Bryant, Hugh Montgomery, Hugh Macnaghten, and many others. He also might’ve inspired Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. It’s insane. He became a muse to everyone who knew him and there’s so much art to show for it.
Step into the echoes of WWI through stories of courage, love, and loss. Discover Antony J Bell’s hauntingly human novels inspired by real lives left in history’s shadows.
👉 https://antonyjbell.com/
Explore WWI’s Operation Hush, an ambitious plan to break the grim stalemate on the Western Front by outflanking German trenches with an amphibious assault
Operation Hush: The WWI Planned Amphibious Assault Behind Germany’s Western Front Trenches
