Benedict Arnold was here

I had long forgotten -- if I ever knew -- that an invasion of Quebec was part of the Continental army strategy during the Revolutionary War.

The assault on Quebec City on December 31, 1775 was led by Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold, and was a failure. Montgomery was killed and Arnold's leg was shattered, but for some reason the fact that he reached Quebec at all was enough to earn him a promotion to general.

These plaques near the Place Royale commemorate the Canadian victory.

Armistice

This plaque is just off the Grand Place in Mons. It reads:

Mons was recaptured by the Canadian Corps on 11th November 1918: After fifty months of German occupation, freedom was restored to the city: Here was fired the last shot of the Great War.

One hundred years ago this morning.

Urban poetry

Since we've just passed the 100th anniversary of the U.S. entry into World War I, here's a tribute to one of the Yanks who went Over There, a statue in Dewitt Clinton Park in Manhattan.

What makes it true urban poetry though is that it gets the poetry part wrong -- the inscription from  In Flanders Fields is incorrect. It should be:

    If ye break faith with us who die
    We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
    In Flanders fields

That poem is one of the millions of random facts rattling around in my brain, taking up neurons that could be more productively used in remembering which server I saved those files on and what I need to pick up on the way home from work. When I was in sixth grade, we each had to pick a poem to memorize and recite for the class, and my friend Lizanne chose In Flanders Fields. (I recited a ghastly lyric called The Bridge Builder, and didn't realize that I was mispronouncing the word “chasm” until many years later. Just a couple of weeks ago on Big Little Lies, Reese Witherspoon's character corrected her ex-husband for pronouncing it exactly the way I used to. He was an unattractive character in general, but for a minute there he had my complete sympathy.)

Yes, I can still recite The Bridge Builder. And no, I won't.

Can you hear me now?

All these pictures of overhead lines reminded me of this wonderful photo in the Atlantic's World War I series: a German officer proudly demonstrating his mobile telephone.

I would have guessed that field telephones were a much later invention. Of course, the fact that it apparently required a minimum of four men trailing behind you laying out the cable (and presumably winding it all up again later) made it a little impractical for widespread use.

Welcome to the working week

Another from Alan Taylor's remarkable series of photographs from the First World War at The Atlantic. This photo, from the Library of Congress collection, shows women welders at the Lincoln Motor Car company in Detroit in 1918.

It's worth clicking on the photo to enlarge. And clicking on the link to look at the rest.

In Flanders Fields

If you can bear it, The Atlantic has a stunning set of photographs from World War I, the first in what will be a series of ten weekly photo essays for the upcoming 100th anniversary of the start of that awful war.

This muddy hellhole is Flanders, in 1918, from the Library of Congress collection. I memorized the poem In Flanders Fields in grammar school, and still know it by heart.

     Take up our quarrel with the foe:
     To you, from failing hands we throw
     the torch...

I could do quite an impressive performance of those lines when I was 11 years old, but I'd like to think we've learned something in the last hundred years and wouldn't fall for that recruiting poster jargon again. I sure would like to think so.