Day 297: Crusade

Nearly a month into the war, the so-called Israeli problem was considerably less vexing in Riyadh and Washington than it had been in January. Delta Force and the SAS combed western Iraq with a fury that chased Scud missile crews into an ever-shrinking patch of desert near Al Qaim. Seventy-five to 150 counter-Scud sorties flew overhead every day. The Iraqis rarely fired now except when bad weather enhanced the concealment. From an average of five daily Scud launches during the first week of war, the attacks in the subsequent two weeks tapered off to fewer than one a day. Patriot launches diminished proportionately, and anxiety over the stockpile of PAC-2 missiles abated. (The Pentagon sent 120 new PAC-2s to Israel before resuming shipments to Saudi Arabia, much to CENTCOM’s irritation.)

Version 34, a new software package intended to correct Patriot’s proclivity for firing at false targets, arrived in Israel and Saudi Arabia on February 4. Israel, which commanded the six Patriot batteries on her soil, four of them operated by U.S. Army crews, had ordered all launchers switched from automatic to manual firing modes after the January 25 barrage in an effort to target only incoming warheads instead of debris. American air defense experts considered the order ill advised: men could not react as swiftly as computerized machines. Even so, the dispute seemed inconsequential, since the average warning time of incoming missiles, flashed to Tel Aviv from the Pentagon over the Hammer Rick line, had doubled from two or three minutes to five or six. In the American view — at least as it was publicly expressed —

Patriot was flawless. "The Patriot’s success, of course, is known to everyone," Schwarzkopf told the press. "It’s one hundred percent so far. Of thirty-three [Scuds] engaged, there have been thirty-three destroyed." In Tel Aviv and at the Israeli embassy in Washington, this gasconade was known as "the Patriot bullshit." The Israelis had a point. American claims were based largely on faith and wishful thinking. None of the twenty-one Patriot batteries in Saudi Arabia possessed "embedded data recorders," digital instruments capable of measuring precisely what occurred when a Patriot intercepted a Scud that had disintegrated at Mach six fifteen kilometers above the earth. That was because U.S. commanders feared the recorder equipment would interfere with missile operations. The Israelis, by contrast, had three recorders and a computerized system used to track all Scud fragments and analyze each engagement. Imperfect though they were, the Israeli data strongly suggested Patriot shortcomings.

This infirmity was hard for the Pentagon to admit. Having proclaimed Patriot a war hero, the Army was reluctant to pull its champion off the pedestal. (Not until more than a year after the war would the Army acknowledge that it had "high confidence" in only ten of the Scud kills proclaimed in Israel and Saudi Arabia; a subsequent study found that as few as 9 percent of engagements resulted in confirmed "warhead kills," although in other cases Patriots apparently knocked the Scuds off course or "dudded" the warheads.) Yet even the Israelis recognized the political and military utility in lauding the missile.

When an Israeli officer suggested publicly disclosing qualms about Patriot, Avraham Ben-Shoshan, the military attache in Washington, snapped, "You shut up. This is the best weapon we've got against the Scuds because it’s the only weapon. Why tell Saddam Hussein that it’s not working?"

In private conversations with the Americans, however, the Israelis showed no such reluctance. On February 4 at the defense ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv, Major General Avihu Ben-Nun, commander of the Israeli air force, confronted Colonel Lew Goldberg, head of the Pentagon’s Patriot management cell. "The Patriot doesn’t work," Ben-Nun declared bluntly. Of twelve Scud-Patriot engagements analyzed by the Israelis, at most only three warheads had been destroyed. Some Patriots had apparently caused damage by chasing Scud debris into the ground. "You ought to stop producing the Patriot until you fix it," the Israeli general added. "Sir, would you rather have nothing until we can produce something that’s perfect?" Goldberg replied. "Or would you rather have this, which is doing a large part of the job?" Ben-Nun responded with a scowl and a shrug. Two days later, back at the Pentagon, Goldberg presented the Army’s top generals with a briefing entitled "Israeli-Patriot Issues" and classified "Secret-Close Hold." On his first page, Goldberg quoted Ben-Nun: "System doesn’t work."

As if to prove the point, another Scud hit Tel Aviv on Saturday morning, February 9, damaging more than two hundred buildings and wounding twenty-seven Israelis. One flaming chunk of debris landed in the middle of a third-floor apartment; the tenant dialed the police and complained, "The missile’s in my living room and it’s burning my home down."

~~Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War -by- Rick Atkinson

Day 296: Peak : Secrets From The New Science of Expertise

One of the things that differentiates violin training from training in other areas—soccer, for example, or algebra—is that the set of skills expected of a violinist is quite standardized, as are many of the instruction techniques. Because most violin techniques are decades or even centuries old, the field has had the chance to zero in on the proper or “best” way to hold the violin, to move the hand during vibrato, to move the bow during spiccato, and so on. The various techniques may not be easy to master, but a student can be shown exactly what to do and how to do it.

All this means is that the violin students at the Universität der Künste Berlin offered a near-perfect opportunity to test the role that motivation plays in developing expert performance and, more generally, to identify what differentiates good performers from the very best.

To look for these differences, we interviewed each of the thirty student violinists in our study in great detail. We asked them about their musical histories—when they started studying music, who their teachers were, how many hours a week they spent in solitary practice at each age, what competitions they’d won, and so on. We asked them for their opinions on how important various activities were in improving their performance—practicing alone, practicing in a group, playing alone for fun, playing in a group for fun, performing solo, performing in a group, taking lessons, giving lessons, listening to music, studying music theory, and so on. We asked them how much effort these various activities required and how much immediate pleasure they got while they were doing them. We asked them to estimate how much time they’d spent on each of these activities during the previous week. Finally, because we were interested in how much time they’d spent on practice over the years, we asked them to estimate, for each year since they’d started to practice music, how many hours per week on average they had spent in solitary practice.

The thirty music students were also asked to keep daily diaries for each of the next seven days in which they would detail exactly how they’d spent their time. In the diaries, they recorded their activities in fifteen-minute increments: sleeping, eating, going to class, studying, practicing alone, practicing with others, performing, and so on. When they were done we had a detailed picture of how they’d spent their days as well as a very good idea of their practice histories.

The students from all three groups gave similar answers to most of our questions. The students pretty much all agreed, for instance, that solitary practice was the most important factor in improving their performance, followed by such things as practicing with others, taking lessons, performing (particularly in solo performance), listening to music, and studying music theory. Many of them also said that getting enough sleep was very important to their improvement. Because their practice was so intense, they needed to recharge their batteries with a full night’s sleep—and often an afternoon nap.

One of our most significant findings was that most factors the students had identified as being important to improvement were also seen as labor-intensive and not much fun; the only exceptions were listening to music and sleeping. Everyone from the very top students to the future music teachers agreed: improvement was hard, and they didn’t enjoy the work they did to improve. In short, there were no students who just loved to practice and thus needed less motivation than the others. These students were motivated to practice intensely and with full concentration because they saw such practice as essential to improving their performance.

The other crucial finding was that there was only one major difference among the three groups. This was the total number of hours that the students had devoted to solitary practice.

Using the students’ estimates of how many hours a week they’d practiced alone since they’d begun playing the violin, we calculated the total number of hours they’d spent practicing alone until age eighteen, the age at which they typically entered the music academy. Although memories are not always reliable, dedicated students of this sort generally set aside fixed periods to practice each day on a weekly schedule—and they do this beginning very early on in their music training—so we thought it likely that their retrospective estimates of how much time they had spent practicing at various ages would be relatively accurate.

We found that the best violin students had, on average, spent significantly more time than the better violin students had spent, and that the top two groups—better and best—had spent much more time on solitary practice than the music-education students. Specifically, the music-education students had practiced an average of 3,420 hours on the violin by the time they were eighteen, the better violin students had practiced an average of 5,301 hours, and the best violin students had practiced an average of 7,410 hours. Nobody had been slacking—even the least accomplished of the students had put in thousands of hours of practice, far more than anyone would have who played the violin just for fun—but these were clearly major differences in practice time.

Looking more closely, we found that the largest differences in practice time among the three groups of students had come in the preteen and teenage years. This is a particularly challenging time for young people to keep up their music practice because of the many interests that compete for their time—studying, shopping, hanging out with friends, partying, and so on. Our results indicated that those preteens and teens who could maintain and even increase their heavy practice schedule during these years ended up in the top group of violinists at the academy.

We also calculated estimated practice times for the middle-aged violinists working at the Berlin Philharmonic and the Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and we found that the time they had spent practicing before the age of eighteen—an average of 7,336 hours—was almost identical to what the best violin students in the music academy had reported.

There were a number of factors we did not include in our study that could have influenced—and indeed probably did influence—the skill levels of the violinists in the different groups. For instance, students who were lucky enough to have worked with exceptional teachers would likely have progressed more quickly than those with teachers who were just okay.

But two things were strikingly clear from the study: First, to become an excellent violinist requires several thousand hours of practice. We found no shortcuts and no “prodigies” who reached an expert level with relatively little practice. And, second, even among these gifted musicians—all of whom had been admitted to the best music academy in Germany—the violinists who had spent significantly more hours practicing their craft were on average more accomplished than those who had spent less time practicing.

~~Peak : Secrets From The New Science of Expertise -by- Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

Day 295: Moving Subjects, Moving Objects

Let us say you were in an Indian town at the onset of winter, and you had forgotten to pack a warm sweater. In all likelihood, all you would need to do was to get a taxi or rickshaw and ask the driver to take you to the ‘Tibetan sweater market’. Most drivers would immediately know where to go: to a market or a bunch of market stalls, built by Tibetan itinerant traders, where you would be able to choose from a wide range of sweaters to keep you warm. Since the 1980s, Tibetans in India have very successfully filled the economic niche of selling sweaters during the winter months. Their market stalls have become a fixture of the winter scenery in many towns all over India. For the Tibetan traders, this involves buying sweaters wholesale from Indian manufacturers and merchants in industrial centres such as Ludhiana and Delhi, and reselling them during the winter season on temporary markets in Indian cities and towns across the subcontinent. The traders themselves call this activity tshong, Tibetan for ‘business’.

The sweater business necessitates that Tibetan traders spend a significant part of the year outside their refugee settlements and in intensive engagement with the Indian host society. As the traders buy and sell sweaters, they operate inside Indian local economies and engage with Indian merchants and customers. In this chapter, I will examine how Tibetans build relationships and boundaries between themselves and Indians through trade interactions. The material objects of the trade – the sweaters bought, transported, stored, displayed, haggled over and sold – will take prominent place in the ethnographic narrative I will develop. In other words, this chapter traces the exchange and significance of sweaters in the Tibetan itinerant trade. It follows a commodity through various kinds of exchange to produce a social analysis, and could therefore be seen to follow in the analytic style of The Social Life of Things (Appadurai 1986). Similar to the contributions in that seminal volume, the value of the objects in question will be highly significant for my argument. In the present study, this value will appear mainly in the guise of risk and the techniques of its management. However, the sweaters as material objects are not merely placeholders of value and risk. They are also, and very importantly, things through which persons engage in social relations with each other. This perspective will allow me to discuss how Tibetan traders relate to Indians through the objects exchanged between them. I will show that, while the traders evaluate their relationships with merchants and customers in both positive and negative terms, the risk-management techniques employed in the trade are simultaneously based on and give rise to notions of trust. In a social field of marked ambivalence in which Tibetan traders may perceive themselves to be exploited, they nonetheless establish and express personal trust-based relationships with Indians through the exchange of sweaters. In the course of my argument, I will draw out the theoretical implications of this for our understanding of the social aspects of commodity exchange, and suggest that we may view the sweaters traded as objects which mediate agency. In conclusion, I will show that the idioms of trust and distrust connect exchange and belonging as two central concerns of Tibetan traders in the Indian diaspora.

Since the 1950s Tibetans have come to India as refugees, and today their number is estimated at over one hundred thousand. Of the first tens of thousands of Tibetans who came to India, the vast majority had been farmers who had relied on livestock and agriculture in Tibet. Since they had to leave land and animals behind, they lost the basis for their subsistence and lacked economic skills matching their new circumstances. Tibetan refugees arriving in India initially found homelessness and poverty, and the absence of economic opportunities which accorded with their skills and knowledge. The first economic foothold they gained was working on road construction sites in the northern states of India, where over twenty thousand Tibetan refugees were employed by the Indian government in just under a hundred road construction sites. Although Indians thought of Tibetans as physically suited to working in high-altitude mountainous terrain (Kharat 2003: 288), many of the Tibetans working in harsh conditions died of diseases or in landslides.

In this context, the business of selling sweaters during the colder winter months as street vendors outside Indian shops, or roaming through Indian villages, was initially discovered as an economic niche in the 1960s by a handful of Tibetan refugees from the province of Amdo (Lau 2007). As the practice proved to be lucrative, it spread among the Tibetan refugee population. From its humble beginnings, itinerant trade involving sweaters had by the late 1980s evolved into the main economic activity of Tibetans in India. In the estimation of my Tibetan informants, including officials of the Dalai Lama’s Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), most Tibetan households in India are today involved in the trade through one or more of their members. In many cases, the market stalls have been passed on from the original traders to their children, who are themselves now adults and continue the trade their parents first engaged in. Some of these second-generation traders bring their own children along in the school holidays, providing them with some first-hand trade experience and early insight into the functioning of the sweater market.

For a significant proportion of the Tibetan refugee population in India, then, the itinerant sweater trade takes central place in the annual calendar. The Tibetan traders leave their home settlements in October to start the trading season, selling sweaters on more or less makeshift markets or from roadside stalls in Indian towns, and most do not return home again until February or March the following year. They form transient communities, disbanding and reforming anew every year at their trade destination, where they are organized in market associations. These associations count the Tibetan traders of a particular market as their members and fulfil a number of functions, both as trade associations within Indian local economic contexts, and as new and democratic institutions regulating Tibetan sociality in the market (ibid.).

The particularity of the traders is clearly reflected in both Indian and Tibetan perceptions of Tibetans as sweater sellers. In India, the distinctive identification of named groups associated with a certain professional activity has long-standing roots. This idea is, of course, basic to the social ideology of caste. Although the particular idea of caste does not readily apply to Tibetan traders, Indian local economies have incorporated them as a named group of traders. For Tibetans themselves, however, the label of being sweater sellers has become intrinsically connected to their own understanding of their refugee identity. Although some Tibetans do work in a range of professions in India, from call-centre operators to academics, most of them stay in refugee settlements where economic opportunities are far and few between. They sell sweaters during the winter, and many are either involved in other petty trading activities or remain economically inactive for the rest of the year. Very often, this goes hand in hand with the assumption that they cannot choose another profession. In spite of evidence to the contrary, many of my informants would say: ‘We are refugees, therefore we have to do sweater business’. At first, this may seem like Tibetans exist in isolation from the Indian economy and larger society. But, as sweater sellers, Tibetans are in fact interacting closely with their Indian host society.

~~ESSAY :SWEATER BUSINESS: COMMODITY EXCHANGE AND THE MEDIATION OF AGENCY IN THE TIBETAN ITINERANT SWEATER TRADE IN INDIA -by- Timm Lau
~~Moving Subjects, Moving Objects: Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions -ed- Maruška Svašek

Day 294: Order Without Power

After 1890, anarchists made huge inroads into the unions, especially in the Latin American countries, developing an anarchist form of syndicalism called anarcho-syndicalism. This movement became very large and powerful, and for a time played a leading role in workers’ movements and social struggles. It had repercussions and impacts on the entire union movement in many countries. Except for the case of Spain, where the CNT remained active until the civil war, anarcho-syndicalism constituted a major force until its decline with the First World War.

The workers’ movement began to reorganize itself in Europe in the nineteenth century. Labor organization was rethought, and its practices repositioned in light of the new political, social, and economic conditions established through the Industrial Revolution. Numerous conceptualizations of syndicalism were advanced, often concurrently: reformist or revolutionary, linked to a political party or apolitical, internationalist or not, and so on. For example, the communists unsurprisingly wanted a syndicalism that was, according to Lenin, “a conveyor belt of party directives.”

Anarchists remained outside these debates for some time. In their view, the ad hoc and reformist nature of union struggles made them immediately incompatible with anarchist goals. Isn’t demanding a wage increase an implicit recognition of the right to hire and thus a perpetuation of wage slavery, as it was then commonly called? Isn’t demanding reform an implicit acknowledgment that the authorities have the right to grant it? If union action was only about seeking better working conditions and salaries, anarchists refused to enter into this logic. Moreover, syndicalism linked to a political party, even a socialist party, in their view inevitably degenerated into parliamentarianism and bourgeois and reformist policies.

However, a decision to get involved in the unions was made at the beginning of the 1890s. One of the most brilliant defenders of this position was Fernand Pelloutier (1867–1901), who died of exhaustion at age thirty-two. He remains, along with Émile Pouget and Rudolf Rocker, one of the most important activists and theorists of anarcho-syndicalism.

Pelloutier was convinced that anarchists should be active in the unions. Two things encouraged this course of action. The first was the failure of “propaganda by the deed,” which most workers and anarchist activists condemned. The second was that the split of the socialist ranks into diverse currents lent increasing credibility to an apolitical concept of syndicalism, opposed to any collaboration with the state. This was precisely the position promoted by the anarchists. Pelloutier was at first involved in the Bourses du travail (labor exchanges), created in 1893. These were meant to be a kind of workers’ equivalent to chambers of commerce, uniting all workers within a given territory. The labor exchanges were to become a space to learn direct action and self-liberation; they aimed to “monopolize all services for bettering the lot of the working class.” In addition to all the services directly related to work, there was a magazine, L’Ouvrier des deux mondes (The Worker from Two Worlds), and open universities. Pelloutier was in fact a great believer in education, stating that syndicalism should “educate to revolt” and provide the worker with “the science of his unhappiness.”

In 1895, the Confédération générale du travail (CGT; General Confederation of Labor) was founded at a congress in Limoges. Eighteen labor exchanges participated. Gradually a revolutionary concept of syndicalism gained ground, based on a double structure of unions uniting workers from the same sector at the national level, and the labor exchanges uniting workers from the same city. The CGT’s Ninth Congress adopted the famous Charter of Amiens (1906), which set out the principles, goals, and means of this direct-action syndicalism, rejecting the necessity and expediency of having intermediaries between bosses and workers. These free associations of free producers aimed to bring about the social revolution outside party politics. While they sought an improvement in the conditions of their members, this was only an aspect of their work. The ultimate goal of the unions was “the disappearance of the salary system and of bosses.” They believed that “the complete emancipation of workers can only be achieved by expropriating the capitalists.” After this expropriation, these groupings of struggle and resistance were destined to become “groupings of production and redistribution, the basis for social reorganization.” At that point, union members would naturally be “anti-vote” and “antiwar.”

The recommended means were sabotage (badly done work, breaking machines, etc); the oft-adopted practices of boycott and labeling (a symbol granted to an employer by a union in return for his commitment to social conventions); and striking, leading up to a general strike, the instrument of revolution. Pelloutier was able to cite Bakunin, Proudhon, and Kropotkin in support of anarcho-syndicalism. However, other anarchists remained hostile or at least reserved. During a famous debate between Malatesta and the young Pierre Monatte in Amsterdam in 1907, Malatesta proclaimed, “We must be wary of any unilateral action. Syndicalism, however excellent it may be for motivating the working class, can never be the sole method of anarchism.”
The conceptions and practices of revolutionary syndicalism greatly fueled the union movement in its beginnings, later losing out to reformist strategies. However, with the increasingly noticeable integration and institutionalization of the big labor confederations, wage earners are rediscovering the ideas and practice of direct-action syndicalism from the beginning of the century. This is owing to new tools of struggle, such as the coordinations of the 1980s (rail workers, nurses) and alternative unions (the SUD and CGT in France, the Cobas in Italy, the CNT in Spain, etc.).

~Order Without Power- An Introduction to Anarchism: History & Current Challenges -by- Normand Baillargeon

Day 293: Hardcore Zen

QUESTIONS ABOUT REINCARNATION inevitably come up at every one of Nishijima’s zazen retreats. In fact that was one of the first things that got me really cheezed off at Nishijima. Sometime during the second retreat of his I attended, several years before the attack of my demons, Nishijima made the sweeping statement that “Buddhists do not believe in reincarnation.”

What?! Richard Gere says Buddhists believe in reincarnation and so does that guy from the Beastie Boys not to mention nearly everyone else. “Of course Buddhists believe in reincarnation, you old goat! Millions of people all over the world who call themselves Buddhists believe very strongly in reincarnation.” I didn’t actually say this. I just sort of sat there with black smoke coming out of my ears. I did that a lot in those days.

We’re all scared of dying and we all want some kind of assurance that we’re going to live forever. Having a kindly old man in black robes tell you you’re going to be reborn after you die is pretty comforting. Plenty of old men in robes have made a good living that way. Nishijima’s stock answer assures that at least half of the participants at his retreats go home extremely unhappy. “There is no life after death,” he always says. “When you die, you never come back to life again.”

When Nishijima says Buddhism doesn’t accept reincarnation, arguments usually follow. But I’ve never once seen the old man back down.

It seems that for a lot of people today, Buddhism is the belief in reincarnation. There must be a hundred books at your local New Age book shop that give detailed explanations of how we move from life to life. Most of them cite the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a book accepted by many as a Buddhist scripture. You can find references to the idea of rebirth in pretty much any Buddhist sutra you choose to look at. Even Dogen’s Shobogenzo is packed full of stories of people dying here and being reborn somewhere else, or even as something else—a fox, for instance. Clearly, then, Nishijima must be wrong. Buddhists do believe in reincarnation.

Whenever anyone—and it has frequently been me—points this out to Nishijima, particularly in connection with his beloved Dogen, he will say that these stories are just based on old Indian mythology. They’re in there to add a little color to the piece. We were never meant to actually believe these people really, literally did die and get reborn somewhere else later. He likes to cite a chapter called “The Wholehearted Way” in the Shobogenzo, in which Dogen says the following about reincarnation:

According to that non-Buddhist view, there is one spiritual intelligence existing within our body. When this body dies, however, the spirit casts off the skin and is reborn. If we learn this view as the Buddha’s Dharma we are even more foolish than the person who grasps a tile or pebble thinking it to be a golden treasure.

The standard thing for me to do right here would be to to explain to you all of the ways in which the Buddhist idea of rebirth is completely different from the older Brahmanistic notion of transmigration. According to that theory of transmigration, there is a soul, an atman, that lives inside our bodies like a person renting an apartment. When the landlord, God, kicks the person out for making too much noise or not paying rent on time, the person moves to another building. We do not know if the soul gets its security deposit back, but I’m guessing that God pockets it and claims it was spent on cleaning and repairs. The Buddhist idea of rebirth, it is said, is a much more subtle view. There is no soul as such, the standard line goes on to say, but the conditions that created the body and mind you have now will continue after your death and manifest themselves as another form, perhaps another kind of sentient being, usually a human, in the future.

This idea ends up sounding like, “You do reincarnate, but you just don’t have a soul.” For years and years that’s exactly how I took it. After reading Philip Kapleau’s The Zen of Living and Dying in which he gives a very thorough and detailed explanation of why the Buddhist idea of rebirth is different from the usual idea of reincarnation I figured I had the whole thing down pat. Though Kapleau’s ideas are well presented and logical, I think the best answer to the question of what Zen people think about reincarnation goes like this:

A guy walks up to a Zen master and asks, “Is there life after death? The Zen Master says, “How should I know?” The guys replies indignantly, “Because you’re a Zen master!” “Yes,” says the Zen master, “but not a dead one.”

~~Hardcore Zen -by- Brad Warner

Day 292: Down Among the Dead Men

The body store leads directly from the entrance vestibule. It is a large room containing a huge fridge which can house twenty-eight bodies and is fronted by seven tall doors. Opposite these are some cupboards, with a bench top, as well as a sink and waste bins. Every time the porters bring a body into the mortuary, they fill in a sheet that lives on the bench top; it details who the deceased is, where they have come from and which fridge they have been put into, plus a few other facts for continuity. Graham consulted this, and then went to one of the seven fridge doors; when he opened it, I saw that behind it were four metal trays, one above the other, each supporting a full body bag.

He manoeuvred a hydraulic trolley on wheels in front of this, and then proceeded to raise it by pumping a lever energetically at the far end. When it was level with the third tray up, he dragged this out and I saw that it rolled along metal runners. On the outside of the white body bag was a clear plastic pocket containing the person’s details on a small beige-coloured cardboard label.

Graham removed the tag, opened the bag and checked it against similar tags that were tied around the dead person’s wrist and big toe. He did this in a matter-of-fact manner, as if he had done it a thousand times before. Graham is a man of average height, with a pure white head of hair and the cheeks you get from spending a long time out of doors. Very friendly, he is full of stories about everything which he tells in a deep, cosy voice bathed in a broad Gloucestershire accent; I felt very comfortable in his company from the word go. He has no airs or graces and talks a lot about how things have changed.

When Graham opened the large white body bag containing Mr Evans, I was shocked to see what lay before me. Mr Evans was an elderly gentleman, and I expected to see a body that looked as though it was at rest. What I did see was a frail old man with head tilted back, eyes staring wide and mouth gaping open. Graham noticed straight away that I was taken aback. He explained to me about the muscles in the jaw relaxing at death and making the mouth drop open, but not about the eyes and the arched neck. At that point, Clive came into the body store and said that Mr Evans was going for autopsy, so could we take him through to the post-mortem room and put him on the middle table?
...
Graham had stripped Mr Evans and placed a wooden block under the middle of his back so the torso was raised and the spine slightly curved to expose the neck. Graham checked the identification on Mr Evans against what was written on the postmortem request. Having satisfied himself that this was the right person, he told me that identification of the body is our most important responsibility; every so often the wrong body gets eviscerated, and what follows is a tidal wave of trouble. The next of kin, not surprisingly, tend to become upset when they discover what has happened. From the way he spoke, I guessed that he might have committed this sin in the past, but I did not want to pry further because it was obviously painful; however, it lodged at once in my head as something to avoid and something to be worried about.

Graham had a tray of instruments on the table with him, resting on Mr Evans’ legs. From this tray he took a knife; it was about the size of a table knife, but with a disposable blade that looked as though it would cut through steel. Graham placed the tip of this at the top of the torso, in the midline just below the Adam’s apple, and ran it down with a single, easy sweep to end just above the pubic hair. Sticking his fingers in a small, deeper incision that he had made in this slit just under the ribcage, he then cut down through a couple of layers of fat and muscle to expose the guts; he extended this down towards the feet so that all the abdominal organs were exposed. This done, he then began to gently retract the skin from the ribs, slicing it off with practised strokes of a knife laid flat to the ribs, so that within a couple of minutes Mr Evans’ skin was completely free of the front of his body, hanging away from it. It looked as if you would almost be able to zip him right back up.

He rinsed off his knife, which was apparently called a PM40, and replaced it in his tray. After that, he washed off any blood that was on the table, and was telling me about how some corpses ‘bleed’ more than others depending on how long they have been dead as he picked up what looked like a pair of small stainless steel garden shears. He opened them up and put the blades around the lowest of Mr Evans’ ribs on the right-hand side. He began to cut upwards, severing each rib with a crunch and then moving on up to the next until he reached the top; he did this on both sides, and thereby removed the front of the ribcage, pulling away a big triangle like a prehistoric crab. This exposed the heart, lungs and most of the liver. He placed the ‘crab’ to one side and moved down the table so that he was over Mr Evans’ bowels, which were fully exposed and waiting to be unravelled.

Next, Graham took a pair of scissors and cut through a piece of gut near the stomach. He tugged at the guts and began to unwind them, cutting as he did so through the fatty membrane that was holding them in place. Within a very few minutes, the bowels were lying in a stainless steel bowl at Mr Evans’ feet. While Graham was doing what he had done a hundred times before, I started to notice the smell. I stood thinking of what it reminded me of. Graham told me how he used to work in a slaughterhouse, and then it hit me. The smell was almost the same as in the butcher’s. By the time I had gathered my thoughts, Graham had loosened the remaining organs from the back of the opened torso – although I missed how he had done it – and he now had his PM40 up inside Mr Evans’ throat, busily working away under the skin, pushing the blade into the floor of the mouth. After a few moments he had cut through this and around the back of the tongue so that he was able to free the mouth and neck organs. What he did then was like some sort of gory magic trick; he pulled the tongue down through the throat, everything still intact, and then he continued to pull everything away from the spine – lungs, heart, liver, stomach, spleen, kidneys . . . It amazed me then – and still amazes me now – how all the organs are attached to each other.

By doing this, he had released all Mr Evans’ organs from his body, and was now holding what he told me was referred to as the ‘pluck’. Grasped firmly in Graham’s hand were Mr Evans’ neck structures, his tongue resting on Graham’s hand while suspended below was every other major organ except the gut and the brain. He placed all this in a second stainless steel bowl, and placed both of the bowls on the dissection bench ready for the pathologist. Graham got cleaned up and we both took off our protective equipment, changed into clean scrubs and went back to the office for coffee. Clive had already rung the pathologist, Dr Ed Burberry, who had told him he would be down at ten thirty to start, so we still had an hour before he was due to arrive. Graham and I took our drinks and went and sat under the canopy outside the double doors to the mortuary to have a smoke.


~~Down Among the Dead Men -by- Michelle Williams

Day 291: Imperial Requiem

At the same time as Russia was undergoing an existential supernova, the pattern of victory the Central powers were enjoying began to disintegrate. In April 1917, the United States entered the war on the side of the Entente, which informally changed its name to the Allies. The move had been in the works since a German submarine sank the Lusitania, a British cruise liner, in May 1915. More than one thousand civilians were killed, including a number of Americans. “No gentleman would kill so many women and children,” Wilhelm II embarrassedly told the American ambassador. In Austria, Emperor Charles I was under no illusions about what the entry of the Americans into the war meant. He told his wife, “Now it’s the end. If America comes in we are finished for good.” Along with their munitions and supplies, the Americans contributed nearly four million additional troops to the war effort. Within a few months, ten thousand new soldiers were arriving in France daily.

The sinking of the Lusitania and the subsequent entry of the United States into the war led to major political crisis in Germany. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg was forced to resign after coming under fire from the Reichstag’s Peace Resolution, a coalition of the Social Democrats, Progressives, and Centrists. Bethmann-Hollweg’s replacement was Georg Michaelis, Germany’s first nonaristocratic chancellor. He remained in office for only four months. On October 31, 1917, he too was forced to resign for his unwillingness to support the Reichstag’s peace initiatives. He was replaced by seventy-five-year-old Count Georg Hertling.

Emperor Charles had known since he was still an archduke that unless something was done to end the war, the damage to Austria-Hungary and the rest of Europe could be irreparable. As early as January 29, 1917, Zita’s two brothers Sixtus and Xavier met with their mother, the Duchess of Parma, in Switzerland to make preliminary and unofficial peace overtures. The emperor sent his old friend, Count Erdödy, to represent him at the meeting. In the Austrian foreign ministry there was some apprehension at the idea of Austria-Hungary pursuing a separate piece, since the alliance that bound it with the other Central powers was very close-knit. But the growing danger against monarchism, fueled by events in Russia, meant that peace might be the only way to save Austria-Hungary from its own revolution. In April, his foreign minister penned a prophetic note explaining that if “the monarchs of the Central Powers are unable to conclude peace in the next few months, the peoples will do so over their heads, and then the waves of revolution will sweep away everything for which our brothers and sons are still fighting and dying today.”

The appeals Charles made for peace through the usual diplomatic channels had failed. The only alternative he and Zita could think of to find a peaceful solution was to use the empress’s brother in the Belgian army—Prince Sixtus—to open the lines of communication with France. With his intellectual prowess, erudition, and reputation as a Renaissance man, Sixtus was the natural choice to act as a conduit between Vienna and Paris if there was to be any hope for peace. Raymond Poincaré, the French president, expressed interest in an article Sixtus had published in a French magazine that called for peace via Charles and Zita. The ensuing episode, which would ultimately help to topple Charles from the throne, would come to be known infamously as the Sixtus Affair.

In early 1917, Charles ordered his military attaché in Switzerland to look into making contact with Sixtus “in order to sound out the readiness for peace on the other side.” The emperor and empress of Austria’s peace initiatives were motivated not only by a desire to preserve their empire from any further losses but also to ally Austria with France and Britain against Germany. A British intelligence report from June 1917 cited that the “Emperor and Empress are entirely pro-French and pro-English. They are strongly anti-German and hate (a) the Kaiser (b) Prince Rupprecht [of Bavaria] both on political and private grounds. The Kaiser insulted the present Empress when she was young: Prince Rupprecht is a course [sic] dissolute Prussianised atheist who bullies the Emperor and Empress for their religious and moral principles.”

A memorandum written by Philippe Pétain, the French general in chief, to Paul Painlevé, the minister of war, shows that—at least at first—the French were willing to talk peace. The memo, dated August 4, 1917, highlights the desire on France’s part to limit German power in the postwar era.

The only enemy of France, the one danger in Europe is Prussia. The amendments to the constitutions of the other [German] governments are secondary factors as long as Prussia is not entirely and definitely vanquished and reduced to impotence. The Entente must therefore create an irremediably hostile power next to Prussia. It [the Entente] can achieve this through the Habsburgs by forming, with a bond of the personal union, a federation with a majority of Slavic states...

Once it became apparent that the French were on board and using the Duchess of Parma as a go-between, the empress convinced her brother to come to Laxenburg, a palace outside Vienna, for a secret meeting; Charles was uninvolved in the initial contact to give himself plausible deniability if needed. When Sixtus arrived on behalf of President Poincaré, he set the tone for the meeting by asking Charles Salomon, Poincaré’s political adviser, to join him. At the meeting, Sixtus pulled out a folded piece of paper from his pocket. It listed four points from the French government that were nonnegotiable for the peace talks to go forward. In no uncertain terms, if Austria wanted peace, France demanded the return of Alsace and Lorraine from Germany, which had been seized in the Franco-Prussian War; the restoration of Belgium’s independence; the guaranteed independence of Serbia; and the handover of Constantinople to Russia. Years later, Prince Sixtus wrote in his memoirs his impression of the initial peace negotiations.

The young Emperor was innocent of his predecessor’s faults and had come to the throne with only one desire, which was to put an end to the universal slaughter. He wished to play an untrammeled [sic] game, face to face with his associates and face to face with his enemies, in order to provoke a possibility and a necessity for peace. The Emperor Charles would have gone on further, for his duty clearly showed him that he could not uselessly sacrifice his people to the obstinacy of an ally [Germany] whose pride was causing his coming destruction.… a separate peace with Austria would have realised the principle object of the war. It would have brought about invincibly the submission of Bulgaria and Turkey. The facts of 1918 have proved how easy it would have been after 1917 to come to an understanding with these two powers. The war would have been concentrated on the French front and brought about the results obtained eighteen months later. The lives of thousands, nay millions of men would have been saved.

Upon leaving that first meeting, Sixtus obtained a guarantee from Count Ottokar Czernin, the Austrian foreign minister, that he was fully committed to the peace process. Ambitious, underhanded, tall, and with a gaunt face and deeply recessed eyes, Czernin was a vocal Germanophile who was committed to Austria-Hungary’s military alliance with the Hohenzollern Empire. There were even rumors that he was a German spy. All of these things made Sixtus very skeptical of his assurances, but he trusted Zita and Charles implicitly. It was enough for the peace process to go to stage two: examining the feasibility of France’s terms. Empress Zita recalled her husband’s reaction to the demands.

The return of Alsace-Lorraine was of course a French interest. But it was also one of the Emperor Charles’s, who was the head of the House of Lorraine. This family link of his with Lorraine was one reason why President Poincaré, who came from that province himself, had so much personal sympathy with the Emperor.

The four points that [were taken] back to Switzerland were personally drafted by the Emperor. It was still too early in his reign for him to have formed any close circle of advisers around him. As for the South Slav kingdom idea, I remember that he had pondered on this—and discussed it with several advisers and friends including my brothers—while he was heir-apparent and even earlier, before the war.… It was envisaged by the Emperor as part of his overall federalist solution.

Once Sixtus returned to France, a flurry of letters flew back and forth between him and Zita, to whom Charles had asked to speak on his behalf. It spoke volumes to the deep love the emperor and empress had for one another that Charles was able to trust his wife implicitly to speak for him. It was also hoped that should these negotiations ever be made public, it would appear as a woman asking her brother for help, not the emperor of Austria suing for peace.

~~Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires  -by- Justin C. Vovk