INNOCENCE LOST

 

I would have been on pins and needles after the decision had been made. It took an never ending 90 minutes to gather all the men and horses back into formation. They had been scattered because of the threat of an air attack.  But eventually they were formed up, again. And only then did the Aussies and their horses make the historic charge.

When  the Australian Fourth Light Horse Brigade advanced at the gallop they were not waving sabers but bayonets. Still it may have been one of the most successful cavalry charges in military history. It is also usually credited with being the very last. 

It was 31 October , 1917 – Halloween - when the British Army made a third attempt to break the Turkish line anchored on Gaza. They had a new General, 56 year old Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby, 

and a new plan. Instead of again attacking the barbed wire and trenches close to Gaza,  Allenby decided to try the other end of the Turkish defenses, at Beersheba. It was a similar choice to the sweeping left hook sent against Iraq forces in 1991: then, fast armored columns were supported by fleets of fuel trucks. But the limiting factor in 1917 was not gasoline but water. 

There have been wells at Beersheba as far back as the biblical Abraham. In 1917 there were 17 wells producing dependable potable water.  It was the wells which made the capture of the village vital for any army coming out of the Negev desert, because the weapon of maneuver in 1917 was not the tank but the horse.

It is simply astonishing that a prey animal, a grass eater, could be so powerful a weapon of war. Since 4000 B.C. humans have trained horses to assist in killing other humans and other horses. We have ridden their backs into close combat where Equus caballus was shot with arrows, pierced with spears and slashed with swords. 

And beginning in the 17th century, horses were then cut by shrapnel and surrounded by deafening gunfire and explosions. And what is most astonishing is that for a horse, such combat is much more frightening than for a human.

Horses have the largest eyes per body size of any land animal. The construction of those lovely huge eyes also gives them a field of vision of 350 degrees, far wider than a humans’. 

Humans hear in the range of 30 to 19,000 hertz. Horses, with their 180 degree rotating ears, giving them the equivalent of sound depth perception, hear 55 to 33,500 hertz.  In short, hoses can see and hear much more of the horrors on a battlefield more accurately than a human can.

And the sound of a rifle or pistol in their own riders’ hands is more frightening because it is closer. So given this higher level of horror why have horses joined us in war?

It has been pointed out that war horses actually lived much more happy lives than their pampered domesticated stabled pets of today because a war horse is constantly surrounded with other horses – a herd. 

An army is a strict hierarchical social structure that mimics the herd. Every combat maneuver used by cavalry is based on herd behavior. A column of horses willing follows the horse in front rather than run for safety alone, and a horse in a charge will run because all the other horses are running as well.

But the actual charge of Napoleonic cavalry (and the Australian Light Horsemen of 1917) was a good deal slower than the paintings might suggest. Sabers might be wildly waving and lances glinting in the sunlight, but charging horses do not slam into enemy troops at the end of a charge. 

The “shock” effect of a cavalry charge was more about human psychology then physical. No horse will 

ride onto spikes or spears, or even willingly ride down a human. Horses have no country, no national pride. They will defend young  members of their own herd, but not to the death.  They are aggressive only when they cannot escape. Running is freedom. Running is life. To a horse the very idea that "Into the valley of death rode the 600" is insanity, illogical and inconceivable. 

The 800 mounted men of the 11th and 12th regiments formed up to the east of Beersheba, behind a ridge. 

Their commander was Lieutenant Colonel William James Bourchier (above)  and he had trained his men to fight as mounted infantry.  

But this afternoon with their rifles slung across their backs and their bayonets gripped tightly in their right hands, they were pure cavalry, straight from the ancient steppes of Eastern Europe and the rolling fields of Belgium. They crossed the ridge line at 4:30pm,  in three waves at a trot, moving at about 8 miles an hour, with five meters between each horse.

The three lines advanced across the open desert toward the Turkish infantry trenches four miles away.  After a mile a battery of Austrian-Hungarian artillery (above) began to bark at them. Shells exploded just behind them as the Axis gunners tried in vain to adjust their range to match the horsemen’s advance.  About two miles out they broke into a canter, advancing now at about 15 miles an hour. 

The Turkish machine guns began to pepper the advancing cavalry. But most of the Turkish infantry were holding their fire, waiting for the horsemen to dismount and attack on foot. 

Instead, a half mile from the trenches, they broke into a gallop, and fell upon the stunned Turkish soldiers at 30 miles an hour.

Trooper Eric Elliot remembered, “It was the bravest, most awe inspiring sight I’ve ever witnessed ...the boys were wild-eyed and yelling their heads off.” And Trooper Vic Smith would write years later, “Of course we were scared, wishing to hell we weren’t there…But you couldn’t drop out and leave your mates to it; you had to keep going on.”  And the horses must have mimicked that same feeling.

In fact the Turkish infantry were so stunned by the cavalry’s audacity that they failed to adjust their sights and most of the Turkish rifle fire that finally began, went sailing over the horsemen’s heads. As the cavalry drew nearer their formation dissolved, which made it harder for the gunners to pick a target, 

And suddenly it seemed to the Turkish soldiers’ that their gun sights were filled with the barrel chests of charging horses, each carrying a screaming mad man directly at each Turkish private and corporal.

The Australian horses leapt across the first trench line. And many of the Turkish soldiers, brave men and determined, well led and well disciplined, threw down their rifles and ran away. To the horses, they were not charging into danger, but trying to escape it. And once over the first trench line, in fact they had. 

The Australian regiments carried the trench and the vital wells and the village beyond. The attack captured 38 officers, 700 men, 9 field guns and 3 machine guns and killed perhaps 500 Turkish soldiers. Many more Turkish soldiers, having run into the desert, came back to the wells over the next few days and surrendered. The cost for this triumph was 31 Australians troopers killed and 36 wounded, almost all of them in the fight for the trenches. 

By five-thirty the battle was over. The Turkish Gaza line had been turned. But so surprised and stunned were the victors themselves that it was almost another hour before anyone thought to send word back General Allenby at headquarters. Instead they took the time to enjoy the cool waters from the Wells of Beersheba. 

It is estimated that 70 horses died in the battle. And afterward an Australian trooper noted, “It was the horses that did it; those marvelous bloody horses.”

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FOOD FOR FUN

I celebrate the fifth of July, every year, because on the fifth of July in 1883 the U.S. government granted patent #278967. It was a formula of something that had never existed under the sun before, an invention that every one reading this has probably used at least once in the past year - and if you haven’t you have cheated yourself - even though their original idea was so successful it disguised the possibilities for fun.

The story begins with a pharmacist in London named Gustave Mellin. Like many other pharmacists of his day, Gustave was looking for a magic elixir that might make people healthy and which would surely make him rich. In the second half of the nineteenth century, all over Europe and America, ambitious young people were throwing chemicals into pots and kettles and selling the resultant concoctions to unsuspecting guinea pigs ....ah...customers. Some of these latter day alchemists just made people ill. A few killed people. And a very few got very rich.

It was an Atlanta pharmacist, Dr. John Pemberton, who cooked up Coke-a-Cola in his back yard in 1886. And Caleb Bradham of New Bern, North Carolina invented Pepsi Cola in his pharmacy during the summer of 1893. In Cincinnati in 1886 Robert Johnson, who had worked as a pharmacists’ apprentice, joined with his brothers James and Mead in forming Johnson and Johnson, to sell their inventions of band aids and first aid kits. 

But the guiding light for Gustave Mellin was Henri Nestle (above), a Swiss citizen who in 1867, made his reputation and his fortune by saving a premature infant with a recipe of powdered milk and ground up wheat. Nestle's formula released the proteins trapped in wheat by grinding it into a powder, and thus making them easier for the baby to digest. And, though Nestle and Mellin did not realize it yet, this also made it possible to transport the wheat and animal fat proteins over vast distances and store them for long periods.

Nestle sold his product by warning first time mothers that “impure milk is one of the chief causes of sickness among babies.” Which was absurd. Babies get sick because their immune systems aren't fully functional, yet. Or over functioning. But we're talking marketing, here, not science. And in London that other Swiss citizen, Gustav Mellin began selling his own version of Nestle's formula, which he inventively called “Mellin’s Food”.  

Mellin marketed his product with free samples, and a pseudo-scientific booklet convincing new mothers his formula was better for their babies than their own breast milk. God only knows how humans survived for the previous 2 million years without the powder.  Anyway, within a few years Mellin became Nestle’s principle competitor. And the success of Mellin attracted the attention of a young, dashing, handsome, ambitious and driven Englishman from the tiny village of Ruardean, in Gloucestershire.

James Horlick (above) began as an apprentice at the feet of the master, and what he learned from Mellin was that marketing was at least as important as the invention itself.  Probably more. But working for somebody else was no way to get rich, and in 1873 James quit his job and immigrated to America, to join his younger brother William (below) in Chicago. And James took with him a little something he had been working on.

In 1860, for the last time in history, the value of American agricultural goods was greater than the products from her factories. And amazingly this shift happened at same time that American farms were becoming the breadbasket of the world. Chief among this new bounty which was flooding the world markets was American wheat and rye. And that is why James and William Horlick had emigrated to America. See,  most of the world's capital for investment was still in England, but most of the world's cultivated plant protein was now in America. And within weeks after James arrived in Chicago the brothers set up J and W Horlicks to market their new wonder baby food, “Diastroid”.  Okay, the name needed a little work.

First, what William and James needed to make their wonder food was a community with cheap property values, a ready supply of clean water, an already industrialized work force, and easy access to their raw materials (wheat and rye) and to shipping routes, to get their product to their customers. They found just what they were looking 60 miles north of Chicago, where the Root River enters Lake Michigan, in Racine, Wisconsin.

The city had been incorporated in 1848 with a population of 3,000, and by 1870 was approaching 30,000, filling up with English, Danes, Czechs, Swedes and Norwegians. The foundation of the economy was the town’s harbor and rail connections.  Early on, Fanning Mills built heavy farm equipment here, including machines to separate the wheat and barley from its chaff, the slurry of which is called a malt. That created a pool of trained factory workers and the machines they used, which attracted Jerome Case who built his heavy equipment factory there, and S.C. Johnson who established his cleaning products factory in Racine.

So, in 1877 the Horlick brothers opened their single story factory in Racine, making "Horlick's Infant and  Invalids Food" and got ready to greet success. Okay, it was a little slow in coming. Oh, the baby formula business was doing okay, but it was by now a very competitive market and not the rocket to success that James had dreamed of along the banks of the River Wye, back in England. Still, in 1883, James’ preeminence in the field of baby food had been confirmed with a new patent, thus effectively limiting their competition in America.

In 1890 James returned to England to be closer to the money, and to handle the European marketing of their slowly growing infant cuisine empire.  In 1908 Horlick’s opened a new, much larger plant in Racine (above). And they just kept plugging away, searching for that marketing angle that would make them rich beyond their wildest dreams.

They thought they had hit the mark in 1909 when explorers Robert Peary (above), Amundsen and Scott all three pick Horlick’s product to supply protein for their assaults on the North and South Poles. Overnight Horlick's was in the forefront of the "health food" craze. And it remains a popular health food item to this day. That same year, 1909, the brothers opened a new plant in New Zealand, to supply mothers and explorers down under with portable protein. But that was not the advancement that changed human life, and made the brothers filthy. filthy rich.

That revolutionary event happened a few years later, It’s unclear who did it first, but my bet is that it was the new player on the stage. They were called "soda jerks" because in the early years they were required to jerk on the levers to dispense the carbonated water that was the main ingredient of their trade - soft drinks, as opposed to hard liquor.

But some conservative Christians even objected to young men and women spending their Sunday afternoons consuming "soft drinks" and frowned on the consumption of carbonation and caffeine on "the lords day", which is why the Ice Cream Sundae was invented, and the Malted Milk Shake - shaken not carbonated.  I doubt that it was an employee of Horlick who first made the discovery of the latter, else their name would have been enshrined in company legend. Besides, after all, it was a small step and may have been taken in several places at about about the same time.

Remember the Horlick formula was a concoction of dried ground wheat chaff,  just-sprouted barley malt and powdered milk, which was then mixed in water and or fresh milk at the point of use.

So let us just accept that some unknown genius added ice cream. After all, everything tastes better with ice cream, doesn't it? Except maybe green beans. And thus was born the malted milk shake.

I doubt that most people today realize that everything “malted” can only be made under license from Horlick’s, including malted milk, malted milk balls, malted tablets or disks and malted “shakes”. Malted is a flavor that is owned. It was invented. It does not appear naturally anywhere in nature.

It started out as baby food, then became a health food before it became an unhealthy treat of magical proportions. And it gave all those soda jerks something to serve with the ice cream Sundaes they had invented, because in the conservative core of middle America carbonated water was considered too racy a drink to be served on a Sunday.

But surely, before the judgment of God, the invention of the cold, frothy and thick Malted Milk Shake will count on the plus side for humanity come the judgment day.  I refuse to believe in a God who does not love malted milk shakes.

                                                - 30 - 

PLEDLEGING ALLEGIANCE

 

I hate to disappoint you, but Betsy Ross did not create the American flag. The creator was the lawyer, songwriter and author Frances Hopkinson, who, a year earlier, had signed the Declaration of Independence for New Jersey. 

We know it was Hopkinson (above) because he actually submitted two bills for his design work – the first one for about $18. But the stingy Continental Congress balked at paying that. So he lowered his price to “A quarter cask of Public Wine”; meaning, the cheap stuff. 

I think he was trying to make a point , but even then he didn’t get paid. The bureaucrats argued that Frances was already on salary, which meant they had already paid him for the design. He failed to pursue his case because he died in early May of 1791, during an epileptic seizure. But then, I don’t want to write a treatise on the vexillology of the American flag. I want to talk about the pledge of allegiance to it.

You see, the pledge was written as a sales gimmick to sell flags. This is pretty big business today, considering about 100 million American flags are currently sold every year. That’s enough profit to justify the formation of the “Flag Makers Association of America”, a lobby group required because American-made American flags are 30% more expensive than Chinese-made American flags. 

But I digress again because my point is that faith in capitalism requires a certain amount of rationalization, and profiting from the symbol of our nation is just another raison d'être. But that particular apolgia was part of the job description for another Frances.

In 1892 Frances Bellamy (above), who was a fired Baptist minister, was working as the publicity director for a Boston magazine called “The Youth’s Companion”.  He was also responsible for planning the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America,  for the National Education Association. And since the magazine had a nice side business going,  selling American flags to schools (their goal was to have one in every classroom),  Frances thought that a pledge for this special occasion would be an inexpensive way to increase the sale of flags. After all, you can’t pledge allegiance to the flag unless you have a flag.

His pledge, published in the 8 September, 1892 issue of the magazine (above), was just 23 words long and could be recited in less than 15 seconds - about the attention span of the average eight year old child. (And a 70 something year old man.)  And it originally went like this -  “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  On 29 October that pledge was first recited in American classrooms,  and at the opening of the Chicago Columbia Exposition. Like the Gettysburg address, Bellamy’s pledge was eloquent in its simplicity. But even Frances could not resist tampering with perfection. He added an unfortunate salute.

Well, it was called the Bellamy Salute, but he did not invent it. It was the brainstorm of  James Upham, junior editor of "The Youth’s Companion".  But it was Frances who laid out instructions for what I would call "a salute too far".  They read. “…At the words, “to my Flag,” the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, toward the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation.” Forty years later the extended arm salute would be preempted by Adolf Hitler, and thereafter tactfully dropped from the American pledge.

Not that people ever stopped trying to improve upon the pledge. In 1923 the America Legion, then made up mostly of veterans of World War One, the Spanish American War, and the Philippines Insurrection, decided that the phrase “my flag” was too open to interpretation. So they added an entire phrase, so there would be no confusion about what country we were talking about. The pledge now began, "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.” I guess calling it "my country" was too ambiguous.

In 1940, with a World War once again looming, the Hughes' Supreme Court (above) ruled that even Jehovah’s Witnesses could be required to stand at attention and recite the pledge in school, which the Witnesses had argued violated their faith.  On 22 June, 1943 Congress made the pledge the official pledge of allegiance to America - by law.  Because of that new law, the Supreme Court reversed itself, and the "lawful" pledge could no longer be compulsory for Jehovah Witnesses.

Then in 1951 the Knights of Columbus decided the words “Under God” were desperately needed in the pledge, and on “Flag Day”, 14  June, 1954, Congress made that addition official, as well.  The oath now officially reads “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”. The pledge was now 31 words long. And to be honest with you, I don’t think the longer version is any clearer. As a kid I always thought it was God that was indivisible, not the country. The pledge became something closer to the old joke about a camel being a horse designed by a committee.

Consider the oath, just as a piece of language. If the oath were to stop after the word “stands” we would have a simple sentence (“I pledge allegiance to the flag) with two modifying phrases (“of the United States of America”, and, “and to the Republic for which it stands”.) In this case the Republic is the modifier of the flag, which makes sense because the original intent was to sell flags; remember? Not the republic.

But that was not good enough for all those who honestly wanted to improve on the oath, to make it clearer, and avoid confusion and misunderstandings. I'm not sure how many misunderstandings there were, but you know what they say about cooks and broths - the more the better. Right? And this  kind of thinking produced four modifying prepositional phrases on top of the two we already had – making six in all.  How do six modifying phrases make anything clearer?

Besides, is love of country really that complicated? Does more detail actually make things clearer, or more confusing? It sounds as if those seeking more detail, are looking for an iron clad contract they can sue somebody over. Isn’t it enough if your lover says “I love you”?  Does adding a pre-nup increase or decrease your odds of ending up in divorce court?

I guess the basic question is, are you looking for an affirmation of love, or an affirmation of suspicion, giving your heart, or getting protection against having your heart broken? Because, you can’t have both, particularly when you are talking about love of a democracy, which is meaningless unless it is shared with others.  You can't force people into heaven. And you can't force them to love the same country you do. Not just the same trees and rivers and ideals. Nobody else is going to love your memories of what those trees, rivers and ideals mean to you.  Somethings you just have to a love that you share, on faith. Sometimes that's the whole point.

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