The Other Side

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An episode from the German trenches, August 1915, from artilleryman Herbert Sulzbach’s 1935 memoir With the German Guns:

One of the next starlit summer nights, a decent Landwehr chap came up suddenly and said to 2/Lt Reinhardt, ‘Sir, it’s that Frenchie over there singing again so wonderful.’ We stepped out of the dug-out into the trench, and quite incredibly, there was a marvellous tenor voice ringing out through the night with an aria from Rigoletto. The whole company were standing in the trench listening to the ‘enemy,’ and when he had finished, applauding so loud that the good Frenchman must certainly have heard it and is sure to have been moved by it in some way or other as much as we were by his wonderful singing.

“Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues,” wrote Henri Rabaud. “The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket.”

| History

Theater Reports

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In reviewing a Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the New York Times in 1970, Clive Barnes found “David Waller’s virile bottom particularly splendid.”

He’d intended to capitalize “bottom.”

In 1915, Woodrow Wilson escorted his fiancee, Edith Galt, to the theater. The Washington Post reported that he “spent most of his time entering Mrs. Galt.”

That should have read entertaining — though presumably she would have been entertained either way.

| Language

“‘Declined With Thanks’ in Chinese”

The following is said to be an exact translation of the letter sent by a Chinese editor to a would-be contributor whose manuscript he found it necessary to return: ‘Illustrious brother of the sun and moon: Behold thy servant prostrate before thy feet. I kowtow to thee, and beg that of thy graciousness thou mayst grant that I may speak and live. Thy honored manuscript has deigned to cast the light of its august countenance upon us. With raptures we have perused it. By the bones of my ancestors, never have I encountered such wit, such pathos, such lofty thought. With fear and trembling I return the writing. Were I to publish the treasure you sent me, the emperor would order that it should be made the standard and that none be published except such as equaled it. Knowing literature as I do, and that it would be impossible in ten thousand years to equal what you have done, I send your writing back. Ten thousand times I crave your pardon. Behold my head is at your feet. Do what you will. Your servant’s servant. The Editor.’

— The Literary World, March 23, 1895

| Literature · Society

Unquote

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“This is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.” — Admiral William D. Leahy to Harry Truman, 1945

| History

“Counting a Million in a Month”

The London Post says a wager came off, the terms of which were as follows. I will bet any man one hundred pounds, that he cannot make a million strokes, with pen and ink, within a month. They were not to be mere dots or scratches, but fair down strokes, such as form the child’s first lesson in writing. A gentleman accepted the challenge. The month allowed was the lunar month of only twenty-eight days; so that for the completion of the undertaking, an average of thirty-six thousand strokes a day was required. This, at sixty a minute, or three thousand six hundred an hour–and neither the human intellect nor the human hand can be expected to do more–would call for ten hours’ labor in every four and twenty. With a proper feeling of the respect due to the Sabbath, he determined to abstain from his work on the Sundays. By this determination he diminished by four days the period allowed him, and at the same time, by so doing, he increased the daily average of his strokes to upwards of forty-one thousand. On the first day he executed about fifty thousand strokes; on the second, nearly as many. But at length, after many days, the hand became stiff and weary, the wrist swollen, and it required the almost constant attendance of some assiduous relation or friend, to besprinkle it, without interrupting its progress over the paper, with a lotion calculated to relieve and invigorate it. On the twenty-third day, the million strokes, and some thousands over, were accomplished; and the piles of paper that exhibited them testified, that to the courageous heart, the willing hand and the energetic mind, hardly anything is impossible.

— Francis Channing Woodworth, American Miscellany of Entertaining Knowledge, 1852

| Oddities

Spine Appeal

Robert Benchley kept a special shelf of books that he favored for their titles:

  • Forty Thousand Sublime and Beautiful Thoughts
  • Success With Small Fruits
  • Keeping a Single Cow
  • Bicycling for Ladies
  • Diseases of the Sweet Potato
  • Talks on Manure
  • Ailments of the Leg

In a review of the New York City telephone directory, he wrote, “The weakness of plot is due to the great number of characters which clutter up the pages. The Russian school is responsible for this.”

| Literature

Blue Cold

On March 1, 1934, a scientist at New Hampshire’s already-odd Mount Washington observatory was digging in the snow before a garage when he was shocked to see that the holes he had dug “were promptly filled with deep blue light.”

Investigating, the man confirmed that the light could not be a “reflection from the sky or of bacteria collecting on the snow.” But no explanation was ever found, and no blue light has been reported since.

(Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 1934)

| Oddities