Short Story 47: Hour of Trust

Mo Holkar · 27 Dec 2012, 10:39 · from 2012-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: lists at ukg.co.uk (Mo Holkar)
Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 10:39:00 +0000
Subject: (urth) Short Story 47: Hour of Trust
In-Reply-To: <1356589897.7000.YahooMailClassic at web160702.mail.bf1.yahoo. com>
References: <1356589897.7000.YahooMailClassic at web160702.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <84279.15014.bm at smtp827.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>

At 06:31 27/12/2012, Marc wrote:
>  the Verdun family is named after a town near Normandy that saw 
> some fierce fighting in WWII, and it is possible that this is also 
> ironically invoked by his name, though he is very far from an ideal general.

Just on this point, I think the battle of Verdun (WWI, on the Western 
Front) is the primary reference for this character. The historical 
Verdun family is a red herring.

This battle is pretty much proverbial, on this side of the Atlantic 
at least, for the folly and waste of the war-of-attrition strategy.

At the time Wolfe was writing (although there's more recent doubt) it 
was believed that the German intention was not to gain the territory, 
but simply to cause as many French casualties as possible: in 
practice, they sustaned as many themselves. The two sides together 
lost approaching a million men.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Verdun

best wishes,

Mo

# ~ # ~ #

WolfeWiki -- a wiki about Gene Wolfe
http://www.wolfewiki.com/pmwiki/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net