Last Stands: How I Take Notes When Reading a Book (1)

Granted, nobody asked me, but below I will give you an example of the way that I take notes when perusing a book, notes which I used in a post two months ago (Michael Walsh: "war may be hell but it is often necessary").

While looking through a book, I write down the page where there is information that, for a vast variety of reasons, I think is important and should be remembered. Following that, I divide the page in five sub-sections to quickly figure out later on in which part is the section I want to quote (t, tm, m, mb, b for top, top middle, middle, middle bottom, bottom, while n means note; originally I used c for center (i.e., middle), but that little squiggle proved sometimes hard to decipher later). 

Afterwards, I turn on my computer and open one of two Bookmarks documents (why two? see below), and then I go back to the book, find the page, and write down the quote, which is sometimes only a word or two and sometimes a couple of paragraphs or longer. If I added an exclamation mark in my notes, it is to remember to make the text bold. (There are often typos, as I am a writer, not a typist.)

Shortly after starting this, maybe 25-30 years ago or so, I also write down every chapter heading, tabbed and in bold, in order to better remember the context and also because the page numbers may not square with various editions of the book. 

It is strictly personal, and often I write down things so they can be quoted later — among other places, in this blog. I do not need to back to the book. I carry it with me in my laptop computer. I do not need to type the quote. I have done so already, months or years ago.

While reading Richard Harris's Pompeii — a novel I adored and couldn't put down and highly recommend — I only made one single note, because I found the information quite astounding. 

Pompeii

by Robert Harris

110  A stink of urine from the laundry opposite, with pots left on the pavement for passers-by to piss in (nothing cleaned clothes as well as human piss).

I usually do not use this method while reading novels — something I do less and less in any case — but I also had half a dozen notes for Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire (by the choice of quotation marks, you can see that it is a British edition of the novel — also highly recommended).

Gates of Fire

by Steven Pressfield

342  'Why is it in war you can't fall asleep when you want to and can't stay awake when you have to?'

352  The youth snapped to, blinking like a boy awaking from a nightmare

379  In that initial instant of salvation, however temporary all knew it must be, a flush of supreme joy had flooded over the allied camp Simultaneously a second wave of emotion coursed through the camp.  This was of piety.

388  The stink of blood and death rose with such palpable horror that the asses of the supply train bawled all night and could not be quietened

441  The earth where the deer had taken shelter was dry, crushed and matted where the herd had lain, flank-to-flank Ball Player assumed a stance to urinate.  'Don't,' Alexandros nudged him.  'Or the deer will never use this nest again.'  'What's that to you?'  'Piss down the slope, ' Dienekes commanded.

455-456  discipline

493  'I am sorry for them,' he avowed, indicating the valiant foemen who stood so proximitaly across.  'What wouldn't they give, the noblest among them, to stand with here with us now?'

524  names of authors.

Some of the books, like Paul Johnson's or Antony Beevor's, have 20 pages of notes or more. A three-year-old post (Stalin's Death at 70: Some Mind-Boggling Revelations About Stalin, World War II, and a Century of Russian History) was heavily influenced by my notes from Beevor's The Second World War while two previous posts from two or three years ago were almost entirely based on excerpts from Johnson's Modern Times (A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s) (1. "Hitler remained to the end a socialist" (the Führer "was totally irreligious and" wanted to hang the Pope in St Peter's Square) and 2. In Spain in 1937 and 1938, many thousands of Leftists of all descriptions, were executed or tortured to death in Communist prisons (one who escaped was George Orwell)). 

How many books am I now "carrying" around with me on my laptop? Well, let me put it this way: years ago, my Bookmarks document got so long that it crashed and — to my great distress — became impossible to open, and I had to contact the publisher of the app (RagTime) for them to open it, sort it out, and divide it into two parts. Bookmarks 1 is now 539 pages long, while Bookmarks 2 is 1142 pages long. 

In the main example of this post, from Michael Walsh's Last Stands (Why Men Fight When All Is Lost), there are far more notes than in the two novels mentioned above — five full pages — but I didn't make any notes for chapters I and V — not because they were of no interest, but simply because it was a personal decision (there may be typos — their homnes p 224, Constantibnople p 338 — see pages 97, 290, 298, and 299 for text in bold). See page 334 for another piece of information that, although far from illogical, astounded me.

Last Stands

Why Men Fight When All Is Lost

by Michael Walsh

Introduction  To Die For

I  "Go Tell the Spartans"

The battle of Thermopylae (480 B.C.)

II  "Varus, Give Me Back My Legions"

Cannae (216 B.C. and the Teutoburg Forest (9 A.D.)

58  "It was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline that, a good soldier should dread his officers far more than the enemy" 

74  Today's West has precesiely the same problem.  We seek to bury our past for having the effrontery for not living up tke moral standars of the present — but what else do we inter with it?

III  "We Have It in Our Power to Die Honorably as Free Men"

Masada 73/74 A.D.) and Warsaw (1943)

95 n23  The term Nazi — an abbreviation of Natiionalsozialisten — was largely a term invented by the party's opponents, both a cognate to the term Sozi (a shortening of Sozialdemokrat — and a colloquial play on the Christian name Ignaz, a Bavarianism best translated as "bumpkin."  The National Socialists rarely referred to themselves as "Nazis."  The prromiscuous use of the word today is ahistorical and inaccurate.

97 n26  Although the National Socialists would occasionally pay some lip service to "God," they viewed Christians as little better than Jews, viewing the followers of the Jew Jesus as a very large and successful sect of Judaism.  Many pastors and priests died in the death camps.

IV  "We Have Come to Rue Your Prowess, Roland!"

The Battle of Ronceveaux Pass and La Chanson de Roland (778/1115)

112 n8  Although the Reconquista was not completed until 1492, it was well underway by the ninth century, when the most significant remaining Muslim stronghold was centered on the modern city of Saragossa near the Ebro river, which at the time of Hannibal had been the border between the Carthaginians and the Romans.  The Ebro was also a crucial battleground during the Spanish Civil War of the twentieth century.  The myth of a prolonged and beneficent Muslim "golden age" in Spain is exactly that

118   the main character was transformed from Roland, the warrior knight, into Orlando, the Latin lover

122  our notions of "right" and "left" (which are derived from the anti-clerical French Revolution) become increasingly meaningless

V  "Look at Me, I Am Still Alive"

The Battle of Hastings (1066)

VI  "I Must Perform Some Action Worthy of a Man"

The Last Stand of the Swiss Guard

144 n4  The homosexual, youth-molesting scandals of the contemporary Catholic Church are an inverted echo of this period, and may well result in a smilar schism, this time between observant Catholics who reject the "reforms" of Vatican II and the currenct curia.  Sedevacantism looms.

144-146  Luther was an avid heterosexual and fully enjoyed the perquisites of married love

In other words, Protestantism — in Germany, Switzerland, Englandm and elsewhere — was founded upon sexual freedom, if not to say license

Sooen enough, Switzerland, lake the rest of Europe, was split into Catholic and Protestand denominations.  The division would fester for nearly a century until it broke open into murderous hostility with the Thirty Years' War

As Western Rome fell, the power of the popes swelled

Prior to the end of the Western Empire, in 452, Leo I had ridden out to meet Attila the Hun

150-151  nothing approached the destruction visited upon the city [Rome] in 1527 — perhaps the least-remembered but most consequential event of the Renaissance.  It was, in its way, as consequential as the Sack of Constatinople by the Crusaders in 1204

In fact, this Sack of Rome brought an abrupt end to the Italian Renaissance, to the world of Michaelangelo and da Vinci and Julius II that had existed just a few decades before.  Rome's barbarian chickens had come home to roost at last, destroying the remnants of a two-thousand-year-old civilization in their baleful wake

VII  "Toady We Bring Dignity Upon Our Names"

The Siege of Szigetvár (1566)

163  the Hapsburg royal seat of Vienna the ultimate prize — the overland gateway into the heart of Christendom and thus a trophy of enormous symbolic importance to the Muslims, who had conquered the Eastern Roman Empire's capital of Constantinople little more than a century earlier

in 1529, Suleiman had laid siege to Vienna itself, lasting two weeks before ending in failure and withdrawal

168  Tiime and again in The Siege of Sziget, [Miklós Zrínyi (1620-1664)] remarks upon the faithlessbess of the Turks abd on the dire conequences that befell those Christians who tursted them.  Let one example, among many, suffice:

Foolish is he who believes the Turk's Oath, Especially if he entrusts his life to the Turks. A Turk considers it a sin to hold to his word, Especially if it is given to a Christian.

171 n  The number of Western women abducted into Muslim harems by the North African Barbary pirates between 1530 and 1780 is estimated at one million

176-177  How different it was back then!  It is hard for modern people to grasp the noise of war.  The guns on both sides, manned both by the Christians and the Muslim Janissaries, were (as guns are today) startingly loud, especially in an age in which there was no mand-made ambient noise to inure the ear.  The clang of metal on metal, the thump of spears and arrows into shields, and, above all, the screams of wounded and the dying, which lingered on long after the guns had beeen silenced, formed the aural backdrop to the warfare of this period

178-179  Having failed the previous year to take the Crusader island of Malta by the sea, Suleiman had no choice but to proceed overland and to sack the capital of the Hapsburgs and thus not only complete his conquest of the Christian outpost of Hungary but also open up all of Europe to the Crescent

n  During the Cold War, it was interesting and sobering to note that Vienna, in "neutral" Austria, lay considerably to the East of Soviet-occupied Prague — a wedge into the heart of the Soviet empire

VIII  "These Aren't Men, They Are Devils"

The Alamo (1836) and Camarón (1862)

185-186  What a difference between the British and Spanish/Portuguese approaches to colonization:  the British sent settlers, the Iberians sent caudillos.  It was a cultural mind-set that resolnates to this day.  Whereas the the British were determined to make the world England," the Spanish … were content to defeat the natives and thus do Western civilization a signal service by destroying the Aztec Empire in what is now Mexico.  And yet the Spanish never followed up on their victory in Mexico or the rest of Latin America.  To this day, the political class of most of South America is, or has been, largely white descendants of the Spanish arictocracy, with administrative and ethnic bona fides that keep the largely mestizo and/or former slave/mulatto populations in subordination.  If there is any "racism" in America, look to the south of the border for its origins.

The fact is that the Spanish model — the imposition of colonial governorship by Spaniards eager to return to the mother country after their tour of duty in the America, and an exploitation of the peoples and the natural resources of the colonies — was the worst possible model for  the Americas.

187  The loss of Texas rankled the newly independent Mexican government, but in many ways it had only itself to blame.  As noted, the Spanish colonized but did not settle.  Instead, they sailed across the Atlantic for plunder and booty to be spent on advancement back in the mother country.  Like the huge area known as Alta (Upper, as opposed to Baja, or Lower) California, Texas itself, for all its vast territorym was sparsely populated by whites, and Mexico needed more people in order to secure control of the lands contested by the Comanche Indians, who freely raided Mexican outposts.  The Mexican government, therefore, not only turned a blind eye to the influx of American settlers moving into the northern territories but also encouraged them at times  

196-197  Mexico was in the throes of a prolonged political crisis as well, brought on by its defeat in the war, which left it open to interference from its old colonoial master, Spain, and the French Bourbons under the emperor Maximilain.  The interplay and the rivalry between Spain and France regarding Mexico is largely forgotten today, but Napoleon, during his Peninsular War, deposed the Spanish monarchy and in 1808 installed his elder brother Joseph as the Iberian ruler for five years

The Spanish Bourbons were restored in 1813 and deposed again in 1868

203  The Alamo changed both Mexican and American history.  The Mexxicans would soon enough have cause to regret they had martyred the men at the Alamo, for vengenance was surely on the moinds of many American soldiers and sailors during the Mexcian War a decade later, when they blockaded the country on both coasts and then marched from Veracruz to Mexico City and forced a humliating peace and loss of considerable territory on Mexico el Norte

IX  "Lick 'Em Tomorrow, Though"

Grant at Shiloh (1862)

206 n1  Grant wrote in his Personal Memoirs, "It was a case of Southern dash against Northern pluck and endurance."

208  The tactical alliance of Grant and Foote is one of the most crucial of the war, and oft unsung

From his early days as a quartermaster during the Mexican War, Grant understood the importance of not only men but also materiel

X  "Big Village"

Custer at the Little Bighorn (1876)

222  Critics attribute his actionss to vainglory or buffoonery or a lack of military knowledge, yet in fact Custer was one of the finest tactical commanders of the Civil War, the darling of both the media and of his superior officer, Gen. Philip Sheridan, who wielded Custer as the instrument of his wrath upon the South.  Custer was many things, but an incompetent glory hound was not one of them

224  We have vivid accounts of the unpredictable brutality of the Indians fom survivors such as Lavina Eastlick; awakened on the morning of August 20, 1862, by a neighbor announcing that the Indians were killing the settlers in their [Minnesota] homnes at Lake Shetek, she, her husband, and their five sons fled.  Only Lavina and one of her children survived, as even the "friendly" Indians working the land turned on them.

"I could not find my children. … During the day I heard the children crying most of the time; sometimes I heard them screaming and crying. … No one can imagine my feelings.  I wished I could die.  I thought then, and I think now, that they were torturing the children.  It was a great punishment to hear tbe children crying and moaning under the cruel tortures of the Indians"

n4  Mrs. [Eastlick's story is anthologized in Captured by the Indians:  Fifteen First-hand Accounts, 1750-1870 (Dover Books, 1961).  Those who view the Indian wars as one-sided will have their illusions quickly disabused.  At the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Custer brought with him several souts, most of them Crows

227  In fact, many of the North American Indians sides with the wasichus — the white man.  As in Mexico and Central and South America, the dominant tribes were often cordially loathed by the native peoples they conquered

n9  Although the Sioux claimed the Black Hills and surrounding areas for themselves, in reality they had wrested them from other tribes; the Crows were among the dispossessed and therefore were natural enemies of the Lakota

XI  "Tell Everyone I Died Facing the Enemy"

Rorke's Drift (1879) and Khartoum (1885)

258  Confident as his well-trained trooops marched into Zululand, Chelmsford had split his force of some 2,500 — the same tactical mistake Custer had made at the Little Bighorn, and for much the same reason:  he thought the Africans would flee, and wanted to trap them

264  fire in three-rank volleys n 16 A legacy of the three-tiered Roman maniples, with troops from the rear constantly moving forward to spell the men at the front

265  their war cry:  Usutu!

268  the British had become ever more concerned about African slavery, which had been abolished throughout the empire in 1833 but which was still flourishing in Arab-controlled areas* where Islam met sub-Saharan black Africa

*n23  In the wake of their conquest of Roman Egypt, Muslim Arabs had attempted to subdue Christian Nubia — southern Egypt and the Sudan — but failed; however, under the term of truce, the Nubians were required to trade slaves for needed foodstuffs.  By the early sixteenth century, the Ottomans had conquered Nubia.  Henceforth, blacks were routinely captured and sold into slavery

284  Omdurman

The defeat was so decisive that there would be no further jihad for more than a hundred years, until on September 11, 2001, when the walls of the World Trade Center collapsed and the long, 1,400-year civilizational struggle between recrudescent Islam and the West commenced in earnest once again

XII  "Not One Step Back"

The Battle of Pavlov's House: Stalingrad, 1942

289  Socialism has long appealed to the Germans.  In Germania,  the historian Tacitus noted the Germans' relative (compared to the Romans, at least) lack of a hierarchy and their sense of community; practically from the beginning, it seems, the Germans have been fond of societies, brotherhoods, Gesellschaften.  Another charactereistic, as might call it today, is their enviromentalism:  Germans are the original tree-huggers

Hitler  a leftist appeal to a working class that might otherwise have been susceptible to Communism

290 n7  For a time, the Soviets even considered joining Germany, Italy, and their erstwhile enemy, Japan, as a member of the Axis!!!

291  The Russians were taken completely unawares.  Stalin had refused to believe intelligence reports that his ally was about to double-cross him, in part because he believed that Germany had learned a lesson from World War I — not to engage in a two-front war — and the two countries had become major trading partners

295 In preparation for the battle, Stalin had issued Order No. 227, which established the fighting principle of "Not One Step Back."  Further, the Soviet dictator refused to allow any of the 400,000 or so civilians to leave, on the theory that his soldiers would fight harder defending their countrymen instead of empty buildings.  Under this directive, penal battalions composed of soldiers who had been court-martialed were sent immediately to front lines, and uuits were created in the rear with orders to shoot all deserters and cowards

The Soviets had held Moscow, and, so far, Leningrad was surviving one of the bitterest sieges in history, but Stalin understood — as Hitler came to — that Stalingrad would be the most important of the three German objectives.  It would be, of necessity, the Soviets' last stand

298  the propaganda value of Stalingrad was one of the foremost considerations during the conduct of the battle itself, on both sides.  Two stubborn socialist dictators dug in their heels

the Third Reich, the successor to Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire and the Wilhelmine Empire of Otto von Bismarck  the moral destruction of the most civilized country in Europe (whose sophistication had always just barely concealed the barbarism beneath)

n  The more reversals the Germans suffered near the end of the war, the faster the Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, Russian prisoners of war, and gypsies were murdered

299  91,000 Germans were taken prisoner, and only 5,000 were repatriated after the war

the Soviet commander, Marshal Vasily … Chuikov was in Berlin during the final surrender on May 1, 1945.  The chief of the German General Staff, Hans Krebs, crossed the lines to greet his Soviet counterpart with typical German arrogance but socialist solidarity:  "Today is the first of May, a great holiday for our two nations," he said.  At the end of the war, Krebs was still boasting of the ideological ties that bound the National Socialist German Workers Party with Soviet Communism:  the rights of the working class.

Chuikov responded:  "We have a great holiday today.  How things are with you over there it is less easy to say."

Epilogue  "Iron Mike"

The Chosin Reservoir, 1950

304-306  war may be hell but it is often necessary.  This may be regrettable, but unless one is a member of a suicide cult, it does neither an individual nor a nation any good to deny.  In our iconoclastioc era, in which a segment of the American population thinnks it is somehow cathartic to tear down statues of great men of the past because they lacked the foresight  to see how their actions and attitudes might play out hundreds or even thousands of years in the future, there can be no disagreement with transitory orthodoxy.  The animated warriors of the "social justice" movement are quite brave when confronting inanimate objects; one wonders how far this bravado would extend to an existential threat.  Let's hope we never have to find out, although one suspects they would suddenly discover the joys of conscientious objection, or a "Higher loyalty" to nonviolence over their preferred goal of international, borderless brotherhood. 

The Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed in Paris in 1928, its signatories to renounce war  Eleven years later, World War II borke out, bound the treaty nugatory and rendering resulting in the disappearance of several of the signatories

Contemporary pacifists and feminists will argue that war is the result of "toxic masculinity," and that in a female-dominated world disputes will be amicably settled by tribal councils of conciliation and jawboning.  Why, then, are contemporarty feminists so adamant about women in the military?  Why do they insist, against all historical and empirical evidence, that women are the equals of men in every respect, including physical strength and and the nature of their enotions?  Their ideal, the now-obsolete United Nations, is a monument on the East River to the naïveté of Kellogg-Briand.  What has the UN brought us?  Wars that drag on forever with "peacekeepers" in blue helmets there to referee, a bloated bureaucracy occupying valuable Manhattan real estate, and outbreaks of rape and exploitation in various hot zones around the world.  Winston Churchill never said anything stupider than "jaw-jaw is better than war-war" — rich coming from a man who also said (of his experience on the North-West Frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan), "Nothing on life is so exhilarating than to be shot at without result."

Santayana's oft-quoted aphorism, "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it," is in a way supererogatory; the past will recur whether we remember it or not.  Remembering it and learning from it, however, at least gives us a fighting chance.

319  The safest and best thing is to do your job.  If you do, you might get killed, but if you don't, you will get killed.  The surprising truth is, most men are not killed in battle.  In any enumeration of casualties, the number of wounded and missing outnumber deaths on the field.  One's chances of survigin any given battle are actually relatively good; disease, or a wound that might otherwise have been attende to and thus rendered nonfatal, is usually the Grim Reaper

320  Few civilans understand how loud war is.  The shell-shocked veterans of the Somme were not reacting to the carnage so much as to the ear-splitting noise produced by the big guns and personal firearms.  It is literally deafening, which is why shooters on a gun range are forced to wear ear protection during target practice.

322  In the freezing conditions, the Marines stacked the dead bodies of the Chinese to use them as both breastworks and windbreaks.  Many of the Chinese had essentially frozen alive, the only sign of life being their moving eyeballs  The Marines shot them.  They relieved the dead of any    usable clothing and unspent ammunition

323 n  In general, and despite what you see in the movies, Marine officers don't use four-letter words

Extracts

Polybius, The Histories, Vol. 6:

334  [the head of the javelin] is a span long hammered out to such a fine edge that it is necessarily bent by the first impact, and the enemy is unable to return it.  If this were not so, the missile would be available for both sides

Urban II at Clermont:

338-339  From the confines of  Jerusalem and the city of Constantibnople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequenltly been brought to our ears, namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation forsooth which has not directed its heart and has not entrusted its spirit to God, has invaded the lands of these Christians and has depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire; it has led a part of the captives into its own country, and a part it has destroyed by cruel tortures; it has either entirely destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own religion.  They destroy the altars, after having defiled them with their uncleanliness.  They circumcise the Christians, and the blood of the circumcision they either spread upon the altars or pour into the vases of the baptismal font.  When they wish to torture people by a base death, they perforate their navels, and dragging forth the extremity of the intestines, bid it to a stake; then with flogging they lead the victim around until the viscera having gushed forth the victim falls prostate upon the ground

The kingdom of the Greeks 

But if you are hindered by love of children, parents and wives, remember what the Lord says in the Gospel, "He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me."  [Matthhew 10:37]

340  That land which as the Scripture says "floweth with milk and honey," was given by God          into the possession of the children of Israel.  Jerusalem is the navel of the world