Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Sept 2024The S2-200 was developed by Louis Stange at the Rheinmetall company in Germany in the late 1920s. Because Germany was not allowed to be doing this sort of arms development at the time, Rheinmetall bought a controlling stake in the Swiss firm Solothurn AG, to make the product deniably Swiss. The gun itself is recoil operated, with a rotating locking collar connecting the bolt and barrel, rather like the Hotchkiss Portative. It was a design that had some early influence on the German MG34, although the German military declined to adopt it. Instead, it was taken into service in 8x56mm by both Austria (as the MG30) and Hungary (as the 31M). A third purchaser was El Salvador, which purchased 47 examples in 7x57mm caliber.
After the anschluss in 1938, the Austrian guns were integrated into the Wehrmacht, where they were primarily used by mountain troops. Hungary did later make a version in 7.92x57mm, designated the 43M.
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July 6, 2025
Steyr-Solothurn S2-200: the Austrian MG30 and Hungarian 31M
QotD: After the Bronze Age Collapse
The collapse itself has a certain drama — the tumbled ruins of monumental architecture, the skeletons and arrowheads amidst the rubble, the panicked requests for aid preserved in the archives of a society that lasted a few decades longer — but any sufficiently thorough collapse will leave few archaeological or historical traces of its aftermath. Civilization is in some sense defined as “stuff that leaves records”: monumental architecture, literacy, large-scale trade, specialist craft production, and so on. It’s much harder for us to know what was going on during an era when people are building with wood (instead of stone), or making pots at home out of lousy local clay (instead of in centralized and semi-industrial production centers), or relying on the oral tradition (instead of carving dynastic propaganda into the living cliff-face in friezes a thousand feet high). When we call these periods “Dark Ages”, we mean you can’t see anything when you look in.
But what surprised me most about After 1177 B.C. is how short this era was. In some places, anyway.
We have a vague picture of what happens after a civilizational collapse, but it’s been disproportionately influenced by two particularly dramatic examples: sub-Roman Britain and the Greek Dark Ages. This was perfectly sensible coming from the Anglo historians and archaeologists who have dominated the public conception of the field — after all, the only thing more interesting than the history of your own island is that of the classical world you’ve been studying since you got your first Latin grammar at age six — but it turns out that neither of these are the general rule. Foggy, faraway Britain, so reliant on imported goods and troops, was far more seriously impacted by the withdrawal of Rome than was most of the Empire and saw a longer and more significant reduction in cultural complexity, standards of living, average stature, and of course population. (Imagine what would happen to a Mars colony if the connections to the home planet stopped working.)
Greece after the fall of the Mycenaeans suffered an even more striking decline. As Austrian archaeologist Sigrid Deger-Jalkotzy summarizes:
The impressive palatial structures were not rebuilt, and very little of the representational arts and crafts of the palaces seems to have survived. The complex forms of political, social, and economic organization fell into oblivion. Palaces, kings, and royal families became matter for Greek myths. The art of writing was lost for centuries. In short, Greek civilization was reduced to the level of a prehistoric society.
The Greeks of the classical era had little conception that the Mycenaeans had even existed, let alone that they were their own ancestors: they retained a vague mythological tradition of past kings, but they attributed the few surviving Mycenaean structures to the work of cyclopes. In fact, the disconnect between the civilization of the Late Bronze Age and the later classical world was so great that until Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B, it was an open question whether the people responsible for the Lion Gate and the Treasury of Atreus were even Greeks at all. (The answer, in case you’re wondering, is yes: Linear B turns out to be a syllabic script for the most ancient attested form of Greek. It features a number of uniquely Greek words and deity names even in the limited surviving corpus. More recently, ancient DNA has confirmed the linguistic evidence: the classical Greeks were the descendants of the Mycenaeans.)1
But the more you look at the archaeological record, the more you can pick out signs of cultural continuity. Agricultural practices don’t seem to have changed much, nor did Mycenaean pottery styles, and the names and attributes of the gods preserved in Linear B are close if not identical to their forms as codified in Homer and Hesiod. Even the cyclopean architecture continued to provide shelter: the Mycenaean palace at Pylos was almost completely destroyed in the Collapse, but the few rooms that survived intact show signs of having been inhabited by squatters over the next century or two.
Homer too is chock full of details that turn out to be distant memories of the Mycenaean world, somehow preserved in the oral tradition until writing was reintroduced to Greece.2 For instance, he describes a kind of boar’s tusk helmet that, by his time, no one had worn for centuries, but which archaeologists have since regularly discovered in Mycenaean shaft graves throughout the Aegean. But my favorite example, which is of course linguistic, is the word for “king”: Homer describes Menelaus, Agamemnon, Odysseus and others with the word anax, which is recognizably the Linear B word 𐀷𐀙𐀏, wa-na-ka, used in the Bronze Age to describe the supreme rulers of the Mycenaean palatial societies. (The w sound was lost with the tragic death of the digamma.) By the classical era, however, anax had fallen out of use in preference for basileus (Linear B 𐀣𐀯𐀩𐀄, qa-si-re-u), which in the Mycenaean period had referred to a much lower-level chieftain.
This all paints an evocative picture of a post-apocalyptic world. You can imagine it transplanted to an American context, with the scattered survivors of some great cataclysm huddled around fires built in the corners of a crumbling Lincoln Memorial. You can picture them passing on stories of the great men of the past with their tall tube-shaped hats and the shiny black stones they carried in their pockets. And by the time this remnant rebuilt, they might well have forgotten the word “President” except as an archaism; after centuries of as a small-scale society, “Mayor” might become so deeply engrained as the highest title that two thousand years later they would still use it to refer to their emperor.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: After 1177 B.C., by Eric H. Cline”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-07-08.
1. It’s slightly more complicated than that, because of course it is; see here for more detail from Razib Khan.
2. A reasonable ballpark guess is that the poems traditionally attributed to Homer were composed in something like their current forms around 750 BC and written down for the first time shortly before 525 BC, although like the dating of Beowulf there’s a great deal of argument.
July 5, 2025
Surviving a Medieval Winter
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 4 Feb 2025Hearty wheat berry porridge thickened with egg yolks and tinted with saffron
City/Region: France
Time Period: c. 1300There was little in the way of fresh food during a medieval winter. Meat, if you could get it, was salted, brined, or smoked (or some combination of the three). During some particularly harsh winters in the beginning of the 1300s, rivers froze for months at a time, making it impossible for water-powered mills to grind wheat into flour.
At such a time, this hearty porridge would be just the ticket. Everyone ate frumenty during the Middle Ages, from royalty to peasants, though wealthier people would add expensive spices and sugar and serve it with venison.
This frumenty is made of whole wheat berries and is a rib-sticking, satisfying meal all by itself. The wheat berries retain some wonderful texture so that it’s not just a mush, and egg yolks add richness and flavor. It’s more flavorful than I thought it would be, but I’d add some cinnamon and sugar.
Formentee
Take wheat, prepare it, wash it very well, and cook it in water. When it is cooked, drain it. Take cow’s milk and bring it to a boil, add the wheat, and boil it again stirring frequently. Remove it from the fire, stir often, and add in plenty of beaten egg yolks, and it should not be too hot when they are added. Some people add spices, a little saffron and venison stock. It should be yellowish and quite thick.
— Le Viandier de Taillevent by Guillaume Tirel, c. 1300
QotD: Roman provinces under the Republic
While the Romans mostly improvise this system for just a handful of provinces – most of the basic patterns of Roman provincial governance develop in just the first four provinces1 – that system becomes the customary way Roman magistrates [consuls and praetors]and promagistrates [proconsuls and propraetors] handled the overseas provinces they were assigned to. Consequently, it was replicated over and over again through Rome’s steadily expanding empire. By the time the Republic collapses into the Empire, Rome will have not four provinces but fourteen; by the end of the reign of Augustus, as the Roman Empire largely took the borders it would mostly hold for the next four centuries, there were just under thirty provinces. Yet the way Rome will govern these provinces largely continued to hold to model established in the Republic, at least through to the Severan Dynasty (193-225 AD), if not further.
As a result, the improvised system the Romans developed for those first four provinces would end up being how the vast majority of people in the Roman empire would experience Roman governance.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Roman Republic 101, Addenda: The Provinces”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-11-03.
1. Sicily, Corsica et Sardinia, Nearer Spain and Further Spain, gained in the period from 241 to 197 and Rome’s only provinces until the addition of Macedonia in 147.
July 3, 2025
Bill Slim, the most forward-looking British commander of WW2
At The War Room, Dr. Robert Lyman explains how and why General (later Field Marshal) William Slim was able to turn around British and allied military fortunes in Burma and drive the Japanese out of India to their eventual defeat:
Field Marshal Sir William Slim (1891-1970), during his time as GOC XIVth Army.
Portrait by No. 9 Army Film & Photographic Unit via Wikimedia Commons.
“Burma and the Birth of Modern Warfare” is the subtitle to my 2004 book and PhD about General Slim’s command of the 14th Army in Burma during the last war, titled Slim, Master of War, a use of Sun Tzu’s description of a “heaven-born” commander. It may appear a rather grand claim, and perhaps it is, but the purpose of the subtitle reflects that fact that Slim’s conduct of operations in India and Burma in 1944 and 1945 represented an entirely new style of warfighting to that experienced by the British Army during the war. Instead of looking back to the lessons of World War One, Slim’s conduct of operations looked forward to reflect a style of warfare that would only be adopted as formal doctrine by the British Army in the 1980s. In the mid-1940s it remained alien to the vast bulk of similar British military experience and understanding.
My argument wasn’t that Slim was the best general who had ever commanded men in the history of warfare. That may or may not be true, but for the sake of my argument is irrelevant. My proposition, rather, is that:
Slim was the foremost British exponent in the Second World War of the “indirect approach” and that in his conduct of operations in 1944 and 1945 he provided a clear foreshadowing of “manoeuvre warfare”.
My idea, which first saw expression in my 2004 book, has been developed since then in my subsequent writings, including that of Japan’s Last Bid for Victory, which deals with the great events in the Assam and Manipur in 1944 (2011) and A War of Empires (2021). A major reason for the continuing amnesia in British military thinking about the warfighting characteristics of the Burma Campaign – apart from the fact that it is a long way to go for a staff ride – seems to be the fact that Slim’s style of warfighting remained largely alien to the British Army’s doctrinal precepts until the late 1980s. Until then, Slim’s strategic conceptions had been considered an aberration, and Slim himself regarded merely as the epitome of a fine military leader, and nothing more. Then, in a doctrinal revolution which began in the 1980s, the old firepower-based foundations – which themselves were largely a product of Montgomery’s approach to war in 1944 and 1945 – in which the supreme military virtue was the effective and coordinated application of force, were replaced. This revolution in doctrine and thinking about warfighting exchanged the old foundations with new ones based on an entirely different conception, that of manoeuvre at the operational level of war, in which notions of subtlety, guile and psychological dislocation came to be emphasised in an entirely new and refreshing way. My belief is that it was the effective and pragmatic employment of manoeuvre at the operational level of war by Slim in Burma that was the direct cause of the extraordinary victories the 14th Army achieved in 1944 and 1945 and which led to the two greatest defeats the Japanese Army suffered in the field in the Second World War, the first at Imphal-Kohima in India in 1944 and the second at Mandalay-Meiktila in Burma in 1945. My argument I suppose is that Slim’s exercise of command in Burma makes him not merely a fine example of a “manoeuvrist” commander but in actuality the template for modern manoeuvrist command.
[…]
First, the 14th Army was the only truly joint formation in the British armed forces during WW2. Nothing else, in North Africa, Italy or North-West Europe came close to it. Slim insisted on nothing less than full integration. Not only were headquarters joint, but operational and tactic delivery was also joint. At every level of command air and land headquarters were completely interlinked. I became convinced of this fact when I discovered that the RAF and the Army even shared messes! Strategic air transport, winning the air war, the operational reach and flexibility provided by air power underwrote Slim’s conception of battle, to the extent that the senior RAF officer in the theatre ruefully concluded in 1945, and I quote, that:
Slim was quicker to grasp the potentialities and value of air support in the jungles of Burma than most Air Force officers.
There was no snobbery and no shibboleths with Slim: if it worked, it was pressed into action.
[…]
Professor Dixon argues [in On the Psychology of Military Incompetence] that, unusually for a senior commander of his ilk in WW2, Slim was non-ethnocentric. He had no intrinsic prejudices about the virtues of one race over another. Slim, after all, was an officer of the Indian Army, and I have yet to come across any evidence that British regimental officers of the Indian Army regarded their soldiers in any way inferior to themselves. He was commonly known to those who served under him as “Uncle Bill” from the special affinity British troops had to him: the remarkable fact, however, was that at least 87% of his Army of several hundred thousand men recalled him as “Cha Cha Slim Sahib”: 14th Army was, after all, very largely Indian, Gurkha and West and East African. I certainly cannot think of any other Indian Army general who had such an impact on British troops. He became, of course, Chief of the Imperial General Staff following Field Marshal Montgomery, in 1948, which securely establishes this feat. On that note, I cannot conceive of “Uncle Bernard” when referring to Field Marshal Montgomery!
The Burma campaign was as much a struggle for mastery of logistics as it was a struggle for mastery on the battlefield, and it was about risk as much as it was about adherence to logistical principles. Slim had an implicit understanding of the constraints placed on warfare by the demands of logistics. Great efforts were made to increase the quantity of supplies to Burma. Railways were extended, roads built and surfaced, sunken ferries refloated and repaired, barges and rafts built for use on the numerous waterways. In this regard Archibald Nye, the VCIGS under Alan Brooke, regarded Slim’s mastery of logistics to be the most significant measure of his greatness as commander of 14 Army in Burma:
He never had enough to do what he had to do and this … is the measure of his greatness.
The practice of war in Burma by Slim was so startling in its modernity, and unlike any other pattern of warfighting by operational level British commanders in the war. My view of Slim as a commander can be interpreted at two levels. He was, first of all, a great commander and leader. Being a master of strategy, of logistics, of technical proficiency and so on are important in themselves when considering the nature of leadership in war, but by themselves they remain insufficient. Successful military command requires someone who can, through dint of personality and inspirational leadership, wield all of the components of fighting power together so that an extraordinary result transpires. What marks Slim out from the crowd was much more than just his winning of a succession of extraordinary battles. His strength lay in his ability to produce a decisive effect from scratch; to mould thousands of disparate individuals together into a single team with a single goal; to persuade a defeated army that it had the potential to turn the tables on their enemies; to master the complexities of terrain, climate and administrative deficiency so that self-help, resourcefulness and ingenuity could become as much prized as fighting skill. In these individual areas, and more, Slim proved the master. His genius for war was the consequence of his ability to bring together all of these elements to create an extraordinary result, the visible sign of which was the greatest defeat suffered by the Japanese on land during the Second World War.
“[T]he old Fleet Street … would not have foregone the pleasures of a story involving the words ‘prime minister’, ‘firebombings’ and ‘quartet of male models'”
Mark Steyn notes the amazing disinterest the British press has been showing for Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s recent firebombing “male model” troubles:
Sir Keir Starmer speaking to the media outside Number 10 Downing Street upon his appointment.
Picture by Kirsty O’Connor/ No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons.
Meanwhile, “Two-Teir Keir” gave an extraordinary interview to a friend from The Observer, in which he reveals that, other than his war on the remnants of UK free speech, he’s spent the last year getting everything wrong. It’s a weird and psychologically unhealthy confessional that one could not imagine from any of his predecessors, whether the wretched David Cameron or the Marquess of Salisbury. If you want the scoop, skip the lame-arse coverage from the decaying Spectator and go to my old chum Dan Wootton. The Speccie’s snoozeroo “gossip columnist” headlines his piece “Four lowlights from Starmer’s Observer interview“, yet fails to note the most intriguing lowlight of all.
Six weeks ago, Sir Keir gave a speech on immigration which, while being a statement of the bloody obvious two decades too late, nevertheless went further than anyone else of any consequence in British life has been prepared to go. Somewhat curiously, this speech came just a few hours after his car exploded and two houses of his were firebombed — for which three (at the time of writing) Ukrainian “male models” have been arrested. I would not wish to suggest the PM has a unique fascination with Ukrainian “male models”. A fourth man has since been arrested — a “male model” from Romania. Diversity is our happy ending! The words “male model” do not appear in The Observer‘s account:
In the small hours of 12 May this year, there was a firebomb attack on the Starmer family home in Kentish Town. His sister-in-law, who had been renting the house since he became prime minister, was upstairs with her partner when the front door was set alight. “She happened to still be awake,” Starmer says, “so she heard the noise and got the fire brigade. But it could have been a different story …”
The prime minister, who had arrived back from a three-day trip to Ukraine the night before, was due to unveil the government’s new immigration policy that morning. “It’s fair to say I wasn’t in the best state to make a big speech,” he says. “I was really, really worried. I almost said: ‘I won’t do the bloody press conference.’ Vic [Lady Starmer] was really shaken up as, in truth, was I. It was just a case of reading the words out and getting through it somehow …” – his voice trails off …
So Sir Keir has now disavowed the only non-bollocks thing he has ever said. He “deeply regrets” saying Britain risked becoming “an island of strangers”, but he only did so, he offers in mitigation, because he was stressed out by all the firebombing from the massed ranks of fetching Slav twinks congregated on his various doorsteps. Unlike the Speccie, my chum Dan Wootton has a nose for a story:
Lucy Connolly was fast-tracked into her gaol cell in nothing flat – because that was the priority of the British state. By comparison, the men who firebombed the Prime Minister’s car and houses will not appear in court until next April, because determining how a remarkable number of East European “models” with no English-language facility were sufficiently familiar with Sir Keir’s homes and car to firebomb them is not a priority. Presumably, by the time April rolls around, the boyish charmers will have been persuaded to do an Axel Rudakubana and cop a plea, so that no trial need be held at all.
Say what you like about the old Fleet Street, but they would not have foregone the pleasures of a story involving the words “prime minister”, “firebombings” and “quartet of male models”. The silence of The Spectator is very typical. If you subscribe to James Delingpole’s view that the increasingly bizarre individuals who make it to the top of the greasy pole — Starmer, Macron, Trudeau — are there because the people who really run the world have got kompromat on them (which is your basic Occam’s Razor), then terror cells of Donbass rent boys blowing up the PM’s motor is an obvious false-flag operation designed to discredit the general thesis …
Here’s the gist of it all, courtesy of another Bob Vylan crowdpleaser:
Heard you want your country back Ha! Shut the f*** up! Heard you want your country back
You can’t have that!
I’m Keir Starmer and I endorse this message. As I wrote
twenty years ago— whoops, no, thirty sodding years ago, a counter-culture has to have a culture to counter. And in Britain and elsewhere an old establishment has merely been supplanted by a new one with lousier tunes. It’s not “edgy” or “transgressive” if you’re live on the BBC’s biggest outlet at an event run by a bloke with a knighthood. The only true counter-culture is that identified by the pseudo-edgy ersatz-transgressive Sir Bob Vylan — the ones who want their country back. Ask Peter Lynch.Oh, wait, you can’t: He’s dead. Sir Keir Starmer and Jeremy Richardson KC killed him — because, in order to prevent you “harming” them, it is necessary for them to harm you.
Nicolas Romero, the inventor who introduced “Spag Bol” to England
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes describes the career of a most inventive man, Signior Nicolas Romero originally of Naples … maybe:
The British interpretation of Spaghetti Bolognese — widely known as “spag bol” — is a pasta dish with a meat and tomato sauce.
The person who tried to bring these coal balls or briquettes to London was one Nicolas Romero — a name that has been almost entirely and undeservedly forgotten. Indeed, the one other historian to have ever noticed a handful of his achievements was unable to find his first name. And so I get the pleasure of being able to give a few glimpses of his remarkable story for the first time in over four hundred years.
Nicolas Romero seems to have originally hailed from the Spanish Habsburg possessions in Italy, most probably Naples. He was personally acquainted with Cardinal Granvelle, who was the regent in Naples from 1570 to 1575, and may have been involved in the Spanish attack on Tunis in 1573-4, where he picked up some siege techniques used by the Ottoman Turks. Romero then moved to Spanish-ruled Milan, where he was apparently the close confidant of one “Dr Sirnige” or “Dr Siring” (as it sounded to an English ear), who received a hefty reward for discovering a “defensative” or preventative treatment against a plague that killed some 15% of the city’s population in 1576-8. Then, Romero appears to have gone to the Low Countries, much of which was in outright revolt against Spain, where he picked up the details of how coal balls were made at Liège.
Then, astonishingly, he suddenly switched sides. Perhaps having fallen afoul of the Inquisition, or perhaps having converted to Protestantism, from some point in the 1580s he was only ever involved with the manifold enemies of Spain. He moved to England, even partaking — and I suspect investing — in its unsuccessful invasion of Spanish-ruled Portugal in 1589, where he was captured and held in “a very cruel prison” for ten months until managing to escape.
Somehow making his way back to London, Romero there befriended the barrister, alchemy enthusiast, and wannabe inventor Hugh Plat. It was via Plat, who plied all of his acquaintances for their technological know-how, and recorded his sources in his manuscripts, that Romero introduced various innovations to England.
Romero told him of how mere bags of linen or canvas, when filled with whatever dirt or sand was to hand, could be used to instantly create a “musket-proof” trench — in essence, the modern sandbag — which had been used by the Turkish army in their successful siege of La Goleta near Tunis. Plat saw a wider potential too, hoping to use these sandbags in reclaiming land from both marsh and sea.
In 1593, when a deadly plague gripped London, Romero gave Plat the recipe of Dr Sirnige’s defensative pills, as used in Milan, and together with the apothecary John Clarke they produced and distributed hundreds of them, including to Queen Elizabeth I and her entire Privy Council, apparently with great success. Clarke published their case notes under the boastful title The Trumpet of Apollo Sounding out the Sweet Blast of Recovery in 1602, though it was a little premature. Just a year later plague returned to London with a vengeance.
Most enduringly of all, Romero told Plat the details of making pasta, which Plat then made and marketed as a cheap and long-lasting food for the English armed forces. What Plat called his “macaroni” even won plaudits from Sir Francis Drake, and in 1594 he published the first known depiction of a pasta extruder. To Nicolas Romero, then — a name never mentioned by even specialist historians — belongs the considerable distinction of introducing the English to pasta. He is the patron saint of “Spag Bol” (if you are Italian, and do not wish to suffer a heart-attack, under no circumstances should you look up this term).
Romero was full of other ideas too. Romero gave Plat his methods for preserving wine, chestnuts, butter, turnips, and quince. He revealed to him the principle behind the diving bell; how to make a metal rotisserie oven; how to catch crayfish; how to engrave glass; how to make vellum paper translucent; how to keep snow from melting over the course of a year by storing it underground; and how few drops of sulphuric acid might be added to a ship’s water supply to keep it fresh for longer. Along with various recipes for Italian salads, and how to make smoke grenades, he even told him how to raise water using atmospheric pressure — perhaps the earliest record in England of what would eventually be developed into the steam engine. In papers seized by the government from the soldier Sir Thomas Arundel, who was arrested for being a Catholic in 1597, are mentions of not just of Romero’s sandbag “trench”, but “also his bridge, his boat to go without wind or sail, and his device against horsemen” — which according to Plat’s manuscripts was a kind of rest for muskets that could also serve as a pike.
Throughout the 1590s, Plat tried to commercialise some of Romero’s inventions, including a method to replace the expensive copper vessels for boiling water for home-brewing with a supposedly more efficient tub made of treated wood; some kind of light, portable water pump; and the Liège-style coal balls or briquettes. But with little success. By 1594 Romero was running low on money and had given up on trying to make it in England, having apparently passed up various opportunities to serve some German princes. So he left Plat in London to keep trying to sell his inventions, while he himself went to Holland to become an engineer in the service of Count Maurice of Nassau, who was fighting to free the Netherlands from Spanish rule.
While in the Netherlands Romero patented his water pump and the wooden boiling tub — an invention apparently “very much needed in the present time of cities under siege”, for whom fuel supplies were scarce. And having gained Count Maurice’s trust and backing, he wrote to one of Elizabeth I’s favourites, the Earl of Essex, in a fresh bid to get the two inventions, along with the coal balls, patented in England. Naturally, Hugh Plat served as his go-between.
Despite such allies, however, they once again failed. Romero would patent more inventions in the Netherlands in 1598 — a means of reducing the friction on the axles of carts and carriages, and a winch for more easily lifting heavy items like anchors and cannon — but he wasn’t to get a patent in England until ten years later in 1608. Just months before Plat’s death, Romero, with one James Jackson, presumably an investor, was finally granted an English patent for some kind of universally-applicable method of saving fuel. Unfortunately, the wording of the patent gives no indication whatsoever of what it involved.
I’ve traced no further record of Romero — if anyone is familiar with German, Dutch, Italian or Spanish sources and has ever come across the name, please do get in touch
Latvia’s Unique Charger-Loading Lee Enfield (CLLE) Cavalry Carbine
Forgotten Weapons
Published 14 Feb 2025During the Latvian War of Independence, the nationalist forces receiver a fair bit of support from the British, including some 20,000 P14 Enfield rifles. These were great for the Latvian infantry, but the Latvian cavalry wanted something shorter. So in the early 1920s, they ordered 2200-2350 (the numbers are unclear) carbines from BSA. These were assembled using old Lee Metford and Long Lee parts, 21 inch barrels, and modified with charger clip bridges per the British CLLE pattern.
These carbines remained in service until World War Two, as we know that replacement barrels were purchased from Tikkakoski in Finland in the late 1930s — and this example has one of those Tikka barrels installed. During the Soviet occupation of Latvia, the Latvian Army did not fight, and many of these carbines appear to have been put into reserve service with the Red Army (some appearing to have been retrofitted with Mosin-style sling slots). Others disappeared into the forest with anti-Soviet partisans, and very few survived after the war.
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QotD: Why Marxists turned away from space exploration and colonization
What caused this turnaround?
To understand this, it’s helpful that to notice that spaceflight is not the only technology about which Marxist attitudes have done a 180. Nuclear power is another. More generally, where Marxists used to be pro-growth and celebrate industrialization and material progress, they’re now loudly for degrowth and renunciation.
But the history of western Marxism is more interesting than that. Western Marxists flipped to strident anti-futurism in the late 1960s and early 1970s while futurist propaganda in the Communist bloc did not end until its post-1989 collapse.
That 20-year-long disjunct was particularly strong about nuclear power, with the Soviets providing ideological support and funding to the foundation of European Green parties and the US’s anti-nuclear-power movement at the same time as they were pouring resources into nuclearizing their own power grid.
And that’s your clue. Domestic Marxism favored making power cheap and abundant, while their Western proxies pushed to keep it expensive and scarce and preached degrowth rather than expansion. Futurism vs. anti-futurism: why?
We don’t need to theorize about this. Yuri Bezmenov, a former gear in the Soviet propaganda machine, told us the answer starting in the early 1980s. Fewer people listened than should have.
Bezmenov explained that unlike Marxism in the Sino-Soviet bloc, Western Marxism was a mind virus, a memetic weapon designed to weaken and degrade its host societies from within, softening them up for totalitarianism and an eventual Soviet takeover. The West was to be denied power, both in a literal and figurative sense.
Ever wonder why today’s Marxists are so quick to make alliances with radical religious Islamists? This shouldn’t happen. According to Marxist theory, Islamism is a regression to an earlier stage of the dialectic than capitalism, and today’s Marxists ought to fear and hate it as a counter-ideology more than capitalism. But they don’t, because to them Islam is a tool to be used for nihilistic ends.
That nihilism is the actual purpose of Western Marxism and all its offshoots, including “woke”. One sign of this is how fervently it embraces the sexual mutilation of children.
The Soviets are gone but their program is still running autonomously in the brains of people who were infected by their Cold-War-era proxies and the successors of those proxies. And that program is nihilism all the way down.
Yuri Bezmenov should have been heeded. There is no simpler theory that fits the observed facts.
Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-14.
July 2, 2025
The Korean War Week 54 – The War is One Year Old – July 1, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 1 Jul 2025Over a year has passed since North Korean forces crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded South Korea, and while the war has seen the advantage switch hands time and again, one thing it has not seen is any sort of cease fire or peace negotiations. However, that might change soon, as this week both the Chinese and the Americans indicate their willingness to sit down and talk. South Korean President Syngman Rhee, however, is against any cease fire talks that do not set out to meet a big variety of his demands, demands which which the other warring parties do not see as being in their own best interests.
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History of Britain IV: Caesar in Britain, Reconnaissance in Force, 55-54 BCE
Thersites the Historian
Published 29 Jan 2025Caesar’s landings in Britain illustrate his willingness to take risks, even unnecessary ones. The questionable decision-making, however, also led to the first surviving detailed description of people and events in Britain.
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July 1, 2025
Tibet’s Last Stand: The Snow Lion vs. The Dragon – W2W 34
TimeGhost History
Published 29 Jun 2025The fate of Tibet is decided on the roof of the world as Mao’s China sets its sights on Lhasa. This episode traces the dramatic showdown between the snow lion and the dragon — from imperial legacies and British invasions to the last years of de facto Tibetan independence. Discover how realpolitik, Cold War indifference, and the carrot-and-stick tactics of Mao’s regime sealed Tibet’s fate. Watch as the Dalai Lama faces impossible choices, world powers look away, and the dream of independence is crushed beneath the weight of history.
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June 30, 2025
Day Five – Massive Allied Air Attack – Ten Days in Sedan
World War Two
Published 28 Jun 2025May 14 1940. The blitzkrieg continues in today’s episode of Ten Days in Sedan. British and French bombers roar over Sedan, braving curtains of flak and German fighters in a bid to smash Guderian’s hastily built bridges across the Meuse. Further north, French infantry and tanks battle against the German crossings at Houx, Dinant, and Monthermé. German general Erwin Rommel has a narrow escape as the French nearly blow him and his tank to pieces!
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Small Arms History of the Falkland Islands Defense Force
Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Feb 2025Various militias existed on the Falkland Islands since its earliest settlement, but the Falkland Islands Defense Force of today traces its roots to the 1892 Falkland Islands Volunteer Corps. This force was equipped with Martini Henry rifles. With the outbreak of World War One, the Falklands were a strategically important naval station, and the FIDF grew significantly in size and was fitted out with more modern arms. They expanded again in World War Two, with Lee Enfield rifles, Sten MkV SMGs, and Bren, Lewis’s and Vickers machine guns. Eventually in 1972 the force modernized, acquiring British L1A1 SLR rifles, L2A3 Sterling SMGs, and GPMGs (FALs and FN MAGs) and updating its Bren guns to 7.62mm. These were the standard arms at hand during the Argentine invasion in 1982, although the FIDF was not really an active participant in the resistance to the invasion. In fact, the British Marine party on the island was in the middle of being replaced when the invasion happened and twice the normal number of Marines were present. They armed themselves with most of the FIDF SLRs, leaving the FIDF with mostly just SMLE rifles.
After the war, the FIDF was reconstituted. It kept its SLRs until the early 1990s when they were replaced with 5.56mm rifles. Instead of adopted the British L85A1, the FIDF opted to purchase Steyr AUGs. The intention was to replace the GPMG with the heavy-barreled AUG, but this did not work out in practice. Instead, the GPMGs remained in service and the heavy-barreled AUGs were converted to standard rifles. In the post-war years the FIDF also began to acquire more specialty arms, starting with a Parker-Hale M85, a couple of Steyr HS-50s, and ultimately a batch of LMT 7.62mm rifles. They remain a small but quite well-equipped for today, offering valuable reconnaissance and local knowledge to the British Army garrison should conflict break out again.
Many thanks to the FIDF for giving me access to their armory to dig out these arms to film for you!
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QotD: Britons and their NHS
I have to run a gamut of procedures to do so and face a receptionist who treats me as a fraud trying to get something to which I am not entitled, and I have no practitioner whom I can call my doctor. The NHS has crowded out private competition, and the nearest private doctor is 25 miles away. Suffice it to say that, if I want to see a doctor, it is easier, quicker and more pleasant for me to go to France than to the health centre about 300 yards from my house in England.
I cannot in all honesty say, however, that my health has suffered in any measurable way as a result of this unpleasantness, because my health is good and I am not a doctor-botherer. But it does reveal something about Britain that is not true in France: in our dealings with the NHS, we are a nation of paupers who must accept what we are given by grace and favour of the system. It may be good or it may be bad, but we have to accept it.
Furthermore, under the NHS doctors themselves are becoming ever less members of a liberal profession and ever more executors of orders from on high, with little leeway to consider whether these orders are good or bad in the case of the individual case before them.
This is a problem in all systems in which a third party pays for patients’ treatment, but it is particularly acute in a highly-centralised and dirigiste system such as the NHS, in which uniformity is the goal, even if it be uniformity of error. And increasingly, it creates an atmosphere of technical, managerial and ethical conformity.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Empire of conformists”, The Critic, 2020-04-29.
