europeana
The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1941 were tall fellows measuring 173 cm. on average, and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 38 kilometres in total. The Germans were tall fellows too, while tallest of all were the Senegalese fusiliers in World War I who measured 176 cm. so they were sent into battle in the first ranks in order to scare the Germans. It was said of the First World War that people in it fell like seeds and the Russian Communists later calculated how much fertiliser a square kilometre of corpses would yield and how much they would save on expensive foreign fertilisers if they used the corpses of traitors and criminals for manure.
Based on the excerpt in this month's Harper's (the above is a longer version (PDF) of the same excerpt), Patrik Ourednik's Europeana. A Brief History of the Twentieth Century is an engrossing, wide-ranging and idiosyncratic retelling of recent history. I look forward to reading the whole thing.
Comments
Americans in Normandy in *1941*? That certainly is an interesting retelling of history.
Posted by: LionIndex | May 7, 2005 4:00 PM
If it makes you feel better, LionIndex, the book is classified as a novel.
Personally, I loved the excerpt I read in Harper's.
Posted by: laura | May 8, 2005 7:09 AM
I'm still working on the January issue with four to go before the current one, but I'll get around to it eventually. Look for more comments here in September!
Posted by: LionIndex | May 8, 2005 3:30 PM
I don't know what explains the 1941 error/fictionalization. I notice that in Harper's it reads 1944. I took much of the excerpt at face value, though perhaps that's risky.
I'm so far behind on Harper's, though I did read the two cover stories in the latest issue (about the religious right) and was properly horrified, angered and disgusted -- which are the usual emotions I feel when reading Harper's. It is such a great magazine, but I'm very lax about reading it (and all the magazines I subscribe to).
Posted by: nedlog | May 9, 2005 3:51 PM
It's not just the year that's wrong. Human corpses cannot simply be "used for" manure unless they first pass through a digestive tract (manure being, by definition, the end result of this), and while that idea is properly horrifying, I don't think it's quite what the author intended...
Posted by: Jerry Kindall | May 10, 2005 2:10 PM