Zed

The 2nd Volume of Peter Pinney's WW2 trilogy follows Johnno to Bougainville Island.

Pinney has shown what a fine writer he is with this 2nd novel. Johnno's observations are sharper, he has honed his skills from the days of his secret diary in the New Guinea campaign. While others come back from the line and play up, getting drunk, raiding and trading for contraband, Johnno is “..... always bloody writing“ a young comrade states, annoyed that he will not go on a raid to steal an officers liquor with his mates. Johnno though is also sensible enough not to seem too big for his boots by occasionally joining in the fun. He is changing. The racist language of the New Guinea campaign is still heavy in his speech but his observations of the peoples of Bougainville Island are now of a more curious nature.
He even contemplates the human nature of the Japanese enemy. At one point a fellow digger, Silver, confides in Johnno his love of art and his own talent. Silver states of the Japanese that they are “....extraordinary artists” with the “...discovery of real beauty a goal in itself”. Johnno writes that it was “...strangely disturbing, the compassion in his voice; as if he was inviting us to consider something which, we instinctively knew, was best ignored”

Though there are lots of patrols the enemy is rarely met and this leaves the troops frustrated. Discipline is poor. Rumours run rife; Western Australia is going to be invaded! They are fighting in a “second rate show” one of their officers confides at one point. Philosophical discussions on killing become part of the banter. For some it is the best time of their lives but for others? It hits the men hard when a newspaper from home is received and the public know that Bougainville Island campaign is but a sideshow.

The Barbarians was always going to be a hard act to follow but Pinney has done more than enough to make this a must read for anyone wishing to read his prose. Again rich in Strine and observation of the Australian soldier at war but this time on Bougainville Island, an even less known theatre of war than was the previous novels settings in Papua New Guinea. This is Johnno's (Pinney's) observations of his own “limited experience” but as he states in the preface “An attempt has been made to eliminate factual error, but bias and prejudice remain,....” “This book is in no sense a unit history, nor is it meant to be. If it gives even a marginal notion of men on Bougainville, it will have served its purpose” It's purpose has been served with this reader. Superb!

Difficult to put down. A short sharp and personal history of the 20th Century.

A very good read about the Restoration of Charles II to the throne of the 3 Kingdoms. After the austere and puritanical times of Cromwell the Restoration was a time of decadence in comparison. This book gives a good account of the changes with specific emphasis on the early part of Charles reign. Recommended.

Being the cheapskate that I am, I picked this up for nix! Well, almost. I swapped it for something in the many neighbourhood libraries I wander past in my daily walks that I do in my never-ending attempt to live for ever and become a god.
(Is Meili the god of walking? Walking is after all a form of travel. Is walking my Ambrosia?)

So this sat on my TBR shelf for what seemed an eternity (Aion is the god of eternity and also an album by the wonderful for all eternity band Dead Can Dance)

Until a young lass told me about a TV series called by the same name that she had watched an episode or two of.
(The modern god for all things media is in fact Media in American Gods, but in Australia the modern media god is in fact a US citizen called Rupert Murdoch who seems to be an immortal of some kind or other)

The young lass I made loan to was very keen on what she had been reading as she gave me periodical updates but made a complete stop at Chapter Eleven as she was off to get married.
(Parvati came to mind)

Brightly, I said I would read it and then hand it back to her after I had finished and she had come back from her honeymoon.
(May Anjea have been, or be kind to the delightful young lass)

Well, here I am writing a review of this rather good book.
(Is there a god of book reviewers? Troth maybe?)

And I enjoyed this.
(By Hedone I enjoyed it a hel of a lot and was that syncretic?)

There are now 826,000 plus ratings and 41,000 plus reviews on this here Goodreads so there is not much I can say about it.
(Seshat would be proud of those numbers.)

So I add nothing other than just don't take it all too seriously, as it is fantasy after all.
(Roger Zelazny is the American god of fantasy, Neil Gaimen has to agree)

Recommended to those of us that worship Anulap

An extract from the chapter called The Reckoning
“So many engineers were seized that factories came to a halt, so many railway men died that some trains did not run; so many colonels and generals were shot that the almost leaderless Red Army was nearly crushed by the German invasion of 1941.

In the Congo, as in Russia, mass murder had a momentum of its own. Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to take someone's life. Once under way, mass killing is hard to stop; it becomes a kind of sport, like hunting. Congo annals abound in cases like that of René de Permentier, an officer in the Equator district in the late 1890s. The Africans nicknamed him Bajunu (for bas genoux, on your knees), because he always made people kneel before him. He had all the bushes and trees cut down around his house at Bokatola so that from his porch he could use passersby for target practice. If he found a leaf in a courtyard that women prisoners had swept, he ordered a dozen of them beheaded. If he found a path in the forest not well-maintained, he or- dered a child killed in the nearest village.

Two Force Publique officers, Clément Brasseur and Léon Cerckel, once ordered a man hung from a palm tree by his feet while a fire was lit beneath him and he was cooked to death. Two missionaries found one post where prisoners were killed by having resin poured over their heads, then set on fire. The list is much longer.

Michael Herr, the most brilliant reporter of the Vietnam War, captures the same frenzy in the voice of one American soldier he met: “We'd rip out the hedges and burn the hooches and blow all the wells and kill every chicken, pig and cow in the whole fucking ville. I mean, if we can't shoot these people, what the fuck are we doing here?” When another American, Francis Ford Coppola, tried to put the blood lust of that war on film, where did he turn for the plot of his Apocalypse Now? To Joseph Conrad, who had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.”

At times, this has been a brutal read that highlights man's inhumanity to his fellow human being. It has also highlighted others courage in the pursuit of justice.

I had been aware of the treatment of the peoples of the Congo via Mathew White's atrocity website. His site stated the following.

• Roger Casement's original 1904 report estimated that as many as 3 million Congolese had died of disease, torture or shooting since 1888 (cited in Gilbert's History of the Twentieth Century; also in Colin Legum, Congo Disaster (1972)).
• E.D. Morel estimated that the Congo's population began with an original 20 or 30 million, and bottomed out at a mere 8 million. Morel, The Black Man's Burden, 1920, Chapter 9 (“[W]hen the country had been explored in every direction by travellers of divers nationalities, estimates varied between twenty and thirty millions. No estimate fell below twenty millions. In 1911 an official census was taken. It was not published in Belgium, but was reported in one of the British Consular dispatches. It revealed that only eight and a half million people were left.”). This estimate also appears in
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, “Congo Free State,” v.3, p.535
- Bertrand Russell, Freedom and organization 1814-1914 (first published, George Allen & 1934) p.453 in the 2001 Routledge ed., citing Sir H. H. Johnston, The Colonization of Africa (Cambridge Historical Series) p. 352
- Fredric Wertham A Sign For Cain : A Exploration of Human Violence (1966): the population of the Congo dropped dropped from 30M to 8.5M, a loss of 21.5 million
• Peter Forbath, The River Congo (1977) p.375: “at least 5 million people were killed in the Congo.”
• John Gunther (Inside Africa (1953)): 5-8 million deaths.
• Adam Hochschild (Leopold's Ghost, (1998)): 10 million, or half the original population.
• Rummel:
- 2,150,000 democides, 19th Century (based on 10% of Wertham)
- 25,000 democides, 1900-1910.
• AVERAGE:
- Median: ca. 8M
- Mean: ca. 8.5M
• NOTE: Because this event began in 1886, it tend to get relegated to the 19th Century; however, 40% of it occured in the 20th Century, so we need to keep this in mind when splitting the death toll into century-based subtotals. Also, it took awhile for the atrocities to get up to speed, so the dying probably intensified as more time passed.


As the reader can see this book by Hochschild is at the high end of deaths. Hochschild does cover the slaughter in the same chapter I have quoted above, called A Reckoning. He states he did not think that the authorities were of a genocidal nature to the Congolese peoples, they just worked them as slave labour and to death, profit was everything in the pursuit of ivory and rubber with rebellion ruthlessly put down. So that meant that murder through to starvation played a part in the plummeting drop in population numbers. There was also a huge fall of the birth-rate as men left their villages with women under hostage so as to force them to not abscond and join rebellions.

There have been some historical characters in this book that were unknown to me prior. Roger Casement and E D Morel, campaigners from Ireland and England, both deserve further reads, they lead fascinating lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Casement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._D._Morel

As does George Washington Williams from the USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Williams

All three contributed heavily to the public campaign to expose the inhumanity that was the Congo Free State.

Known to me, but more as someone taught to the English schoolboy with stories of derring-do was Henry Morton Stanley. He does not come out of this book with any honour.

There are 2 sets of illuminating black and white plates and an excellent bibliography. I have David van Reybrouck's Congo to read and will do so sometime into the future.

This was a fascinating if sad history and highly recommended.