Landships II

TinCanTadpole · Legend

German sketches

Rectalgia · Legend

It appears a sub-editor at the Daily Mail shares your concerns TCT:'Humorous' German cartoons of life on the frontline in World War I are unearthed (and no, they're not funny)

They seem to focus on the incongruity of maintaining the trappings of civilisation/normalcy in a time of total war. I'm sure this falls within the taxonomy of "humour" according to the exhaustive (mostly Teutonic) analyses of the topic. Anyway, it seems the German general officer who commissioned them could at least, laugh at himself. And it is nice to see that the lack of dunny paper afflicted the Central Powers just as it did the Allies. Hence the importance to both sides of Routine Orders and it also explains both why the were eagerly anticipated by the troops and why the authorities stopped using white arsenic as a sizing agent in their paper supplies. Okay, I just made up the last one.

LincolnTanker · Commander in Chief

I quite like the style of some the images, worth a look.

�Leonardo da Vinci's cartoons weren't very funny either.

James H · Legend

Not like the Daily Mail to stereotype foreigners . . .

Anyway, on the subject of toilet paper at the front (so to speak), is anyone familiar with the poem about General Cameron Shute? It's brilliant:

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

Rectalgia · Legend

I pointed to it in http://landships.activeboard.com/t35258533/the-royal-naval-division/.

Worth another plug, to be sure.

James H · Legend

Beg pardon, Stephen. I forgot. I first came across it in a book called The Price of Pity, which was written by my old headmaster, doncher know.

Plug? Is that another Rectalgia joke?

Rectalgia · Legend

James H wrote:
...Plug? Is that another Rectalgia joke?

No, no, straight up, - I have an abiding admiration for officers like Herbert who got up the noses of their "superiors".� Helped keep the lower orders sane, I'm sure.� Bruce Bairnsfather was another.� They should be cherished more.� These men had an unwavering moral compass, easy to appreciate in quiet retrospection but devilish hard, surely, to maintain at the time, let alone to flaunt it from a vantage of modest authority.

And, dare one think, this German cartoonist was another?� In a sense he was more successful since he had high patronage for his lampooning, less successful since he was kept close (what a clever, subtle old General that was to so subvert him).

TinCanTadpole · Legend

Rectalgia wrote:
It appears a sub-editor at the Daily Mail shares your concerns TCT:

�Actually I was just trying to say what their view is, I didn't have much of an opinion myself - although I can only see a hint of humour in the toilet paper sketch, the others just look like representations to me.