In the wee hours, self was wallowing through a book about the history of disinformation, starting with the Russians in the 1920s. Chapter 2 was about a Japanese “Mein Kampf” which turned out to be a fake, but which correctly predicted Pearl Harbor, 12 years before it happened. At that point, everything got too “Wall of Mirrors” for her, and she decided to tackle the book at a later date.
Now, she’s in the trenches of World War I, which are indeed an awful place to be, even without the bullets and the barbed wire, because the smell of decaying corpses is everywhere. And men are getting shot in the face!
Self took a peek at the accompanying photographs and — Gulp! Bullets really do a job on the human face! Just sayin’
p. 6 of The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I, by Lindsey Fitzharris:
- From the moment that the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: Europe’s military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities.
As Fitzharris explains, “the nature of trench warfare led to high rates of facial injuries. Many combatants were shot in the face because . . . they seemed to think they could pop their heads up over a trench and move quickly enough to dodge the the hail of machine-gun bullets.”
Kanlaon 