mbarrick | Dec. 31st, 2014

Dec. 31st, 2014

#dailycolonist1914 - News out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today.

Headline reports "Christmas Day Battle Fierce" but the article has no official reports of Christmas Day battles other than the combined aerial/naval raid already reported on the 27th. The idea that there was fierce fighting is based on the number of wounded arriving at field hospitals [which, in hindsight, is probably due to the truce making it easier to move men who were wounded previously].
Details on the combined aerial/naval raid on Cuxhaven to bomb German Zeppelin sheds. Britain attacked with cruisers, seaplanes, and submarines. Germans defended with submarines, Zeppelins, aeroplanes, and torpedo boats.
Two Canadians, jailed in the Tower of London for disorderly conduct, manage the first escape from the Tower in over a century.
"Usual Outrages" by the Turks against Christian Armenians.
Rumours of German-American terrorists conspiring to sabotage railways leading into Vancouver from Washington state.
Fortifications around Paris begun early in the war ar now complete. Over 200 miles [320 km] of fortified trench surround the city, serviced by telephone lines for communication and a railway to quickly move men and ammunition. Fortifications also include tiger-trap type hidden trenches outside the perimeter.
Civilians in London are warned the what comes up must come down, i.e. that shells and bullets fired at enemy aircraft have to land somewhere and that it is prudent to take cover during air-raids even if the aeroplanes are not directory overhead.
Italy has dispatched troops to Albania to protect Albanian neutrality.
Fighting with Muslim Albanians backing Turkish forces against forces under Essad Pasha [it is not explained that Essad Pasha is in charge of a secret Serbian-Albanian alliance backed by Italy].
Two American duck hunters, violating restrictions on approaching the border while bearing arms, are shot (apparently accidentaly) by Canadian soldiers. One American is killed and the other injured. The official statement from the American government is that it is the hunters' own fault and no action will be taken.
American fishermen in Alaska have whined to both the President and the territorial administration in Seattle [remember Alaska is not a state yet and is administered by the American federal government through an office in Seattle] that fishermen from Prince Rupert are unfair competition.

https://archive.org/details/dailycolonist57y16uvic

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Source: http://www.mbarrick.com/blog/141229/daily-colonist-december-29-1914

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#dailycolonist1914 - News out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today.

More reports from the naval/aerial raid on Cuxhaven, Germany.
7,394 alien enemies registered in Montréal alone. 450 interned in Petewawa, "converting some of the buildings, which were only used for Summer camp quarters, into warm Winter quarters" [which makes you wonder if they are stuck living in uninsinuated buildings in the middle of Winter, north of Ottawa, where the average night-time low is around -20 °C.] Another 170 men are "employed" at an experimental farm near Hearst, ON.
One paragraph of "Christmas Day Scenes" slipped into an article of general news from the Western front recounts Germans and Belgians singing Christmas carols at each other. [This is the first news of the Christmas Truce at all, and very limited. I'm suspecting that the unofficial cease-fire, while sanctioned by the royalty running the show, is being censored at lower levels.]
In Britain, alien enemies, naturalised or not, including British born descendants of foreigners from enemy countries to the second generation (i.e. grand-children), are being forced to move away from the coast. Only the very old and very young are exempted. [Such is the nationalism and racism of 100 years ago: being born to the wrong parents or even grand-parents can be a crime.]
An ad for Kodak that couldn't be more Canadian.

https://archive.org/details/dailycolonist57y17uvic

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Source: http://www.mbarrick.com/blog/141230/daily-colonist-december-30-1914

Happy very monumentally important arbitrarily chosen date marking the anniversary of the Bris Mila of the Made Up Son of the Great Imaginary Friend, even though the Big Book of Made Up Stuff kind of hints at, and history records, that the census Joe was bringing himself and his Mysteriously Knocked-Up wife Mary ("Really, Joe! It was the Immaculate Hand of Great Imaginary Friend and not the epic Italian wang of some cute Roman soldier with a sexy accent!") to be counted in actually happened in the Spring, and the actual "year 1", depending on who you talk to, is somewhere between 2 and 7 years out, and the whole December thing was made up by some guy with a bad haircut and a brown dress several hundred years later in a calculated attempt to be in synch with the Get Drunk and Burn a Tree on the Longest Night of the Year festival of all the shouty northern folk... and that for the first 1,582, 1,700, 1,752, 1,753, 1,918 or 1,923 years (depending on whether you were Dutch or Catholic, Protestant, British, Swedish, Russian/Soviet, or Greek, respectively) the years didn't have leap years so the dates didn't match up with the actual orbital period of the Earth around the Sun and slipped off by a few weeks. So on this next orbit around the sun, may the inadvertent apophenia that we all have as the evolutionary artifact of learning when to collect shellfish without out getting washed out by the tide or dying horribly from paralytic shellfish poisoning fool you into thinking the uncaring infinite universe is directing some kind of anthropogenic good will at your insignificant and ultimately meaningless and ephemeral existence.

Source: http://www.mbarrick.com/blog/141230/atheist-happy-new-year

#dailycolonist1914 - News out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today.

The first Canadian troops are now in France, waiting to move up to the front.
More news from the aerial/naval raid on Cuxhaven, Germany. "British Airmen Wrecked Super-Zeppelin"
A German-born professor at the University of Toronto has been granted Canadian citizenship and allowed to continue working in a very special case.
[And at last,] "Christmas Day Truce Was Kept" - stories of soldiers crossing No-Man's Land and exchanging gifts have finally made it to Victoria, datelines London, Dec. 30 and Northern France, Dec. 30. [the late datelines lending credence to the idea that this news was probably heavily vetted by the War Office and published reluctantly, likely after stories started spreading by hearsay.]

This will be the last of my daily updates from 100 years ago, as it was always my plan to stop when news of the Christmas Truce made it to this back-water end of the Empire. It's been too interesting reading history in this as-it-happens kind of way, so I expect to keep reading these century-old papers and will have the odd thing that is too interesting not to share...

https://archive.org/details/dailycolonist57y18uvic

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