Tony Robinson, né Baldrick in Blackadder, once did a series on the worst jobs of the Middle Ages. It would you’d think be a crowded field, so to speak, and I remember with great distaste his description of the process and particularly the contents of wattle and daub construction. The daub particularly was quite nasty.

I suppose it beats “leech collector”. But it also probably beats the curious job given to one André de Longjumeau by King Louis IX of France on February 16 of 1249: Go make friends with the Mongol Khan and see about converting them to Catholicism while you’re there.

In a way it was his own fault. On a previous visit to the Mongols on behalf of Pope Innocent IV (who apparently wasn’t, by the way), Longjumeau claimed, he’d received some sort of offer of an alliance against Muslims in Syria. Always game for a cunning plan, the French king sent André with rich presents of a distinctly Christian tinge to impress the Emperor.

It didn’t work. For one thing, by the time he arrived at the Mongol court the khan in question, Güyük Khan, had been poisoned by a rival. The regent khan-mother seems to have dismissed Longjumeau with insulting gifts and an insulting letter for the French king, after forcing him into a humiliating ritual (“Passing between two fires” which honestly sounds better than the likely alternative of being flung into both, either sequentially or simultaneously after being amusingly cleaved in twain).

I consider it a narrow escape. Trying to make an alliance with the Mongols was probably a far worse idea than trying not to get noticed by them, and not saying anything rude or flippant about the piles of bones lining the major roads in their territory. (You: “Wow. You sure have lots of bones.” Them: “We’re always on the lookout for more.” Sliiiiice!).

It is remarkable to ponder the impossibility, regardless of the skill of the translators, of communication between a medieval French court and a Mongol one. Even the giving of gifts, regarded as a sign of friendly strength in Paris, was seen as groveling tribute on the Imyl river or near Karakorum or wherever the Mongols were currently celebrating a slaughter.

Longjumeau came back with suitably impressive and utterly invented tales of Mongol history including the struggles of the all-too-real Genghis Khan against the invented Prester John and the Mongol homeland being near the prison of Gog and Magog (don’t ask), plus exaggerations of the Mongol Christian community and reasonably accurate stories of Mongol ferocity and culture generally.

He then passed out of history, and this life, at some uncertain date. That it wasn’t at the hands of the Mongols might be counted an improbable narrow escape, given the job he’d managed to land himself in.

“Very simply, the increasing need for psychiatric counseling is inversely proportional to the decline of our understanding the world in Christian terms.” R. Cort Kirkwood in Ottawa Sun September 6 1998

“Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.” Erich Fromm

“Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”

Immanuel Kant

On August 4, 1944, Anne Frank and her family were captured by the Gestapo. Somebody ratted them out and they, the family of Otto Frank’s business partner Hermann van Pelz, and Fritz Pfeffer, a friend of the Franks who was hiding with them, were sent to concentration camps; only Otto Frank survived. Which you knew.

Anne Frank is famous, and justly so, because of the diary the Gestapo did not find. She began it shortly before the family went into hiding and made its last entry just three days before they were captured. It was recovered by one of the brave Dutch gentiles who had sheltered the Franks and the others, and given to Otto Frank after the war. Amazingly, given the cramped quarter eight people shared for over two years, he was not aware that his daughter was keeping such a detailed chronicle of their lives.

The diary puts a very human face on the Holocaust, and speaks for the millions of whom we have not even a name let alone a story (despite the best efforts of the Names Recovery Project at Yad Vashem). And it forces each of us to ask how we would have handled such difficult circumstances for over two years, unable to get away even briefly from people who would not under other conditions even have socialized occasionally. And to ask whether we would have had the courage to help them if we’d been in the position of non-Jewish Netherlanders in those terrible years.

By the way, I said somebody “ratted them out” and I use the phrase advisedly. Technically a rat, as G. Gordon Liddy says, is one who had been part of a group and then betrays it. And the person who betrayed the Franks, van Pelzes and Pfeffer may never have agreed to help shelter them. But I think our fundamental duty to assist one another against life’s greatest horrors makes whoever turned them a “rat” who betrayed all mankind and their own humanity as well as the eight people in the secret “annex”. I only hope after the war they read the diary and repented (though if they did, I note unhappily, they did not find the courage or clarity to make a public confession).

The diary is a very powerful book. Anne was a remarkable girl, kind and thoughtful, at one point repenting of an earlier harsh judgement about her mother and recognizing how their claustrophobic as well as generally terrifying situation naturally made everyone edgy. And because of her sensitivity the diary is almost a wonderful insight into the blossoming of a shy girl into an exceptional woman.

I say almost, because almost everyone knows how it ends before they start reading it. And we all know before we reread it. I wonder sometimes if it would be better to give it to a young person without revealing the ultimate fate of the participants, which obviously Anne Frank herself did not know as she wrote. But I think not.

Somehow having the whole story unfold not just under the general shadow of Nazism, but the specific knowledge that the darkness would take Anne, swallowing her petty thoughts and her profound ones, her small frustrations and her unexpected joys, makes it that much more poignant and moving, a bright light still shining through the dreadful murk.

Thanks for beating Hitler. Now don’t let the doorknob hit you in the backside.

That was the disgraceful message British voters delivered to one W. Churchill on July 26, 1945 when the votes were counted and the Labour Party under Clement Atlee won an unexpected landslide on a promise to undermine British liberty.

Oh, they didn’t put it like that, of course. It was about the security “from cradle to grave” the brave British people had earned by their heroic resistance to Hitler. And I don’t doubt either that the populace had generally behaved heroically or that they were tired. But if freedom is what made Great Britain great, it was a seductive promise they should not have heeded.

Churchill himself tried to warn Britons of the path down which they were headed. Indeed some of his statements from the 1945 election, dismissed as shrill and hysterical at the time, have since proved all too accurate. And I cannot quite fathom the public reluctance, having ignored his warnings about Hitler in the 1930s until it was almost too late, to heed his warnings a decade later about socialism grinding down Britain and making life there dismal. It smacks of ingratitude as well as obtuseness. (It’s true that Churchill was returned to 10 Downing St. from 1951-55, but by then he was himself too tired to make a difference and the times were against him.)

He had lost none of his eloquence. It was the audience that failed him when in a Commons speech in October 1945 Churchill uttered his classic “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” And when in Scotland in May 1948 he said “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.”

The election result of 1945 had the additional ill effect of yanking Churchill from the Potsdam Conference with Stalin, leaving the unprepared Truman to face the evil Bolshevik dictator alone. Churchill himself, of course, was as clear on Soviet Communism as he had been on Naziism, giving a warning Americans did heed in 1947 about the Iron Curtain, whose prose still resonates today:

“A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory. Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organisation intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies…. We understand the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression. We welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world. We welcome her flag upon the seas. Above all, we welcome constant, frequent and growing contacts between the Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic. It is my duty however, for I am sure you would wish me to state the facts as I see them to you, to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow…. The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.”

Churchill also commented tersely in 1949 that “the strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.” (Evidently with more than Reaganesque foresight he also, in 1953, told a young aide named John Colville that if Colville lived a normal lifespan he would see Eastern Europe free from Communism.) And he was an early alarmist about radical Islam as well.

Given his record it is tragic that his warnings about socialism went unheeded and, unconquerable from without, Britain was hollowed out from within.

I cannot say how different things would have been if Churchill had won the 1945 election. But I hope I would have voted for him if I’d been there at the time. How could you not?

“These – these bones that fly into dust – they make me sick and a little afraid. Did the people who lived here once have the same feelings as we have? What was the good of their living at all? They’re gone! What’s the meaning of it all – of us?”

The heroine Bess in Zane Grey Riders of the Purple Sage

On July 25, 1832, the first recorded railroad accident in U.S. history, and the first railroad fatality, happened near Quincy, Massachusetts. Four people riding on a vacant car on the Granite Railway to see how effectively a train could carry loads of stone were hurled off a cliff when a cable snapped. It sure didn’t take long. And I wonder what environmentalist defenders of the “Precautionary Principle” would say.

It’s always odd to see familiar technology in its infancy. For instance, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad started in 1828 powering its cars with, of course, horses. I mean what else would you use? But after a steam engine, of all things, nearly outran a horse in 1930, they started using this new-fangled stuff.

Some people found it troublesome. New York governor Martin Van Buren wrote to President Andrew Jackson in 1829 that “The canal system of this country is being threatened by the spread of a new form of transportation known as ‘railroads.’... As you may well know, railroad carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles an hour by engines, which, in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside. The Almighty certainly never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed.” And as the 1832 accident indicated, “breakneck” is not just a colourful adjective.

Of course, it existed before there were trains. I very much doubt the horse would have passed a Precautionary Principle test thousands of years ago. I mean those things can buck, they can kick, and where will we put the dung?

No really. The last was a very serious ecological problem by the turn of the 20^th century especially in big cities, mercifully solved by private industry through the now-despised car. Oh, and by the way, the first automobile fatality in the Americas occurred quickly as well, when 69-year-old Henry Hale Bliss was crushed by an electric taxi. I doubt electric cars would be allowed today under the sort of rules applied to oil pipelines.

I don’t even think the bicycle would make it. When cheap steel made bicycles widely available in the 1890s, Carl Honoré notes in his splendid book In Praise of Slow, there was concern that riding them at high speed on a windy day might produce the permanent disfiguring condition “bicycle face”. I mean hey, you never know. (The first recorded bicycle accident came in 1842 when someone ran over a kid; I haven’t been able to determine when the first bicycle fatality came but evidently the inventor of the menacing-sounding steam-powered bicycle, Sylvester H. Roper, died riding one, though possibly because a heart attack caused him to crash.)

As it turns out, we did get trains, and now they’re the subject of some nostalgia as well as futuristic dreams of high speed rail. We don’t pull them with horses any more and we’re not very afraid of them. But nuclear reactors and oil pipelines, weeellll….