Veteranscribe's Blog

“Take it with a grain of salt.”

You know what it means. Don’t believe everything that you’re told. Be skeptical. Check it out for yourself.  If you don’t you could be deceived, swindled, or – worst case scenario – you could be killed.

That worst case scenario was a frequent happening in the ancient Roman Empire. And it was way back then when taking something with a grain of salt emerged as a prudent measure. This is the rest of the story, as told to us by Pliny the Elder in his “Natural History,” written around 77 CE.

Kings, emperors, nobles, and other potentates of that era often had a very short time at the top of the heap before someone knocked them off. And the preferred method of assassination wasn’t the knives-in-the-forum killing that did in Julius Caesar. The weapon of choice was poison.

One man, King Mithridates VI of Pontus, decided to do something about it. Mithridates (135–63 BCE, r. 120-63 BCE) was a bad guy. Of course, the Romans wanted to kill him. If the writings of Plutarch are correct, he orchestrated the mass killing of up to 150,000 Roman and Italian noncombatants in a single day. He was perennially at war with the Roman Republic. But he managed to live until age 82.

How did he do that? By concocting and regularly ingesting an antidote for all toxins known at the time. Legend has it that he built up a tolerance to deadly poisons, thanks to the magic elixir that became known as mithridatum.

Pliny the Elder wrote the story of how Pompey, a foe of Caesar, found the recipe for Mithridates’s secret protective. It included dried nuts, figs, rue leaves, and close to 50 different ingredients – arsenic and venom also among them – that were mixed together with honey and made into chewable tablets.  It was to be taken after “additio salis grano” – an added grain of salt.

So now you do know the rest of the story. And if you find it less than believable, well, reach for the salt shaker.

Like me, you likely read John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley when you were in high school. If so, you probably don’t recall anything like the following excerpt from a letter to his long-time friend and publisher, Pascal Covici. The letter was written in July, 1961. Steinbeck was in the process of writing his travelogue at that time. The book was published in 1962.

His trip around the country had taken place in 1960 – the beginning of the decade of “The Sixties,” – don’t forget. He was already in declining health, and he wanted to see his country one last time. He died in 1968, at the age of 66.

I wonder what Mr. Steinbeck would have to say if he took a similar trip today. Here is the passage, today’s food for thought.

“Thinking and thinking for a word to describe decay. Not disruption, not explosion but simply rotting. It seemed to carry on with a weary inertia. No one was for anything and nearly everyone was against many things. Negro hating white. White hating negroes. Republicans hating Democrats although there is little difference.

“In all my travels I saw very little real poverty. I mean the grinding terrifying poorness of the Thirties. That at least was real and tangible. No it was a sickness, a kind of wasting disease. There were wishes but no wants. And underneath it all the building energy like gasses in a corpse. When that explodes, I tremble to think what will be the result. Over and over I thought we lack the pressures that make men strong and the anguish that makes men great. The pressures are debts, the desired for more material toys and the anguish is boredom. Through time, the nation has become a discontented land. I’ve sought for an out on this – saying it is my aging eyes seeing it, my waning energy feeling it, my warped vision that is distorting it, but it is only partly true. The thing I have described is really there. I did not create it. It’s very well for me to write jokes and anecdotes but the haunting decay is there under it.

“Well, there was once a man named Isaiah – and what he saw in his time was not unlike what I have seen, but he was shored up by a hard and durable prophecy that nothing could disturb. We have no prophecy now, nor any prophets.”

I offer this passage to you, dear reader. I offer it without comment. However, I commend for your reading my source for this: Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. John Steinbeck didn’t care much for the telephone, and he didn’t have email or social media. So he wrote, longhand. And this collection of his letters is superb.

Finally, I also suggest that it would be nice if we all could take up, once again, the nearly lost art of letter-writing. What was the last time received a letter, one composed especially and only for you?  Wasn’t it a nice feeling to get it? Maybe, as 2021 wanes and the New Year approaches, you could take the time to write one to someone you’ve not seen or spoken to lately. I assure you, it will be appreciated.

Today is November 15, the feast of Saint Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus), who died in the year 1280.

The cocktail of the day is the Mud Pie: 1.5 oz rye or bourbon, .5 oz orange curacao, .5 tsp sugar, 2 dashed Peychaud’s bitters, on orange slice, cherry, lemon twist.

And when we raise a toast with that drink, it’s “Here’s mud in your eye.”

You’ve heard that one, I’m sure. Where did it come from? If you guessed The Bible, you’re right.  Here’s the rest of the story, from John, Chapter 1.

“And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.

“When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay,  And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, (which is by interpretation, Sent.) He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing.”

So, “Here’s mud in your eye” is a toast to your health – especially to your precious gift of eyesight. It’s also a wish for you to “see the light” in many other ways. A goodly benediction, indeed.

And what does this have to do with Albertus Magnus, honored as a doctor of the church and a brilliant natural scientist? Perhaps, though it’s all speculative, it has to do with his musings on the birds of the air. Albert wrote that the heron, whose Latin name is “ardea,” was probably named thusly because its excrement burns (“ardet”) whatever it touches.

The heron is said to defend itself from hawks by aiming its anus at it and shooting excrement. It may not mud in the hawk’s eye, but all that the projectile has to do is hit the hawk’s wings. The attacker’s feathers burn away, and the heron escapes.

The heron’s name is found in a royal decree of James VI of Scotland (1566-1625.) The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the name is a shortening of “shiteheron.”

So there’s some more history I never knew. The heron was officially the world’s first “hot shit.”

Now you know the rest of the story.

Today’s cocktail is the cherry cobbler. I’ll get to what it is and why, but first, Shakespeare’s King Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt:

“Today is called the feast of Crispian.

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,

And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

He that shall see this day, and live old age,

Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,

And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’

The will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,

And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s Day.’

…

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered-

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition.”

Saints Crispin and Crispinian, who was also called Crispian, were brothers and missionaries from Rome to Gaul. They were martyred for their faith around the year 286. They preached by day, and they made shoes by night to pay their bills. They are the patron saints of shoemakers, or cobblers. That’s why the drink of the day is the cherry cobbler: .5 oz cherry heering, .5 oz lemon juice, 1.5 oz gin, .5 tsp sugar, one cherry, one lemon wedge.

As we few, we happy few, we band of brothers, raise our glasses with the cherry cobblers in toast to Crispin and the King, let’s look at the rest of the story. It’s not a tale of chivalry, lads. It’s a tale of butchery, and brutality, and the hell of war. William Tecumseh Sherman would be right to state it again, more than 400 years later. War is indeed hell. Come to think of it, maybe we shouldn’t toast at all, or just toast to Crispin and Crispinian.

So what really happened at Agincourt? Whence that storied victory? A combination of luck and superior military technology for the English, and vanity combined with stupidity on the part of the French.

England’s invading army was in tatters. Henry V landed his ships on the Normandy coastline in the summer of 1415, thinking he would claim the crown of France.  The French Dauphin blew off Henry’s challenge to meet in single combat and raised a big army that besieged and nearly starved the English at Harfleur.

Disease swept through the English camp. Henry was to lose more of his men to rampant dysentery than he did in battle. More than a thousand were reduced to agonies, with blood and filth constantly oozing out of them. The stench was indescribable: by the time the siege was lifted, and the survivors had staggered south in pouring rain and crossed the Somme river, the French were boasting that their enemy were as good as dead.

The English and Welsh troops were outnumbered four-to-one. But they had as their best weapon the longbow. It fired arrows with such power that they could pierce even the heavy armor of knights on horseback, and kill at 200 yards or more. Most of the 5,000 archers were Welsh, mere commoners, who wielded 7ft bows made from thick yew staves, tipped with cow horn.

Henry knew his theatrics. He rode a small grey horse and his legs hung down with no stirrups. His armor was mirror bright and his helmet was crowned with a richly jeweled golden battle crown. He was making himself a target, to show his troops how unafraid he was.

The French lined up at least 1,000 glory-seeking knights, lords and minor aristocrats, all itching to make their reputations as warriors, on the front line. They wanted to capture English knights and hold them to ransom — and they were so certain of swift victory that they feared all the rich pickings would be gone unless they were first into battle. Their own archers and crossbowmen were sent to the rear.

The sticky clay ground had been churned to a quagmire the previous night as the grooms walked the noblemen’s horses around, and a headlong gallop was impossible. The English began to advance, until they were within bowshot range. Then the archers opened fire. After hesitating, above the screams of wounded men and horses, the French cavalry tried to charge.

The ranks of knights broke up into ragged lines, and the English archers began to pick them off like snipers. It was impossible for the Frenchmen to mount a cavalry charge. The horses stumbled, floundered, and fell.

French knights who survived the blizzard of arrows blundered onto the archers’ next line of defense — sharpened stakes rammed into the mud that impaled the horses. As the animals thrashed, the aristocrats were thrown off, and the archers clubbed them to death with mallets. Horses that saw the threat in time swerved back and crashed into those still advancing. The French went tumbling, with more ranks tripping over the bodies as they advanced.

The archers were able to fire into this lurching mass without respite, while the primitive French artillery far behind the lines lobbed cannonballs that caused just one English casualty and mostly landed among their own troops.

Realizing that the cavalry assault had failed, the French commanders signaled a mass infantry attack. As the fallen men struggled to haul themselves out of the sludge, they were knocked flat by the new arrivals who, in turn, tripped and fell. A great number of men drowned in the mud beneath heaps of other bodies, though no English weapon had touched them.

Finally the French trumpets sounded the retreat, and more than 2,000 Frenchmen surrendered rather than have their throats slit. They removed their helmets and were herded back towards the English baggage train, to be ransomed later.

But rumors swept the exhausted English army that a second French attack was being mounted from the south. Afraid of being trapped on two sides, with the added peril of 2,000 armored Frenchmen in the heart of his own army, Henry reacted ruthlessly. He ordered the immediate execution of all but the most noble and valuable of the prisoners. Two hundred archers did the killing, with daggers.

In a desperate bid to escape, some of the Frenchmen barricaded themselves into a barn. The English burned the barn down.

Around 8,000 Frenchmen died at Agincourt. English and Welsh casualties numbered just a few hundred. After the battle, Henry’s men ransacked the French camp, before marching in triumph to Calais.

The king sailed for home, and landed in a snowstorm at Dover, before elaborate festivities in London hailed him as “Henry the Fifth, King of England and France.”

Glorious and chivalrous? I don’t think so.  Brilliant strategy? Nah. More dumb luck than anything else. And is there any doubt now as to why the British and the French really don’t like each other?

And that’s the real story of what happened on the Feast of Crispian.