The excellent Telegraph obituary for Mr. Campbell suggests that he might have been the last Gallipoli survivor of any nationality.

Alec Campbell, RIP
While visiting The Economist's website, I found this earlier article I must have previously missed. Last May, Alec William Campbell died at the age of 103. He was Australia's last survivng veteran of the notorious failure that was the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915.


It is always amazing to read the obituary of a man his age, not only because of his war experiences, but also because of the dramatic transformations in technology and culture through which he lived. (At the time of Campbell's birth, for example, Queen Victoria was on the British throne and Australia had yet to see her first automobile.) Truly, with his death, the era which he came to personify advances very much further toward becoming "merely history". It is only too bad that The Economist had to mar an otherwise fine tribute by momentarily turning Campbell's death, with only the slightest subtlety, to the service of one of its favorite political causes: the abolition of the monarchy.


Incidentally, Masterpiece Theatre showed a wonderful film this past season about Gallipoli and pre-war culture called All The King's Men. (No relation to the Robert Penn Warren novel of the same title.) Co-starring Dame Maggie Smith as the dowager queen Alexandra, it is worth watching should it turn up again on PBS.

Copycat
Police in Rome yesterday arrested a lady for wading into the Trevi Fountain and harvesting its coins, in imitation of the transient apprehended for the same offense earlier this week.

Nazi commandant must serve another decade
A German court has ruled today that, his advanced age notwithstanding, Josef Schwammberger, 90, must serve another ten years of his life sentence. Schwammberger was convicted in 1992 of murdering hundreds of Jews on his own initiative from 1942 to 1944, when he was commandant of several forced labor camps in Poland.

More turmoil in the British arts world
The dancers of London's Royal Ballet are on the verge of mutiny.

Black Hannibal Revisited
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Hollywood's plans to film Hannibal's life story as a tale of blacks beating up on whites. It was my point that -- pace the Afrocentrists -- Hannibal was not black, a view supported by British classicist Peter Jones in the current issue of The Spectator.

A business approach to opera
An article in this week's Spectator comments on the firing of the English National Opera's director and what that augurs for the company's future.

Why did Stalin execute the heroes of Leningrad?
When the Germans laid siege to Leningrad in the summer of 1941, it fell to two men -- Andrei Zhdanov and Alexei Kuznetsov -- to lead the beleagured city until the Soviet army relieved it in early 1944. After that, however, history records nothing more of Zhdanov and Kuznetsov. Documents recently made available to the BBC reveal why: both men (and four others as well) were purged and executed on Stalin's orders. Zhdanov, whose health was failing, was sent off to a state hospital, where he was given a lethal prescription. Kuznetsov and the rest received the familiar Stalin treatment: arrest, torture, forced confession, and execution. In addition to these executions, Uncle Joe had 4000 Leningraders purged from the Communist Party and arrested.


Kuznetsov's son suggests a possible motive for Stalin's brutal treatment of his father: "For Stalin... [making] an independent decision was a terrible crime against the state."

Modern technology put to good use
Scientists will employ radar in an effort to determine whether the formal 17C water gardens of Bramham Park ("The Versailles of the North") can be restored. As this article notes, an 1828 fire at the estate, which caused the owners to abandon it, perhaps saved the garden by preserving it from redevelopment according to 19C fads.


This story calls to mind one of the strangest and yet most delightful sights I visited in Europe. The early 17C Wasserspiele of Hellbrunn Palace in Salzburg is less a formal water garden than a whimsical expression of Prince-Archbishop Markus Sittikus's mischevious wit. One word of advice: when invited to the archbishop's garden table, watch where you sit!

Battle of Hastings painting restored and remounted, 140 years later
An enormous 19C painting of the Battle of Hastings, taken down nearly a century and half ago because of its size and stored in a soggy basement, has been carefully restored and returned to display. It hangs once again in its intended location: Battle Abbey (now a school), which stands on the site of the great 1066 conflict.

Stolen Rubens found in Ireland
Authorities in Dublin have found a Rubens that an Irish gang had lifted in a famous 1986 art heist.

Three coins in . . . his pocket
Prompted by the Italian press, the Roman police have finally arrested a vagrant known for wading into the Fontana di Trevi and taking for himself the many coins thrown therein. The money is officially set aside for various charities.

No WorldComs in medieval Italy
Down here in Washington I came upon a report about a most interesting exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art: "Art and Economics: Sienese Paintings From the Dawn of the Modern Financial Age". It seems that the authorities in medieval Siena took public fiduciary responsibility very seriously, even considering their ledgers of such importance as to merit cover paintings by great artists like Ambrogio Lorenzetti. (A selection of these books, and related items, comprise the Corcoran display, the scheduling of which had nothing to do with the recent rash of American corporate accounting scandals.) The Washington Post's explanation of the painstaking system the Sienese devised to ensure probity reminds one that this is the same city whose town hall holds Lorenzetti's masterpiece frescoes, Allegories of Good and Bad Government.


The era was not entirely devoid of high-profile bankruptcies, however. As the article points out, it was the English king Edward III's default in 1342 that helped bring down the Sienese banking system.

War veterans denied medals
The British government has angered hundreds of veterans by forbidding them to receive Russian medals. The Russians want to decorate the men for their part in the Second World War's Arctic convoys, which helped supply the Russian war effort on the Eastern Front. London states that its policy is not to allow British soldiers to receive foreign medals for events more than five years in the past.

The Pilgrimage of Grace
Britain's Observer has a sympathetic review of a new history of The Pilgrimage of Grace, the virtuous and loyal, but sadly failed, 1536 rebellion against Henry VIII's religious schism and violation of the monasteries.

Paving over national treasures, again
This time the culprit is Italy, where officials want to build a freeway through a stretch of virgin Tuscan countryside dotted with vineyards and archeological sites. As one might suspect, behind this plan lurks the EU.

A landmark anniversary
On August 6, 1806, Francis II dissolved the Holy Roman Empire under pressure from Napoleon. Having foreseen this, Francis had earlier declared himself the first Emperor of Austria, in which capacity he and his successors reigned until 1918. Because he did so, there is a statue of Francis II/I in Vienna with the inscription Pater Patriae, the Father of his Country.


I had been looking forward to writing a more substantial blog on the demise and legacy of the Holy Roman Empire, but unfortuately I am out of town at the moment and rather pressed for time. I intend to post it when I return home next week, but in the interim, enjoy these pictures of the magnificent Imperial Crown and coronation regalia, which are displayed in the Imperial Treasury in Vienna, and this primer on the nobility and constituent states of the Empire.

Alpine chic
Lederhosen are back in style.

The dying art of royal portraiture
According to the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, modern artists no longer understand how to paint kings and queens.

Endangered: The Great Wall of China
I was not aware that this great wonder of the world had fallen into such a pitiful condition, but I really can't claim surprise. Nor am I terribly surprised that the Chinese Communists made a mess of things the last time they launched a Great Wall preservation effort. We should hope, however, that this one turns out better.

Today is Percy Shelley's birthday
Or would be, if he were still alive. This sonnet may not be his best work, but, as a blogable example, it has the advantage of being short (which many of Shelley's greater pieces are not), and it is an arresting, intricate, and richly ironic critique of pride.


Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

"The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."
--Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary of Great Britain, 4 August 1914
As her deadline for German confirmation of Belgian neutrality passed, Britain declared war on Germany. The New York Times had this report on the opening of hostilities and with it the dramatic escalation of the World War.