Your Future Leader

                                                  Le Salut au pinard !                          

Pinard (French slang for wine) – brought up to the front on a narrow gauge railway.

“The Ambulance man is death on prohibitions — of any sort— but particularly of beer and wine. It disquiets him to think that the Statue of Liberty, which he left holding high the torch of freedom, now extends toward him, a member of the magnificent army of Liberty, a “Liquor Verboten” decree.”

 AFS Bulletins, numbers 85-86.

Just Austrian officer dudes bein’ dudes.

My part of the cat exchange with @quercusrubra! (which should be an actual thing imo) 

General Daendels Taking Leave of Lieutenant-Colonel Krayenhoff

Found in the archives:

a cat’s perspective

The Drunken Bolsheviks and the Greatest Hangover in History,

On October 25th, 1917 Bolshevik soldiers and sailors stormed the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, former home of the Russian Czars.  Among the wealth and grandeur of the palace, the revolutionaries stumbled upon perhaps the greatest treasure of the Romanov Dynasty; Nicholas II’s personal wine cellar, which housed the largest collection of fine wines, liquors, and cordials in the world.

Having thousands of heavily armed men and civilians in the proximity of the largest cache of booze on the planet was certainly a big problem for Bolshevik officers and politicians.  Already Bolshevik soldiers were carting out kegs and bottles, beginning a Bolshevik boozing spree that would quickly get out of hand.  At first Bolshevik leaders considered blasting the cellars with high explosives, however it was feared that this would severely damage the palace.  Finally Bolshevik leaders ordered the cellars be barricaded and placed under heavy guard while the booze was disposed of.  At first the booze was hauled out in crates to be dumped, however convoys tasked with this duty were ambushed by drunken soldiers and civilians. Finally it was decided to simply pour the booze down the drain.  This plan failed when people by the thousands gathered around the palace drains with buckets.

Klavdiya Kalugina was one of the youngest Soviet snipers who fought during the Second World War.

Born in 1926, Kalugina was 15 years old when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, at which time she was working in a munitions factory. Shortly after the invasion she joined the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) and in 1943 she was accepted into a Komsomol sniper school. Although she initially struggled with the training, Kalugina credited her graduation from the school to the patience of her squad commander.

Kalugina was sent to the front lines in March, 1944, where she joined the 3rd Belorussian Front. Aged 17, she operated in a sniper-spotter team with a girl who she had trained with, Marusia Chikhvintseva. Her usual weapon was a Mosin-Nagant rifle with a PU scope, with which she engaged enemies at distances from as close as 200 metres to as far as 1200. She described her objective as eliminating key targets such as enemy commanders and machine gun emplacements, making one shot per day from a heavily camouflaged position and then returning to base at night.

Kalugina survived the war, although her partner, Chikhvintseva, did not. There is no account of her life following the end of the war.