Granddad’s Armistice in letters and recollections. Glimpses ante hoc of Cameronians & Royal Scots (52nd Division) in the Eastern Mediterranean and on the Somme; of ambulance trains in Northern France; of 6th Battalion York & Lancaster Regiment (11th Division) during the terminal Hundred Days Offensive to Mons, Belgium; and post hoc of base hospitals, influenza, and an exchange with one Wolfram Sterry regarding his brother Karl. Introducing Kandy the Maltese terrier.
Karl Nagl’s claim that, unlike the Germans, Viennese organ-grinders are musicians, because they have “crank-sense.” And female yodelling with Dudlerinnen Trude Mally and Maly Nagl.
François Dominique Séraphin, Bourbon favourite and reputedly the father of ombres chinoises (shadow puppetry), began operating 15 years later than is generally thought, and may have copied his techniques from an itinerant Italian or a London Alsatian. Featuring the memoirs of the valet to the later Louis XVII, early descriptions of the delights of the renovated Palais Royal (including a pygmy show), jolly old Baron Grimm on the lamentable state of French opera, shadow plays, and marionettes, and William Beckford’s favourite designer of theatrical perversions.
