Letters From Their Eleventh Hour: Friedrich Sohnrey (1887-1914)*

FRIEDRICH (FIDUS) SOHNREY 

Student of Political Economy, Berlin 

Born December 21st, 1887, at Möllenden.
Killed November 8th, 1914, near Clamecy. France 

In the trenches near Clamecy, October 24th, 1914. 

    I go everyday into the village here to see a family with six children. The father is in the war.¹ The woman says that he is a Reserve Dragoon. She innocently believes that he has not yet been under fire, but she has no news for two months. She sheds tears when she tells me that and hears that we get letters from home every day. I get hot water there so as to have a good wash after four days' interval., but I can't stop too long, as suspicious scratchings on the part of the children indicate undesirable house-mates.² 

    One does feel sorry for these poor people, who have hardly a stitch of underclothing to change into, not to speak of anything to eat--nothing left but potatoes, and the woman is always tearfully asking me how much longer she and her children will have to go on living like that. She is always lamenting over the war: 'C'est triste pour nous et pour vous." She lays the blame for it on the English and curses them. It makes her very unhappy when I tell her that we are making preparations for the winter and shall probably spend Christmas in the village. She just sobs helplessly. By way of thanks I leave her some bread and an army biscuit, which the children fall upon with shouts of delight. The youngest is five months old. It is true that one cow has been left in the village, by order of the Area-Commandant, to supply milk for the babies, but even so that is little enough. On the second day I gave each of the children two sous. The woman was very much pleased and touched by my sympathy. She followed me to the door and assured me that her house always 'à votre disposition.' 

    We all pity these poor people who are clinging to the last remnants of their former happy existence, though in constant danger of seeing all their possessions burnt and smashed up by their own artillery, and I hardly think that a single one of our soldiers would treat them with anything but friendliness. Many of the men habitually give them some of their bread. The inhabitants of the place gather round our field-kitchens regularly to collect their tribute. So we are seeing to it that our enemies' belongings do not starve. Kindliness is probably that part of the German character from which it derives its greatness. 'It is the German soul, that makes a sick world whole'³ -- and no doubt that means the German heart. 

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*The letter is part of series called "Letters From Their Eleventh Hour" which I began a few years ago. The letters come from two books described here.

¹France and Germany lost comparable numbers of soldiers, but France and Belgium bore the brunt of civilian casualties on the Western Front.

²Lice?

³He was quoting someone -- who?

Letters From Their Eleventh Hour: Rudolf Hauer (1894-1914)

RUDOLF MOLDEN HAUER 

Student at the High School of Commerce, Munich* 

Born March 18th, 1894, at Munich.
Killed December 13th, 1914, near Peronne. 

Halle, near Perone, December 9th, 1914. 

...When we have the treat of a beautiful sunset over the watery marshes of the Somme; when a beautiful, cold, December morning breaks through the mist of dawn and the red clay of the trench glows in the sunshine: then we are happy and rejoice like children over the beauty of it. We watch our men in their fleld-grey uniforms; they come out of the dug-outs, stretch themselves, wash themselves and clean their rifles. They look over the edge of the trench with shining eyes, and their bodies seem to be bursting with health and fitness. They are all young, full of joy in Nature, are living parts of that most wonderful whole--a nation developed into full beauty, goodness and strength.

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*Quite possibly the Königlich Bayerische Technische Hochschule München, the forerunner of today's Technical University Munich.

The letter is part of series called "Letters From Their Eleventh Hour" which I began a few years ago. The letters come from two books described here.

Hauer's words are so striking and full of color that I chose a WW I color photo to illustrate.

100 Years Ago On The Western Front

Read more here

[Added]: An edited dramatization from the BBC:

Imagine If You Will, Another Dimension of Atoms...

Cobalt and nickel are elements 27 and 28, respectively, but this wasn't always so. Older textbooks often put cobalt and nickel together because they weren't sure which came first. Though there were chemical reasons to believe that cobalt preceded nickel in the Periodic Table, no matter how carefully they measured it, nickel always came out lighter than cobalt, even though it should be heavier.

Scores of new elements were discovered in the 19th century and back then weight measurements were used to identify them and to place them in the table. T. W. Richards won the Chemistry Nobel in 1914 "in recognition of his exact determinations of the atomic weights of a large number of the chemical elements." But realize that while the Periodic Table originally sorted and arranged chemical elements according to their atomic weights, the table actually sorts the elements according to their atomic numbers. The notion of atomic number was unknown to 19th century chemists.

A hypothetical sample of cobalt, nickel, and copper** ions would give a mass spectrum looking something like this:

Natural cobalt is monoisotopic (⁵⁹Co), while nickel has five isotopes: ⁵⁸Ni, ⁶⁰Ni, ⁶¹Ni, ⁶²Ni, and ⁶⁴Ni, with the lightest being the most abundant. Note how ⁵⁸Ni precedes ⁵⁹Co.  Why cobalt likes neutrons more than nickel does is an interesting question for which I have no answer.

Henry Moseley first showed that cobalt and nickel were correctly ordered despite their anomalous weights. Around the same time, J.J. Thompson invented mass spectrometry which sorts ions according to mass as shown above. Thompson discovered that neon had two isotopes but the concept of isotopes wasn't fully understood until James Chadwick discovered the neutron in 1932.  Chadwick's discovery also enabled the subsequent syntheses of elements beyond uranium.
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*Tellurium (element 52) presents a similar weight anomaly because it is on average heavier than iodine (element 53).
**I wrote about copper isotopes back here and included it because it falls close to Ni and Co.

Jack LaLanne (1914-2011) R.I.P.

I remember watching this guy with my mom on TV before I was old enough for kindergarten in the mid-1960's.

Here he connects alcohol and sugar addiction, something I find physiologically interesting because of the chemical similarities between ethanol and polyols like sugars.



R.I.P. Jack!!