This date in history

[Aktungbby]

1917: Famed dancer Mata Hari is executed by firing squad; blows a kiss to her executioners and declines a blindfold! Mata Hari's sealed trial and related other documents are scheduled to be declassified by the French Army in 2017, one hundred years after her execution...Mayhap some juicy secrets may be ....unveiled

[Aktungbby]

1854: a charge of British light cavalry led by Lord Cardigan against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava on in the Crimean War.I'm wearing my Cardigan sweater(my wife knits them) in honor of the day!

]"The Last of the Light Brigade" is a poem written in 1890 by Rudyard Kipling echoing – thirty-six years after the event – Alfred Tennyson's famous poem The Charge of the Light Brigade. Employing synecdoche, Kipling uses his poem to expose the terrible hardship faced in old age by veterans of the Crimean War, as exemplified by the cavalry men of the light brigade who charged at the Battle of Balaclava. It describes a visit by the last twenty survivors of the charge to Tennyson (then in his eightieth year) to reproach him gently for not writing a sequel about the way in which England was treating its old soldiers. Some sources treat the poem as an account of a real event, but other commentators class the destitute old soldiers as allegorical, with the visit invented by Kipling to draw attention to the poverty in which the real survivors were living

Seems nothing bad goes outta style for Veteran care...either!

 

There were thirty million English who talked of England's might,
There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night.
They had neither food nor money, they had neither service nor trade;
They were only shiftless soldiers, the last of the Light Brigade.

They felt that life was fleeting; they knew not that art was long,
That though they were dying of famine, they lived in deathless song.
They asked for a little money to keep the wolf from the door;
And the thirty million English sent twenty pounds and four !

They laid their heads together that were scarred and lined and grey;
Keen were the Russian sabres, but want was keener than they;
And an old Troop-Sergeant muttered, "Let us go to the man who writes
The things on Balaclava the kiddies at school recites."

They went without bands or colours, a regiment ten-file strong,
To look for the Master-singer who had crowned them all in his song;
And, waiting his servant's order, by the garden gate they stayed,
A desolate little cluster, the last of the Light Brigade.

They strove to stand to attention, to straighen the toil-bowed back;
They drilled on an empty stomach, the loose-knit files fell slack;
With stooping of weary shoulders, in garments tattered and frayed,
They shambled into his presence, the last of the Light Brigade.

The old Troop-Sergeant was spokesman, and "Beggin' your pardon," he said,
"You wrote o' the Light Brigade, sir. Here's all that isn't dead.
An' it's all come true what you wrote, sir, regardin' the mouth of hell;
For we're all of us nigh to the workhouse, an' we thought we'd call an' tell.

"No, thank you, we don't want food, sir; but couldn't you take an' write
A sort of 'to be continued' and 'see next page' o' the fight?
We think that someone has blundered, an' couldn't you tell 'em how?
You wrote we were heroes once, sir. Please, write we are starving now."

The poor little army departed, limping and lean and forlorn.
And the heart of the Master-singer grew hot with "the scorn of scorn."
And he wrote for them wonderful verses that swept the land like flame,
Till the fatted souls of the English were scourged with the thing called Shame.

They sent a cheque to the felon that sprang from an Irish bog;
They healed the spavined cab-horse; they housed the homeless dog;
And they sent (you may call me a liar), when felon and beast were paid,
A cheque, for enough to live on, to the last of the Light Brigade.

O thirty million English that babble of England's might,
Behold there are twenty heroes who lack their food to-night;
Our children's children are lisping to "honour the charge they made - "
And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade!

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1775 US Navy forms as the Continental Navy.

1914 British battleship Audacious sunk by mine.

1942 US aircraft carrier Hornet sinks off Santa Cruz.

1962 Black Saturday - Russian nuclear missile crisis in Cuba.

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1904 St Louis police try a new investigation method - fingerprints.

1914 German battle cruiser Goeben enters Black Sea.

1943 German submarine U-220 sunk by US aircraft in the Atlantic.

1971 Great Britain becomes sixth nation to have a satellite (Prospero) in orbit.

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1929 "Black Tuesday" Wall Street Stock Market crashes triggering the "Great Depression"

2015 China announces the end of their one-child policy after 35 years.

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1917 World War I: Battle of Beersheba in southern Palestine - "last successful cavalry charge in history" performed by the 4th Australian Light Horse.

1940 Battle of Britain, fought between the RAF and Luftwaffe over the English Channel and southern England, ends.

1941 Prior to US joining WWII, German submarine U-552 torpedoes US destroyer Reuben James near Iceland.

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1919 British Admiral David Beatty becomes First Sea Lord.

1939 First jet plane, Heinkel He 178, demonstrated to German Air Ministry.

1941 Japanese naval staff offiicers Suzuki & Maejima arrive at Pearl Harbor.

1952 "Ivy Mike", the first thermonuclear weapon to utilize the H-bomb design of Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, is detonated in the Marshall Islands, Pacific Ocean.

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1914 Great Britain declares the entire North Sea a military area: neutral ships will transit it at their own risk.

1943 Jewish ghetto of Riga Latvia is destroyed.

1944 Auschwitz begins gassing inmates.

1947 Howard Hughes flies "Spruce Goose", a huge wooden airplane for the first and last time.

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1862 Dr Richard Gatling patents Gatling machine gun in Indianapolis.

1922 Howard Carter discovers tomb of Tutankhamun in Egypt.

2008 Barack Obama becomes the first African-American to be elected President of the United States.

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1605 Gunpowder Plot: Catholic conspirator Guy Fawkes attempts to blow up King James I and the British Parliament. Plot discovered, Guy Fawkes caught, tortured and later executed along with seven others. Celebrated ever since as Guy Fawkes Day, where his effigy is traditionally burned on a bonfire, accompanied by fireworks.

1937 Adolf Hitler informs his military leaders in a secret meeting of his intentions of going to war.

1941 Japanese naval staff officiers Suzuki and Maejima leave Pearl Harbor.

1956 Britain and France land airborne forces at Port Said in Egypt, escalating the Suez Crisis.

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1865 American Civil War: CSS Shenandoah is the last Confederate combat unit to surrender after circumnavigating the globe on its cruise that sank or captured 37 vessels.

1935 First test flight of Hawker Hurricane fighter aircraft.

1941 Japanese fleet readies assault on Pearl Harbor.

1945 The first landing of a jet on a carrier takes place on USS Wake Island when an FR-1 Fireball touches down.

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1872 Cargo ship Mary Celeste sails from Staten Island for Genoa; mysteriously found abandoned four weeks later.

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1888 Jack Ripper's 5th and probably last victim, Mary Jane Kelly, found on her bed.

1914 Off Cocos Island, near Sumatra, the Australian cruiser 'Sydney' sinks German cruiser 'Emden', which has been attacking ships in the Pacific.

1918 Emperor Wilhelm II abdicates after German defeat in WW I.

1923 Beer Hall Putsch, Munich; Nazis fail to overthrow government, 16 die, Hitler flees.

1961 The X-15 rocket plane achieved a world record speed of 4,093 mph (Mach 6.04) and reached 101,600 feet (30,970 m or over 19 miles) altitude.

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1871 Henry Morton Stanley encounters David Livingstone at Ujiji, near Lake Tanganyika in Central Africa, with the immortal words 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'

1918 Western Union Cable Office in North Sydney, Nova Scotia receives a top-secret coded message from Europe stating on November 11, 1918 all fighting would cease on land, sea and in the air.

1940 Walt Disney begins serving as an informer for the Los Angeles office of the FBI; his job is to report back information on Hollywood subversives.

1989 Germans begin demolishing the Berlin Wall.

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1918 Armistice signed by the Allies and Germany comes into effect, WW I hostilities end at 11.00 am

1923 Eternal flame lit for tomb of unknown solder, Arc de Triumph.

1940 British Fleet Air Arm attack destroys half of Italian fleet at Taranto.