[Aktungbby]

Amazing! And it hits home! I helped put the wife through law school delivering truck loads of all the Huggies and Kotex Kimberly-Clark makes-62 years later!..My dad avoided being called up for Korea, after 5 years of WWII, as his engineering skills and employment at National Tea Company were deemed more important to the war effort,(c-rations) than his skills as an aircraft engineer/navigator...on out-of-date B29's- by then pure MIG fodder! I'm probably here as a result! And of course, I collect wrist-watches as my principle hobby. Of particular interest on the WWI wristwatch also was the 'hacking' mechanism to stop the watch; SIMPLE but necessary!(VON C. ON WAR?!) every subaltern could then reset to a correct time (every mechanical watch runs a little differently) so that all would 'go over the top' on schedule as well as stay ahead of the 'creeping' barrage. ""The idea that time matters to warfare appears in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: “War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known; and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war.” Time’s importance calls for critical inquiry, but time is often treated as if it were a natural phenomenon with an essential nature, shaping human action and thought. Yet our ideas about time are a product of social life, Émile Durkheim and others have argued. Time is of course not produced by clocks, which simply represent an understanding of time. Instead, ideas about time are generated by human beings working in specific historical and cultural contexts. Just as clock time is based on a set of ideas produced not by clocks but by the people who use them, wartime is also a set of ideas derived from social life, not from anything inevitable about war itself.
Yet war seems to structure time, as does the clock. Stephen Kern argues that World War I displaced a multiplicity of “private times,” and imposed “homogenous time,” through an “imposing coordination of all activity according to a single public time.” During World War I, soldiers synchronized their watches before heading into combat. In Eric J. Leed’s description of trench warfare, war instead disrupted time’s usual order. Battle became an extended present, as considerations of past and future were suspended by the violence of the moment. “The roar­ing chaos of the barrage effected a kind of hypnotic condition that shattered any rational pattern of cause and effect,” so that time had no sequence. And so one meaning of “wartime” is the idea that battle suspends time itself."" Simply put: It wouldn't do to stride bravely into 'no mans land' while the Fusilier company on your flank was still having it's A.M. tea...thinking it had 5 minutes more. Although at the Somme that might have passed for military genius! WWI Waltham with shell-proofing-and a similarly protected Jaeger-LeCoultre...'what will I be getting myself into today?' would have passed through my (rational?) mind strapping either of these BBY'S on!?