French Artists In World War I

Artists on the Battle Lines, From France (Where Else?)

By DAVID W. DUNLAPAUG. 16, 2017

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Gaston Balande (bearded) and another artist near the front. The original caption noted that they were “working behind a screen which protects the road on which they are sitting from observation by the enemy.”CreditPictorial Press/The New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial, Aug. 16, 1917

The New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial exemplified how powerful a tool the camera had become in telling the story of war. But technical limitations still left a lot to be desired. There were many French artists who believed they had a role to play in conveying the war’s terrors in ways that photographers could not.

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CreditCentral News/The New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial, Aug. 16, 1917

Among the most vivid examples is Félix Vallotton’s unsettling oil painting, “Verdun (Interpretive War Painting, Projections in Black, Blue and Red Colors, Devastated Lands, Gas Clouds),” of 1917. Vallotton was among a group of established artists who were accredited by the French Army to work near the battlefront.

“Some of the foremost artists of the day are employed by the government to make pictures of scenes and episodes for which the camera is unsuited,” the Mid-Week Pictorial said 100 years ago.

Although the caption in the magazine identified neither artist, the website Bon Sens et Déraison says that Gaston Balande is the man in the background.

The cover image was of a battery of five 14-inch guns that seemed almost to jump off the page. “To defend the freedom of the seas,” the headline said.

Another photo with a nearly three-dimensional quality showed the ruined village of Craonnelle through the window of a mansion that had been wrecked during fighting along the Chemin des Dames ridge.

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The ruins of the French village of Craonnelle. CreditThe New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial, Aug. 16, 1917

Times Insider is offering glimpses of some of the most memorable wartime illustrations that appeared in The New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial, on the 100th anniversary of each issue:

• A graphic look inside a German bomber (Aug. 9)• Raw recruits muster at Gettysburg (Aug. 2)• A hellish battle scene captured by the camera (July 26)• Feeding troops with a cumbersome kitchen (July 19)• A phony battleship lures real sailors (July 12)• Carrier pigeons in military duty (July 5)• Fijians join the fight (June 28)• A “dead town” in northern France (June 21)• Immigrants among draft registrants (June 14)• Terror on the high seas (June 7)• General Pershing shows some vanity (May 31)• The face of chemical warfare (May 24)• Germans lose Cameroon (May 17)

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Did Scientists Just Unveil The Largest Dinosaur Of All Time?

Did Scientists Just Unveil the Biggest Dinosaur of All Time?

The jury’s still out—but if you can get over the size contest, far more fascinating patterns about these giants emerge

An artist's illustration of Patagotitan mayorum, the latest and possibly most gargantuan in a series of recent giant dino finds.

Dinosaurs are superlative animals in every sense of the word. Their ranks include some of the strangest and fiercest creatures ever to have evolved, not to mention the largest to have walked the Earth. Now paleontologists have announced a species proposed to be most massive dinosaur ever discovered: an enormous herbivore estimated at over 120 feet long and weighing over 70 tons—or longer than a blue whale and heavier than a dozen African elephants.

  

You may have already heard of this ancient titan. The dino started making headlines back in 2014, before its bones were even fully out of the ground, getting its own David Attenborough-hosted documentary and American Museum of Natural History exhibit in early 2016. Over and over again, the Cretaceous dinosaur’s status as the biggest of all time was proclaimed. But the dinosaur didn’t have a name (it was simply referred to as “The Titanosaur”) and no formal description of the bones was published for other experts to check this sauropod’s claim for the title. 

Today, in the pages of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, paleontologist José Carballido of the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio and colleagues have finally published the scientific details of this enormous plant-muncher.

The dinosaur’s official name is Patagotitan mayorum, meaning “the Mayo family’s Patagonian titan.” That’s because its bones were excavated in 2014 at La Flecha ranch, owned by the Mayos, in Chubut Province, Argentina, from their 101-million-year-old-resting place.

This wasn’t the resting place of just one animal. The stone was littered with the remains of at least six individual dinosaurs of different ages and sizes. By the time they were done, however, the paleontologists had excavated parts of the neck, back, tail and limbs, which were enough to come to two conclusions: This was a dinosaur no one had ever seen before, and it was a true giant.  

But was it really the largest dinosaur of all time, as some of the media hype has proclaimed? 

Not everyone is convinced. Mathew Wedel, a paleontologist at the Western University of Health Sciences who has been following the titanosaur’s story since 2014, notes that the body of the new paper doesn’t include the necessary measurements of the dinosaur’s bones to tell. On top of that, Wedel says, the measurements reported in the media so far hint that Patagotitan was comparable in size to the previous record holder, Argentinosaurus, also known fromCretaceous Argentina. 

“So not the world’s largest sauropod, probably,” Wedel says, “but the most complete super-giant sauropod by far.” This means Patagotitan joins a club of previously-discovered immense dinosaurs; its real claim to fame is that far more bones of Patagotitan are known than for other giants. “I think it would be more accurate to say that Argentinosaurus, Puertasaurus and Patagotitan are so similar in size that it is impossible for now to say which one was the largest,” Wedel says. 

But step back from the “my dinosaur is bigger than yours” contest for a moment, and a curious pattern starts to appear. “All the big sauropods for which we have good evidence seem to be clustering in the same general area,” Wedel says, whether those are titanosaurs or other sauropod giants from different lineages. “That suggests a real upper limit that all these lineages were hitting,” Wedel says, with Patagotitan not so much blowing past previous records as reinforcing an emerging pattern.

Which brings us to the question of why these dinosaurs got so large at all. Macalester College paleontologist Kristi Curry Rogers points out that these huge sauropods were bellwethers of the times they lived in. “Titanosaurs like Patagotitan evolved huge bodies because they could,” Curry Rogers says, adding that “the ecosystems they inhabited had the resources to support their bodies, and their unique and specialized physiological adaptations made behemoth sizes work for them.”

 Furthermore, Wedel says, a giant like Patagotitan “is a case of ‘them that has, gets.’” 

Living large has definite benefits. Big sauropods, Wedel says, laid more eggs, were harder for predators to kill, could survive on lower quality food, could migrate long distances on less resources, and more. The bigger they got, the more benefits they reaped: “So to me the mystery is not ‘Why did some sauropods get so big?’; it’s “Why didn’t all sauropods gets big at Argentinosaurus, Puretasaurus and Patagotitan?’” Sauropods came in sizes from about as large as a draft horse to the biggest animals on land. What led to that range of sizes is still unclear. 

Yet for better or worse, it’s the giants who transfix our attention, and it seems that every few years there’s another dinosaur that’s touted as the largest of all time. Brachiosaurus, Supersaurus, “Seismosaurus”, Argentinosaurus and more have all had their turn laying claim to the title over the years. 

Could there still be larger dinosaurs out there? Curry Rogers thinks so. “So far, all of the very biggest sauropod dinosaurs how clear signs that they are still growing” when they died, Curry Rogers says. Even the largest Patagotitan bones, she points out, show signs of ongoing growth at death. “Even if we’ve discovered the largest terrestrial animals ever known,” Curry Rogers says, “we haven’t found the biggest representatives of their species so far.”

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The Charlotteville Tragedy-My Family Members Fought Nazis In World War II

Everyone my father was named Vasco L. Walters. He served in the US Army from 1940-1946. He bravely fought the Nazis in France, Belgium, Germany and into what is now the Czech Republic.

My late Uncle was named Hubert Noel Ballew. He bravely fought the Nazis as a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force from 1940-1942 and the US Army Air Force from 1943-1944 when he was shot down in France and became a Nazi POW.

Let me not forget, also, my late uncle John Robert Helms who served in the US Army Air Corps from 1942-1946. He flew a B-17 and survived his 26 missions over the best-defended targets in Nazi Germany.

If you were at a party and met these three men, you would find them to be warm, friendly, and decent people. You would never hear them brag about their war exploits. You would never hear them boast about their courage in battle. You would never hear them feel sorry for themselves about the sacrifices and hardships they endured fighting Nazi tyranny.

My dear friends, all these men were from the south of the U.S. In all the years that I was privileged to be around them, I never heard one of them utter a hateful or a racist comment. In fact, all of them treated every man and woman decently regardless of their color.

If they were alive today, they would be heart broken, as I am, over what happened in Charlottesville on Saturday.

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While Everyone Focuses On North Korea, Here Is Another War Waiting To Happen

BHUTAN

Three-dimensional Chess at the Top of the World

Only around 300 feet separate angry Chinese and Indian soldiers on the Doklam plateau, where the border of Bhutan, China and India meet.

The two sides have hunkered down into a dangerous stalemate after the Indian army heeded a Bhutanese request to stop Chinese troops from building a road that Bhutanese officials feared would violate border agreements.

In a so-called “flag meeting,” Chinese and Indian military brass conveyed messages to each other. China wants the Indian soldiers off land claimed by Beijing. But the Indians won’t leave unless the Chinese also remove their construction equipment from the area. Neither side bent. So now they expect to stay through the winter.

“Since this flag meeting hasn’t resulted in a resolution of the conflict at Doklam, it appears to be a long-drawn affair,” S. L. Narasimhan, a defense analyst and ex-Indian army officer, toldBloomberg.

The conflict pits the world’s two most-populous countries against each other as well as the largest democracy against the largest economy by purchasing power parity – a standard that accounts for price differences, as explained by the World Economic Forum.

India lost a war with China that stemmed from a Himalayan border dispute in the 1960s and India’s army is still smaller and less well-equipped than China’s, so Indian leaders are justifiably cautious, especially since economic ties between the two countries have increased in recent years.

But nonetheless, it seems New Delhi is not only prepared, but also has little choice but to stand up to China.

“India’s decision to move more troops closer to India-China border in Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh is guided by the ground realities of the northeast,” wrote India Today over the weekend. “Doklam plateau is not very far from the Silliguri Corridor – also referred to as the Chicken Neck – that connects the northeastern states with the rest of India.”

The standoff reflects Beijing’s new aggressiveness, a stance exemplified by China flexing its muscles in the South China Sea and frequent incursions into disputed territories in what India considers part of the states of Arunachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir. Chinese aggression in the region is also probably a play to shore up its hold on Tibet, whose leader, the Dalai Lama, now lives in exile in India. Bhutan is a Buddhist kingdom, by the way.

“China has been trying to dominate the Himalayan region because it believes unless it does, it will not be able to retain firm control over Tibet,” said Brahma Chellaney, a strategic studies professor at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, in an interviewwith the Financial Times. “The big obstacle it still faces is Bhutan. Driving a wedge between Bhutan and India is clearly a Chinese strategy.”

It’s a game of three-dimensional chess that adds yet another hotspot to the world, this time at the top.

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