From Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Regarding the Russian Revolution):

From Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Regarding the Russian Revolution):
".....If you charged someone with the task of creating a new world, of starting a new era, he would ask you first to clear the ground. He would wait for the old centuries to finish before undertaking to build the new ones, he'd want to begin a new paragraph, a new page.

"But here, they don't bother with anything like that. This new thing, this marvel of history, this revelation, is exploded right into the very thick of daily life without the slightest consideration for its course. It doesn't start at the beginning, it starts in the middle, without any schedule, on the first weekday that comes along, while the traffic in the street is at its height....."
They cut down the trees, they burned them, they even pulled up a few stumps. The roots, they were simply buried too deep...They are coming back to the surface now, springing forth new life, in the spectacular green of early spring....Strider

Friday, June 5, 2009

Napoleon and the Danube Campaign

Several battles of Napoleon's Danube campaign were fought in 1809, which was significant in my history, since the earlier route of the German settlers to Ukraine was on the river Danube from Ulm. It is likely that the mass mobilization of troops in the area of Regensburg, northeast of Ulm, prevented my ancestors from taking the river course, but rather forced them to take a land route across central Germany to Poland, then south to the Ukraine. The land route was longer, but may have been safer, given that the earlier river people were robbed by Turkish pirates along the river, then succumbed to river-born diseases along the lower stretches of the river.
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