Remodel Army

 I just peeked into this joint and realized I've been a baaaaad blogger; over a month with no new content.

Frankly, it's mostly because of this:

That's the kitchen. Well, that's where the kitchen used to be. 

The Little House has always been, well, little. It's barely 1,000sf, and it's poorly designed, with small rooms and a cluttered floor plan. I wrote about it back in 2020; the original wasn't great and the remodel the 1970s-80s owners did didn't make it much better. We wanted to open the place up a bit.

Here's what we started with:

And here's where we're going with that:

That's still the plan. But as Clausewitz (drink!) reminds us, between plan and execution is friction. And there's been...a LOT of friction.

Subcontractors not showing up.

Subcontractors showing up and then FUCKING up.

Ice Storms.

It's all been very stressful. I hate not having a kitchen. Cooking on a hotplate on the old dining room table sucks major ass.

That's my excuse, but it doesn't excuse me. I'll try to be better.

In my defense, I'm plugging sway on the promised "Frontiers 1914" post. It's going to be complicated. I've got two major sources right now; Terence Zuber's Battle of the Frontiers Ardennes 1914, and Dennis Showalter's The German Failure in Belgium, August 1914.

Remember that to try and make the post less insanely huge I decided to focus on the reconnaissance/counter-reconnaissance part of the fight. Well, the two sources are diametrically opposed on the subject.

The Showalter book focuses on what the German Army termed "Higher Cavalry Commands" (Höhere Kavallerie-Kommando), HKK, strategic assets directly under the Imperial Army HQ but assigned (sorta) to the Army commanders of the right wing (1st and 2nd) armies.

Their task was more-or-less purely strategic; find the left end of the Allied forces so the big Schlieffen Sweep could turn it. As you can tell from the title, Showalter doesn't think the Germans succeeded there.

The Zuber book, on the other hand, is tightly focused on - also as the title makes clear- the fight between the German 4th and 5th Armies and the French 3rd and 4th Armies in the Ardennes.

The general tone of the two is utterly dissimilar.

Showalter is zoomed in on the failure of the German Oberste Heeresleitung, the overall German Army HQ, to appreciate the criticality of the strategic mission and the degree to which the top brass either permitted (or encouraged) the right-wing HKK to faff about rather then go do what they were supposed to and the utter lack of urgency in applying the air assets.

This was supercharged by the organizational and logistical arrangements made to set up the HKKs (as well as the aerial recon elements, both fixed-wing and lighter-than-air) which helped make them less responsive and thus less useful in the right-wing fight.

Zuber, on the other hand, luuuurves him some German Army tactical training. His thesis is, so far as I can tell, to debunk the post-war French narratives of why the Ardennes sector was such a completely nutty cluster of fuck. He seldom deals with reconnaissance other than to point out the vast superiority of German tactical recon/conter-recon. Zuber seldom, if ever, deals with strategic reconnaissance at all.

(As an aside, Zuber also throws in a - to my mind - highly questionable defense of the German Army reprisals against Belgian civilians. These executions appear in the Showalter text as well, and are largely condemned as excessive responses to German friendly-fire incidents. There's actually a good discussion on the degree of 1) Belgian irregular resistance and the 2) German reprisals for it in the Wikipedia page covering the "rape of Belgium" - loaded term, but that was the most common one used for it...)

It's been a fun research project, but it's rapidly becoming obvious that discussing the subject is too massive for a single post. I'm leaning towards dividing it into three parts; a "Frontiers 1" dealing with the largely-strategic recon/counter-recon of HKK1 and HKK2 and air assets on the German right, "Frontiers 2" discussing the German center and left (including HKK 3 and HKK4 but more closely examining the divisional tactical cavalry, since the lack of open maneuver space tightly constrained the HKK's (and the terrain and foliage greatly limited the aerial recon), and a final "Frontiers 3" summarizing the main concepts of the first two.

So that's the plan, anyway.

Hopefully it goes better than the kitchen.