THE SMELL OF ...

As the big guns roared the smell of thin extruded strandlike explosive material remarkably resembling spaghetti used up till roughly the insurgency in Malaya hung heavy in the air. It smelled like victory. Well, mostly of nail polish remover (acetone), but victory none-the-less. Cordite, invented by the British shortly before the turn of the last century (circa 1889), was used commonly used by them for rifles and artillery during roughly six decades.

It is still used by authors when trying to imagine what crime smells like.

What they probably mean is nitrocellulose and sawdust.

A somewhat different odour.


In a previous life I may have been on the North West Frontier fighting howling savages trying to overrun the outpost. A horrible smelly place with food poisoning, diseases, crappy tobacco, and insects, all of which were probably more deadly than the screaming raggedy banshees brandishing long knives who showed up periodically to kill us infidels.
Ah, a splendid time! It was good to be alive!

My hypothetical earlier self probably died young. Cholera or malaria.

As the yallahyallah shouting heathens get smacked by the light cannon, a passage from Sir Henry Newbolt comes to mind, unbidden, recited with upper-class diction by an Eton man. How stirring it is! "The sand of the desert is sodden red, red with the wreck of a square that broke; the gatling's jammed and the colonel dead. And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. The river of death has brimmed its banks, and England's far, and honour a name; but the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks, 'play up! play up! and play the game'."
Sir Henry Newbolt was the Victorian Era's answer to Lucretius.
It brings a tear to the eye, and fortifies the liver.
One is ready for combat.

The entire place smells like shit. Can't smell the cordite.

As we all know, that builds character.



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