[Bosworth Field, England.]

Henry, Earl of Richmond [later King Henry VII]:

      [part of] His oration to his soldiers

If you do sweat to put a tyrant down,
You sleep in peace, the tyrant being slain.
If you do fight against your country's foes,
Your country's foison shall pay your pains the hire.
If you do fight in safeguard of your wives,
Your wives shall welcome home the conquerors.
If you do free your children from the sword,
Your children's children quites it in your age.

William Shakespeare
Richard III, 5.5.209-216
[foison = abundance; quites = requites]

  
American Civil War at Troynovant
1860-1865; freedom & slavery,
campaigns and battles

Holiday at Troynovant
high days of celebration

Utopias at Troynovant
utopia in power, or dystopia

Warfare at Troynovant
war, general weaponry,
& philosophy of war

Weapontake at Troynovant
weapons, martial arts;
gun rights, freedom of self-defense
  

  
Allied Checkpoint Alpha
Helmstedt, Germany
about 9 December 1945
  

Breitbart's National Security
maintaining peace in peacetime

The word "liberation" has lost the force it had ten years ago [in 1945] but gets it back when you look at Victory at Sea, which has completed its second run on television, this time with sponsors. Repeatedly you see the tears and ecstasy of people greeting their deliverers: the French in North Africa and Marseilles and Paris, the Filipinos, the Italians. They line streets of shattered buildings, they swarm over tanks and the fields are still burning behind them, against many backgrounds they are ravished by the fulfillment of hope. On half a dozen islands they come slowly down some path from the hills, starved, fever-ridden, carrying their sick and old. On Guam they stagger out from a concentration camp; at Dachau they have to be carried. At Tokyo they are American prisoners. Each of the twenty-six programs in the great war serial evokes the most powerul and most profound emotions, but the sight of deliverance moves the beholder more deeply than anything else. We forget too easily; everyone should see the whole series every year. It will be all right with me if Congress sees it twice a year.

Bernard DeVoto
"Victory at Sea"
Harper's, June 1954; collected in —
The Easy Chair  (1955)