Christmas Every Day

1712

The Mohocks

Eighteenth-century London, poorly-policed and crime-ridden was the playground for various gangs of aristocratic vandals, one of the most notorious calling themselves “The Mohocks”. This account describes their comeuppance.

On the 6^th of June 1712, Sir Mark Cole and three other gentlemen were tried at the Old Bailey courthouse in London for riot, assault, and beating the watch. A paper of the day asserts that these were ‘Mohocks, that they had attacked the watch in Devereux Street, slit two persons’ noses, cut a woman in the arm with a penknife so as to disable her for life, rolled a woman in a tub down Snow Hill, misused other women in a barbarous manner by setting them on their heads, and overset several coaches and chairs with short clubs, loaded with lead at both ends, expressly made for the purpose. In their defence, the prisoners denied that they were Mohocks, alleging that they were ‘Scourers,’ and had gone out, with a magistrate’s sanction, to scour the streets, arrest Mohocks and other offenders, and deliver them up to justice.

On the night in question they had attacked a notorious gambling-house, and taken thirteen men out of it. While engaged in this meritorious manner, they learned that the Mohocks were in Devereux Street, and on proceeding thither found three men desperately wounded, lying on the ground; they were then attacked by the watch, and felt bound to defend themselves. As an instance of the gross misconduct of the watch, it was further alleged that they, the watch, had on the same, night actually presumed to arrest a peer of the realm, Lord Hitchinbroke, and had latterly adopted the practice of going their rounds by night accompanied by savage dogs. The jury, however, in spite of this defence, returned a verdict of ‘ guilty;’ and the judge fined the culprits in the sum of three shillings and four-pence each.

1944

D-Day

By 1944 German forces were being pushed back on the Eastern Front and in Italy, but everyone knew that the Allies were preparing an invasion of continental Europe from bases in England. The Germans had constructed the massive Western Wall stretching from Norway to Spain, trusting to its minefields, beach obstacles, gun emplacements, and concrete bunkers to pin any invaders on the beach and deter any progress inland. The Allies relied on deception and air superiority to keep the enemy from knowing where their blow would be struck and from moving in reinforcements.

On the morning of June 6, over 20,000 Canadian, British, and American paratroopers were dropped over the Normandy peninsula to take control of bridges and roads behind the landing zones. A thousand warships then bombarded defenders along a fifty-mile stretch of the coast, and units of the French Resistance were activated on missions of sabotage. Almost 7,000 vessels from 8 Allied navies, from battleships to landing craft converged on 5 beaches, codenamed Utah and Omaha (the objectives of American forces) and Sword, Juno, and Gold (targets of Canadian and British armies).

Casualties were heavy, particularly in the American sector, and none of the initial objectives were reached on the first day but a successful toehold in France had been achieved and would provide the beachhead for the armies that would soon sweep the Germans out of France.

What do you do with the graves and memorials of your enemies? That is a question that has faced conquerors for thousands of  years.

When Alexander the Great had captured Thebes in 338 BC, he murdered all the males, sold the women into slavery, and ordered the city razed to the ground — with the exception of one house. The home he ordered spared was that of the dead poet Pindar, a favourite of Alexander who liked the fact that Pindar had spoken well of Macedonians.

When a Roman emperor had been overthrown by his rivals, his works and statues were obliterated in what they called a damnatio memoriae. A similar fate has now overtaken Canadian politicians like John A Macdonald, Egerton Ryerson, or Lord Cornwallis, who in their time were not nice enough to aboriginals in the eyes of 21st-century critics.

In 1547, when the Catholic emperor Charles V had taken the town of Wittenberg where Martin Luther was buried, he was asked whether he wanted the arch-heretic’s grave dug up and his remains burnt or hung from a gallows. Much to his credit, Charles replied, “I make war on the living, not on the dead.” Luther’s resting place was left undisturbed.

A similar attitude seems to have been held by Adolf Hitler in 1940. Hitler had been a soldier in the German army during World War I and had suffered in the trenches, ending the war in a military hospital recovering from a poisonous gas attack he endured at the Ypres salient in Belgium. What would he do then when he returned to that site as a conqueror 22 years later and found an enormous Canadian war memorial (picture above)?

Unlike many other Allied graves from the Great War, the Canadian monument at Vimy Ridge was not vandalized by the Nazis. Apparently, Hitler appreciated the fact that our memorial was not glorifying war but mourning our dead. He ordered an SS guard mounted at the site and protected the monument from any damage.