My Travel Year: A Look Back And A Look Forward

As my regular readers know, I'm an avid traveler. Living in Madrid makes it easier, but various things have kept me from doing much travel this year. I have three main threads in my writing career--travel, history, and fiction. For the past ten years all three have had their ups and downs, and in 2014 travel writing was definitely in a down.

The year started well with trips to Tangier and Belgium. Then the travel assignments dried up and besides our usual family trips to Oxford, there wasn't much of anything. I did manage to slip in two more trips to Tangier, but that's it. This is the first year that I can remember where I didn't go to a new country. I'll have to remedy that in 2015. Call it a New Year's resolution.

So where could I go? I recently discovered there's regular flights from Madrid to Algiers, so that's a possibility if I could drum up some freelance. Hungary and Egypt are also possibilities. I'm sure my career will throw me some curveballs as usual, so who knows where I might end up?!

Military History Photo Friday: Belgian Graves at the WWI Fort of Loncin, Namur

I've been doing a lot of research about World War One lately as background to my Trench Raiders series. I've managed to visit several fronts of the war--the Salonika Front, the Italian Front, even the Mesopotamian Front. It wasn't until late last year, though, that I got to visit the main event at the Western Front.

Military History Photo Friday: A four-barrelled flintlock pistol and Napoleon's bed

Here are some more photos from my trip to Belgium, the Battlefield of Waterloo to be exact. One of the many sights to see is Maison Le Caillou, the house where Napoleon slept 17&18 June 1815, during the battle. There are several interesting displays, including the odd four-barrelled flintlock pistol.

Note that there are actually only two flintlock mechanisms to ignite the powder. One or two barrels could be fired at a time, and then the whole barrel assembly would be turned so that the next two loaded barrels would be in a position to fire.

Military History Photo Friday: North African and Portuguese WWI Uniforms

One of the more unusual scenes in Trench Raiders, the World War One novel I'm currently writing, has some of the British troops meeting up with French Moroccan troops. When we think of the war, we tend to think of the British, French, and Germans, while in fact it was a world war. The European powers had vast colonies and they drew troops from these to help with the war effort. Also, many smaller countries jumped on the bandwagon. Few parts of the world remained untouched.

When I was in Brussels last month I got to visit that city's fine military museum. Of course they have a huge WWI section! Above is a uniform of a French Spahi, a colonial soldier from northwest Africa from 1914. Below is the uniform of a Portuguese infantryman from the 35th Battalion, 1917-1918.

The Moroccan troops were a mix of Berbers and Arabs. My characters get very curious about these troops because they've only heard of these folks from books and illustrated newspapers! By all accounts they fought well, although they were poorly supported by the French high command. At the Battle of the Aisne in 1914 the Moroccan regiments weren't even assigned any medical personnel. British medics had to take care of their wounded.

The Portuguese didn't come into the war until 1916 and didn't arrive at the Western Front until the following year. Poorly trained and inexperienced, they fared badly and broke in the face of a large German offensive in April 1918.

For more pics of the museum's WWI collection, check out this article I wrote for Black Gate.

Military History Photo Friday: German Armor from the Sixteenth Century

These two lovely suits of armor are in the Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and of Military History, in Brussels, Belgium. They have a splendid collection of medieval arms and armor that will be the subject of an upcoming post on the Black Gate blog. I'll give you the link when it goes live next week.

The suit on the left was made in Germany in the third quarter of the 16th century, while the one on the right was made in the famous workshop of Michael Witz of Innsbruck around 1555. The helmet in between is also German from the mid-16th century.

Sadly I can't tell you more because the signage was all in French and Dutch. I puzzled out as much as I could and came to the odd discovery that while I studied both French and German many years ago, I had an easier time reading the Dutch because it was close to German and my German was always better than my French!

Oh, and what's that gauntlet on the lower right getting up to?

Belgian battlefields and Viking wisdom

If you follow this blog, you know I was recently in Belgium and England. I'm settled back in Spain now and writing up my travels for various sites. Two articles have come out recently. The first is for a cool travel site called The Scout Project, which has published my article on the World War One battlefields in Belgium.

I also have an article out with Black Gate on the British Museum's blockbuster Viking exhibition titled Viking Art, Magic, and Wisdom at the British Museum. This show is full of surprising artifacts like this 10th century gold ear spoon used for cleaning out wax.

I've just been signed up to do a weekly series on historical travel for Black Gate, so you'll be seeing plenty of me over there!

Photo Copyright The National Museum of Denmark.

Military History Photo Friday: Nazi Red Cross Flag

Here's something you don't see every day. This is a flag from the World War Two German Army medical unit. You can see the red cross, but what's that white patch on the eagle's chest? That's covering up a swastika. The museum that displays this in Belgium decided against a public display of the emblem. Interesting to see two diametrically opposed different symbols on the same flag!

For more on my trip through Belgium's military history, check out my latest article, Tales of War and Humanity in Belgium.

My travel articles on other websites: shamanism and Waterloo

As regular readers of this blog know, I write for other websites fairly regularly, including the fantasy magazine Black Gate. I've recently published two travel articles for them. One is on an exhibition in Valencia, Spain, on The Art of Shamanism and the other is about the Waterloo panorama in Belgium. Check them out!

Military History Photo Friday: The Halle Gate, Brussels, Belgium

Belgium has some 300 castles, and while the focus of last week's trip was on the Western Front of World War One, I did get to see the sole-surviving example of the medieval fortification that once protected Brussels.

The Halle Gate was built between 1357 and 1373 as one of seven gates in the city wall. It eventually became a prison and was thus left standing when the rest of the wall and gates were torn down. Today it hosts the Royal Museum of Art and History

World War One ordnance at Ypres, Belgium, explodes and kills two

World War One has claimed two more casualties.

An unexploded artillery shell or grenade from the Battle of Ypres blew up on March 19 when workmen at a building site at Ypres, Belgium, accidentally set it off, the BBC reports. The explosion killed two of the workers.

There have been hundreds of these fatal accidents since the end of the war, and farmers and workmen along what used to be the Western Front still talk about the "iron harvest" of old ordnance and war materiel they find every year.

I and my press trip group were only a few kilometers away from the accident on the same day. It's scary to think that happened so close, and tragic to think that one of the world's bloodiest wars has killed two more people almost a century after it started.


Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. This is not the shell that caused the accident.

The Fin de Siecle Museum, Brussels

Mask of Cleo de Merode, by Georges Despret, c. 1907

Sorry for the silence last week. I was on a press trip touring the battlefields of Belgium and was kept very busy during a fascinating and enjoyable week. We focused on World War One sites but also took in Bastogne and Waterloo. Expect several articles about the trip on this and other blogs!

On my last morning before flying back to Spain I was left to my own devices and decided to check out the newest museum in Brussels--The Fin de Siècle Museum. It looks at Belgian art from 1868 to the disaster of 1914. While Art Nouveau will be the biggest attraction here, there's also a lot of works from the Realist, Impressionist, Symbolist, and other movements. I've focused on the Art Nouveau here because it's my wife's favorite art style and she doesn't read my blog enough.

Enjoy!