Free Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun by Jeffrey Sackett Page B

of voices that were quite obviously French. He was alone and armed only with a revolver, but no one could see anything, so he decided to brazen it out. He began shouting orders as if he had an entire platoon with him, and then demanded that the French drop their weapons and surrender. They did, and Hitler marched them back to German lines. For this act of bravery (not to mention bravado) he was awarded the Iron Cross.
    Hitler subsequently was injured by mustard gas. One cannot help but wish that he had inhaled more deeply.
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    I hate the Schweinhund too, but it's safer if you stand up.
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    Benito Mussolini was also a brave soldier in the First World War, also a corporal, though on the other side, of course. ( Italy was fighting Germany 's ally, Austria .) He was also wounded, but did not discuss his injury very often. It seems that Corporal Mussolini realized that the mortar he was firing was growing dangerously hot, and he warned the officer in charge that it needed to cool down before being fired again. The officer stupidly ignored him and ordered another shot. The mortar exploded, and a piece of shrapnel hit Mussolini in the buttocks. He regarded such a wound as undignified, and he rarely mentioned it.
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    Considering what was to come, a remark made by Hitler to Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg in 1938, shortly before the German Anschluss (annexation) of Austria, is particularly chilling. Schuschnigg had been summoned to Hitler's Alpine villa for a few hours of haranguing invective culminating in a series of demands that the Austrian chancellor felt compelled to accept. (They would all be rendered moot by the Anschluss .) When the meeting was over, Hitler concluded with the following words: "I think we have settled our relations for five years to come. But keep this is mind: Germany today has the most powerful army in the world. Why do you think we spent all this money to create this army? For parades?!"
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    A comparison of the dietary habits of the three major dictators of early 20 th century Europe is interesting.
    Mussolini was athletic and health conscious. He was stricken by a stomach ailment in 1923, and from that point on ate almost entirely fruit and cereal, with very little meat but copious amounts of fish sautéed in olive oil. Red wine in moderate amounts was not uncommon. He was in fine physical condition right up until partisans stood him up against a wall and shot him to death in 1945.
    Hitler was a strict vegetarian who neither drank nor smoked and regarded killing for food as cruelty to animals (!). His only indulgence seems to have been a fondness for sweet, creamy pastries, which he consumed in vast quantities. When he hosted dinners for his entourage he ate a vegetable plate as they consumed a normal German meal, and would say, "I hope you are all enjoying your carrion."
    In stark contrast to Mussolini's health-conscious abstemiousness and Hitler's sugar-based vegetarianism, Stalin ate like a pig, drank like a fish, and smoked like a chimney, which may be as much as reflection of Russian culinary habits and table manners as his own behavior. Evening dinners at his dacha rarely ended with any of his guests able to stand up or walk straight (or walk at all, for that matter.)
    Stalin lived well into his seventies, and died in bed. There is a lesson in there somewhere.
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    The shadow of nuclear annihilation lay across the world through the entire era of the Cold War. Leaders on both sides usually exercised decorum when discussing the so-called nuclear option, but there were occasions when a more sinister perspective became evident.
    At a meeting of the Cominform leaders in Moscow in the 1950s, Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedung ) told Czech Communist Party head Klement Gottwald that China did not fear a nuclear exchange with the west. "We could lose 300 million lives and still have over half our population left."
    "But Comrade Mao," Gottwald said, "your