Merveilleux! A first review!

And what to expect in 2023!

Allow me to start by wishing you all a ‘frohes neues Jahr’, a happy new year and ‘une Bonne Année’! Better days are coming for us all, and i hope that 2023 will be a year filled with joy, happiness and success.

For The Iron Time, it has started with this wonderful post on the excellent 3945km platform, a brilliantly curated French review site for military history publications, books and specialist magazines. Check it out! [and make use of your browser’s translate function if needed].

At this moment, I am still working on a publishing schedule for the first quarter of 2023. The first feature articles written by guest authors are going to land soon, and I am in the process of planning the step-by-step release of the first military memoir for my paid subscribers. With this, I intend to take you back to the battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars. That much I can already tell you, but I have just not quite decided yet where these battlefields will be. During the pandemic, in an effort to stay sane, I worked on the transcription, or respectively the translation, of several memoirs and diaries of combatants of the Napoleonic Wars. Among them the memoirs of a pair Prussian officers in Spanish service, which were originally published in a small edition on the 150th anniversary of the institution of the Iron Cross in 1863. I struck gold when I discovered that the original manuscript, the men’s diaries, had survived which allowed me to compare and work with both texts. This in turn resulted in what i titled ‘Brothers of the Blade’: a glorious, swashbuckling ‘boys own’-type adventure story, which will take you from the frozen plains of Brandenburg, to the lush green fields of Britain and into the scorching heat of Catalonia.

 (…) I too am having great fun. He has two light wounds in his right hand, which unfortunately won't even leave a scar; one stitch in the right hand is nothing at all. I looked longingly at myself from time to time to see if not even one drop of blood would adorn my breeches, but in vain. But I have never fought like I did yesterday, never. I have drowned all the years of my restrained, pent-up rage in blood; yet I remained human and spared the lives of many. Against one, however, I was hard, even cruel, and I would give all my glory of the day if I could replace his skull. That is the lot of soldiers; one cannot always keep oneself within the proper bounds, and yet afterwards every cruelty appears to one in every waking and dreaming moment, a terrible reminder of the futile murder.’ - ‘Brothers of the Blade’, coming soon ‘The Iron Time’.

‘Brothers of the Blade’, coming soon on ‘The Iron Time’.

This weekend however, stay tuned for the launch of the second part of ‘A DIRTY DUTY WELL PERFORMED’. a history of German sniping in the First World War, which will again be full of fascinating, new insights. There will be an unpublished diary fragment, written by a fighter pilot of Jagdgeschwader 3 in 1940/1941. A series of unpublished, high-quality photographs from the estate of a Wehrmacht officer in the staff of Generaloberst Lindemann, the commanding officer of Army Group North, will follow soon after. There will be features on militaria, weapons, equipment and awards, an extended series on German pilots who flew for Kaiser AND ‘Führer’, I will offer early insights into some fascinating finds made on the battlefield of Waterloo and, and, and….

In short: There is much to look forward to.

Happy New Year everyone!