Dan Snow's History Hit - The Persian War

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

In the 5th century BC the world's first super power, the Persian Empire, went to war against a ragtag collection of cities and statelets on its western frontier. It was the start of the Persian War. Thankfully for us this war was recorded in some detail by the world's first historian. Herodotus. Despite previous millenia of history in the ancient Near East, this historical record means that the Persian Wars feels recognisably modern. The attitudes and decisions of commanders are discernable. The course of the battles, traceable.William Shepherd has written an engaging new account of the war. He took some time to sit down with Dan and explore the course of the war and why it still matters.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We are back in the game. I bring you this having been freed from a 19th century Birmingham police cell where I've been filming. Filming a new show for History Hit TV, so check that out, it'll be coming soon. And we've got podcasts, lots and lots over Christmas. Some of you complaining that there's been too many and you haven't been able to catch up. I'm sorry about that. We're just generating so many podcasts at the moment. I want to get them out. I want to get them out. I owe it to the historians to get them out. And I just can't help. Every time I meet one of the historians, I want to interview them. So I can't help creating a lot of content. So sorry about that. Apologies.

Just sleep less. Sleep less, guys. We're in a battle against sleep here don't let sleep win listen to some more pods head over to historyhit.tv i'm just putting the finishing touches to a beautiful script we're going to make a big show one of our most ambitious yet about a big anniversary coming up this year so i hope you enjoy that the january sale comes to an end i think thank goodness but just after the weekend i'm not sure the point it's really cheap. Get it now while it's cheap. Go to historyhit.tv, sign up and use the code January. It's exclusive to podcast listeners. You get a month for free. And then you get four months, which is one pound, euro, dollar, or rupee, or whatever, per month. So I would do that if I were you, because it's unbelievably cheap. The other day I bought a sticker book, a sticker book for one of my kids, which you rip out the stickers from the back,

affix them to pages in the middle, and then throw the book away, right? We were done. We did the entire thing. It was an ancient gods and goddesses, brackets, Greek sticker book. We did the whole thing in about an hour. We threw it away.

It cost me 11 pounds. I thought to myself as I was doing it, this is considerably more than the price of the January sale at History Hit TV. So what am I doing with my life? I need to pivot to sticker books. Videos getting old. Anyway, what am I talking about? Yes, how cheap the History Hit thing is. It's very cheap. Just use the code January when you check out. This podcast goes right back to the beginning, everybody. Right back to the beginning of written history.

Herodotus is widely regarded as the first writer of history. He wrote history so that the bravery, the deeds of a past generation should not be forgotten by those that follow on. We're still doing it 2,500 years later. His history, of course, was about the Persian Wars, the invasions of a ragtag collection of city-states on the western frontier of the world's first superpower, the Persian Empire.

And in 480 BC, the Persians lunged west. Both times were defeated by the Greeks. Why does it matter what happened? Why are we still enthralled by those stories of Themistocles, Salamis, Marathon, Plataea, Thermopylae? Well, here's William Shepard to tell us. William Shepard's written several books. He's now published a book on the Persian War.

And I got to sit down with him. And we had a good old chat about one of the foundational stories of Western historiography. Enjoy. I feel the hand of history historiography. Enjoy. One teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world. Thank you very much for coming on the show to talk about the Persian Wars. Yep.

I mean, what is it just Herodotus? I mean, what do we know about the Persian War? Most of what we know is in Herodotus. And it's one of these extraordinary pieces of history where there's a rather small amount of source material, of which Herodotus is by far the largest and definitely the best part. And then a huge amount of secondary material. I don't know if you know Philip Sabin at London University. Well, he's a classical historian, ancient historian of war studies, and he specialises in reconstructing ancient battles by simulating them rather than, you know, beyond games World War, what you're doing is drawing on an enormous stock of primary material and tapering it up to the point of a pillar image. In the case of ancient wars like the Persian War, the Persian War is really the first one to be reasonably documented at all. It's the other way around.

reasonably documented at all it's the other way around um you've got this rather small base of evidence and then you have got this massive breadth of secondary material on it people have been writing about it well since the war finished and it's gone on and on I mean um for centenary of the Battle of Marathon 2011 three books were published just of the Battle of Marathon, 2011, three books were published just on the Battle of Marathon. That's nearly 1,000 pages. In Herodotus, there's actually about less than 1,000 words on the battle itself. And, of course, then there's the iconic nature of the war. There are books on at least three different battles,

all saying they're the battle that changed world history. Three different battles in the Persian War. And Marathon is the least likely candidate for that. Really? Okay, so we've got 490 BC. Yeah. Marathon, we've got 10 years later, 480 is your Thermopylae and your Salamis.

Yeah. Why is this the first war in human history? I don't know enough about Eastern Asian history, but the first war in Eastern history, but the human history perhaps of the Mediterranean Basin, that we've got sort of detail, almost tactical level detail, about what might have happened in these... No, we haven't got tactical level details.

They didn't and couldn't think that way. There's occasional moments where you get tactical minutiae, really. But Thucydides' writing about the Peloponnesian War remarked, and he fought, he knew about it. Herodotus, as far as is known, never fought. Never fought in a war, never went on a ship, never fought as a hoplite or anything else in a battle. But he said he was describing a terrible night attack

which went wrong in the siege of Syracuse. And he describes how in daytime a man in a battle only really knows what's happening to his right and to his left, immediately to his right and to his left and in front of him. And at night, it's worse than that. And you have to couple with that the fact that there weren't the means of measuring. They didn't have maps, except in very elaborate bronze plates. You couldn't sort of do a bronze sketch map. They didn't have instruments for measuring distance. Communication was impossible once the battle had started.

Clouds of dust, tremendous noise. And you do get moments of it. One of the things that spreads a lot of ink over the Battle of Marathon is the fact that the Athenians ran in their charge on the Persians. They didn't walk in a measured tread, they charged. And actually, Herodotus has them charging over an impossible distance. I think, in fact, it was the case that they ran the last staid or so, which is the Olympic running track distance. It's about a furlong.

It translates better into a furlong than metres. And it's a variable figure, depending where you were running your race. But they ran the last part of it, at least at the double. It probably couldn't have been faster. And the reason they did that was the Persian way of fighting, which in one and a half lines Herodotus does document was to stand off and fire arrows or swarm up in cavalry and fire arrows in the same way. They were missile warriors

and the whole approach to battle was to start it off at a distance and hope the opposition would begin to break up. When it broke up, then they would charge and use spears and swords and whatever, go hand to hand. But this, of course, reflects on what happens in the other battles. I think that's the clue to the running charge at Marathon. It probably wasn't that exceptional, but it was unusual. And a great thing was made of it.

So if you're heavy infantry, you want to get to grips with the enemy as quickly as possible. So let's say, do we remember the Persian War? And particularly a generation or two ago, there was this sense that this was the kind of wellspring of Western civilisation against the kind of Asiatic tyranny. Do we remember it because it was hugely geostrategically important, or do we just remember it because it happens to be the first war that we have a historian of sorts who emerges to tell us about it? Well, it's rememberable and important at various levels because it almost immediately became romanticised. Marathon became romanticised.

It was terribly important to the Athenians. It was a great sort of declaration of their identity as a leading power, which they'd grown to be. There was really a big three in the Greek mainland. Corinth, Athens and Sparta, and more broadly, Lastamonia. The whole sort of Spartan state. The hand. The hand, the others.

And it was important that they won. If they hadn't won, I would have put my money on the Persians making it into Athens because it wasn't walled, and if they'd beaten their army out at Marathon, there'd be no defence. They only had a few ships which couldn't have put up much resistance to a larger Persian fleet but I think the Spartans and other allies from the Peloponnese and the Corinthians would have arrived and they would probably have dislodged the Persians. And so the next stage of the war would almost certainly have happened. So let's get everyone on the chronology.

The Persian Empire, the great imperial power of the eastern Mediterranean, lands on Athenian shores, and the Athenians charge out of Athens and fight the Battle of Marathon. Yes. With a little bit of political unrest at home which i think is an interesting part of it there was a peace party um they wanted to appease they probably favored a more autocratic kind of government and would like and accept Persian rule to reinforce that. I mean, the Persians, this is one of the things that,

well, it's wonderfully exaggerated by 300, for example. I mean, they were called the barbarians, but that didn't mean they were barbaric. They were pretty civilised people, and they ran their empire in quite an enlightened way. And in fact, Athens might have gone on being allowed to be a democracy, but they would have had to pay their tribute. They would have to supply their troops in kind and things like that. And that's jogging on to the what if they'd lost in the final battle at Prytia or at Salamis what would have happened then at that time Persia was in Greece in much greater force

yeah that's that's the next invasion that's 10 years later so the Xerxes the son of the man who invaded Athens seeking revenge what's what's he why does Xerxes invade in 480? I think Darius wanted to do it. He publicly stated that it was to punish the Athenians and a town in Euboea called Eretria who sent troops to fight alongside the Ionian Greeks, the Asian Greeks on the... What is now Turkey. Yeah, Turkey, exactly.

And they'd been rebelling against the Persians. They were rebelling. And that was when the war really started, because that was when Greeks began to fight the Persians. And it went on quite a long time, about six or seven years. And the Persians nearly always won, but there was a long resistance there was probably a certain amount of sort of asymmetric warfare at the end but they finally sorted it out the thing which hurt terribly to the Greeks on the mainland was

that Miletus the city of Miletus fell and was razed to the ground which is very sick that had been this enlightened great place place of scientific inquiry. It was, and Herodotus came from there. He was born in Halicarnassus, and he was definitely influenced by the schools of thinking that were developing there, the Ionian schools of philosophy. They became not a school, but a labelled cluster of philosophers called the Presocratics who led on to all of that. And he was part of that enlightenment

without a doubt. And he was astonishing intellectually. It's quite hard going just to read all through Herodotus because he digresses and he puts in long speeches when he wants to explain something. You know, that was the only way they could do sort of non-narrative reflective text. He loves a good anecdote and he's not really sorted out the difference between history and storytelling. It's all one. He wants to talk of great deeds. He also wants to give the reason and to use the word Arche, the beginning, the beginnings of the conflict between the Greeks and the barbarians. So he's wanting to tell good stories and he's also wanting to explain. And sometimes they merge in rather peculiar ways.

And he does say on two occasions, you have to realise that I write down what I'm told. I may not necessarily believe it, but it's my obligation to write down what other people say. And he respects for the most, what he writes down. Usually there's a hint or two. You know which way he thinks the answer goes. And occasionally there's a massive put-down.

I mean, there's a wonderful story about a man who swam about 15 kilometres underwater off the coast of Euboea to warn the Greeks that the Persians were there, which, of course, they knew already, but anyway, he swam underwater off the coast of Euboea to warn the Greeks that the Persians were there, which of course they knew already, but anyway, he swam underwater all the way and he was richly rewarded for the intelligence he brought. And he goes on about his other exploits. And then he just says,

I think he took a boat. Speaking of taking boats, Xerxes crosses from Asia to Europe on a big, great, big bridge of boats that he ties together. So he's sort of finishing his father's work, but he brings a, this is this great story, he brings this giant force with him. I mean, do we have any sense in, what is scholarship today saying? How big might that Persian army have been well um in one of his best put downs of all Herodotus goes all the way through the reasoning for the legendary size of the army and it gets some figure like 5 million 749 342 and um he goes on sort of extrapolating to get to that

number and ends up by counting um concubines and Indian dogs and um then right at the end or a little later he says of course this can't be true if you have that many people each of them would be consuming one cup full of grain a day so you multiply that by five million not sure what the Indian dogs get but you you do a huge multiplication. And he got it nearly right. And the fact that the arithmetic in the sort of received text is wrong may be as much to do with the manuscript not being quite accurate as his arithmetic. But it works out they would be consuming as much grain as probably Athens did in a year, in a day.

It was just impossible. And, you know, that's a very sophisticated way of getting to the bottom of one of these sorts of unbelievable arguments. You can bring a factual answer to it, and he does that beautifully. And he describes the building of the bridge pretty well, but fairly sketchily, because he obviously hadn't seen it done.

But one of the wonderful things I came across is that Arrian, the second century AD author writing about Alexander the Great, Roman, has a wonderful description of how Alexander the Great built pontoon bridges. So this is an example of how you can take back things, you know, back project things from centuries afterwards into that time and get a better understanding of it. It sometimes produces bad results. There's a lot of certainty in certain quarters about, you know, how hoplites fought, therefore how the Athenians and Spartans fought in this particular war. And they use the word phalanx a lot. You've heard of that.

Everybody talks about the phalanx, the Spartans lining up the phalanx, the Athenians in their phalanx. It's a word that isn't used by Herodotus except for a log of wood. And it isn't used by Thucydides at all. In other words, that wasn't a concept which has the baggage of the fourth century BC and the third, then it's a more modern form of fighting and it reached its peak with Alexander the Great's and Philip of Macedon's long pikemen. It was in some respects perhaps still

have been more recognisable as a way of fighting by a warrior of the Homeric era. a warrior of the Homeric era. Now, as far as Troy was concerned, that was the 12th century BC. But actually, the warfare that Homer is writing about is probably more like the 7th. And certainly lines of heavy infantry, clashes of lines, charges and so on, but a certain amount of fluidity too. Okay.

Individual combat. Right, so a certain amount of fluidity too. Okay. Individual combat. Right. So a little bit sort of Bronze Age heroic. Yeah, there was definitely. Getting out in front. And one of the things which is evidence for it is that for every battle, Herodotus said, and so and so, so and so, so and so got the award for valour. It's this wonderful concept arete, which is not really translatable with one word, but thinking of Victoria Cross

as valour is probably rather a good way of thinking about it. If they were all fighting shoulder to shoulder, as it's described, in a completely coherent block of men, how could an individual excel? I mean, very important, the group effort of it, but rather hard to see how you could, as it were, win your colours just being one in the line, lined up with everyone else. And they didn't fight shoulder to shoulder anyway,

because they fought, the fighting stance was with one shoulder forward, rather like a boxing stance, so that their shields probably touched, but they didn't interlock. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History,

we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week Why do at the Battle of Thermopylae, famously a small force of Spartan and allied Greek forces

hold off the Persian army, then we move to Plataea the following year, arguably the decisive land encounter, there is a sense that the Greeks are better at these infantry clashes than the Persians. Do you think that's equipment, way of fighting? Why does it... or because the sources are biased? Well, we should start with Thermopylae,

because that has all sorts of alternative history around it. You know, alternate history, alternate facts even. The land battle at Thermopylae, I think, can better be described as a siege. They were in a very narrow place and they probably had quite a good bastion. So barricades. The barricades.

What they did have to do was keep the Persians for getting to the wall, so they could get ladders to it so they could start picking it and pulling it down. So they had to skirmish out from the wall, drive off parties of Persians coming. And their heavier armour and the fact that they were good at fighting in coherent units when they needed to, but also good at individual combat, did show a degree of superiority. But Herodotus starts it. He describes the Persians driving in in waves against the indomitable Greeks,

standing in line and the fighting went on a very long time and many fell and it probably never did happen like that except at the last stand the Persians would have stood off and um bombarded bombarded with their armor and with the fact that they probably had some head cover on their little wall and everything like that um it held for two or three days. What the persons were really doing was trying to get round it. And the other thing that happens with Thermopylae, it gets all the big tunes, but actually there was a much bigger battle

and equally important going on at sea at the same time. That's a matter of Artemisium. There were probably, probably well there were 300 and something triremes to start with you know the mainland greece's entire assets and um a good 70 80 000 men including a lot of hot blights engaged in a much bigger battle than in fact the 6,000 to start with at Thermopylae were engaged with the land army but it was a combined operation strategy as long as the Thermopylae front could be held and the Persians hadn't got around it and as long as the fleet held so that the Persian fleet could not get behind the land army it was a defensive wall for Greece and it was a bit of a Maginot moment really because

the Maginot line could be got round and Thermopylae could be got round and it's a total mystery to me how they thought a thousand Phocians parked up in the mountains round the back could be thought to be able to protect them from a flanking march and the other thing which baffles me is how they happen to be in the right place because they they did the persons didn't meet them and encounter them and they um the g the Greeks, the thousand Greeks, lined up, prepared to sell their lives dearly, took up position. The Persians fired a few arrows and carried straight on. And, you know, this is part of the philosophy of war.

You're not trying for position or whatever. The more prosaic Greek philosophy, you found a field, a playing field almost, the dancing floor of Aries, to face each other and decide the matter. You know, it was all about beating the other army, not necessarily going round it and occupying something else. But if the fleet had failed, the army at Thermopylae would have been stuck

because the Persian fleet could get round. If the army had failed, the fleet, the Greek fleet, would have its retreat cut off because you couldn't spend the night on a trireme or be very uncomfortable and no sleeping quarters, limited amount of water, things like that. They had to land every so often to get water to cook, to feed. You know, they didn't have galleys or bunks or anything like that. I mean, it was an extraordinary rowing machine. It was like an eight, but with 170 oars. it was like an eight but with 170 oars and so so the thermopylae they the spartans go round the back they annihilate this mythical band at thermopylae athens is captured and burned

then you got the battle of salamis yes do we know enough about why Salamis turned out the way that it is, crushing a Greek-Athenian-led victory? I think we do. I think we know that this wonderful character Themistocles, who was really the strategic master of the naval protection of Greece in those two years, he knew he couldn't beat the Persians in the open sea. They had more ships. They were, I mean, there are various contradictions, but they were on the whole better sea boats. They're more manoeuvrable. They had the ability to surround them and to crush them in the open sea. He knew he had to meet them in closed waters or relatively closed waters. I mean the Straits of Artemisium is about 20 kilometers across and I think most

of the fighting there was when the Persians tried to get down to the narrows at one end to go round to get behind the position at Thermopylae. And the fighting was, there was an objective for the Persians' part to get round them and the Greeks had stopped them getting round. And Herodotus understands this very clearly. He works it out and he gets the strategic links between the two. Anyway, the motivation was that Athens did not want to abandon Attica. They said, we've got to fight up here. There's a good reason for it. We could fight at the isthmus

of Corinth, but then, you know, we could probably hold that, but the Persian fleet could get round because there's open sea to get round to it he had to persuade them to fight and you know there is this story about him sending his family tutor with a message that the Greek fleet was about to The Greek fleet was about to disperse and break up. And if Xerxes made his move, he could catch them on the way out and defeat them. And there was reason to believe this because there had been endless bickering about where the next stand should be made. The Athenians had said,

look, if you're not going to fight here, we're off. We're going to relocate to Sicily, to Italy. That'll be it. You won't have our fleet to help you. And the rest of the Greeks, mainly Peloponnesians, knew that without the Athenian fleet, 200 ships in the 340 or so that they could actually put on the water, they had no chance whatsoever.

And he persuaded them to come in to the straits. And again, you can interpret it in various ways, that's the fun of it. My interpretation is which certainly has some support both from Aeschylus who wrote this wonderful tragedy the Percy which has an eyewitness account in the battle of Salamis because he he was actually in it. They came in in order to face the Greeks who were on the island of Salamis opposite them and to block the ways out to the east towards Piraeus. And they also had a fleet round to the west of the island which stopped them going out the other way. and persuaded them that if they came in, faced the Greeks, at first light, the Greeks would all be going off in different directions and they'd be there for the taking. And, as I say, there was reason to believe that.

I mean... Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week There was an awful lot of traffic of information to and fro between the two sides. The Persians were past masters at it. One of their main tactics or strategies was to break up opposition before it even fought,

persuade them to give in or persuade key members of the enemy forces to give in bribery threats. And so they had good reason to believe that they were being told the truth, this was what was going to happen. And then first thing in the morning, as the white wisps of daybreak pass over the sea, in the morning, as the white wisps of daybreak pass over the sea, they see a perfectly coordinated Greek fleet coming out to meet them, and they clash. And the Greeks manage to control their fleet in the space, mainly because it's smaller, better than the Persians. And the Persians get tangled up with each other. They have more Persians enthusiastically coming in and it becomes a huge sort of traffic jam.

The Greek fleet doesn't have to do much work. It's just punching into these crowds of enemy ships and creating more and more confusion. So it was a bad mistake, and for Mr Cleese, it was almost, it was like jujitsu, really. You know, he used the enemy's strength to defeat him. And then let's just talk quickly about Plataea at the end, this land, the forgotten land,

but too many people tend to forget about Plataea. Yes, the most important of all. Right, exactly. In that, again, that's seen as traditionally a clash of these heavy armoured hoplites against more lightly armoured Persian infantry. Is that fair? What do we now think? It's fair, but an interesting part of it, there was a possibly significant hoplite battle

in the middle of it as well, hoplite against hoplite because the thebans and the thessalians and others from northern greece were fighting on the persian side but it was decided by the 10 000 lacedaemonians made up of 5 000 spartans 500 from outlying cities of licester, and Mardonius, the Persian general's best Persian and Median troops. And that was the final stage of the battle. It was about the 12th day. I mean, it was an extraordinary affair. There were probably more troops engaged in it

than at Getzburg or Waterloo. I mean, it was that sort of size. And, you know, measures reasonably up with the manpower that went in at D-Day. It was Armageddon-like. And it could have decided it either way. Again, you then go off into what-ifs. But a total Persian victory at Plataea, with a much larger force in Greece than came over there for Marathon, would probably have been able to fulfil Darius's and then Xerxes' purpose, which was, as I said, partly to punish Athens, but also to push out the empire. It happens with a lot of empires. They always like to get their boundaries further and further away, so they have great stability inside.

I mean, the Victorians had a good art. They knew this. They thought that this was the birth of the Mediterranean Western civilization, a sort of Socratic and Aristotelian way of thinking about the world and freedom and all this kind of stuff. You mentioned actually the Persian Empire could be quite enlightened in dealing with its subject peoples. Do you see this as one of the great turning points in history? An expression that annoys me is people say it changed the course of history. What's that mean? Everything does. Because history took its course.

The course it took was very important. I think democracy, tremendously romantic idea, and the liberty and things like that. Democracy was important to Greeks, you know, a nice sort of individualistic, bloody-minded way of running a country. And they were permitted to change their minds as well when they had voted on something, even two days later. Famously. They wouldn't have had Brexit. But they were interested in individual freedom.

They were interested in the freedom of their city-states, individual city-states, their polis. They weren't interested in the liberty or freedom of Greece as such. They wanted the conditions for them to be able to have their individual liberty within greece and obviously not being under the heel of a tiring monarch you know 33 months march away or whatever they wanted to run their own show but democracy did flourish as a system as a result. As I say, I don't think the Persians were necessarily quashed it. After the Ionian Revolt, when they were pacifying Ionia, they actually allowed some of the states in Ionia to get rid of their tyrants,

their autocratic rulers or their oligarchies and changed to democracy, but democracy inside the Persian Empire. So democracy was able to flourish as it was, and that's important because the institutions and concepts and so on around us were all very important. I mean, equality under the law, an equal voice in government were two very important parts of it.

The cultural events, the growth of philosophy, the magnificent literature, the architecture, I think it's unlikely that would have happened on anything like the same scale if Athens had not been able to accumulate If Athens had not been able to accumulate the riches it was able to do, it built its own empire. And that, of course, ironically, provided a lot of the funding for all these wonderful things to go on and provided the cultural life, the space for the cultural life that flourished. So that wouldn't have happened.

Then, you know, with their own version of Manifest Destiny, where would the Persians have gone next? Sicily. They'd have teamed up with the Carthaginians and gone to Sicily. They'd have gone into Italy. And then, you know, there are various interesting things for them. I mean, Rome had just about scraped into a republican state at about the time that the Persian War was fought.

Rome was in its infancy. If Persia had gone into Italy, what would have happened with the Roman Empire? And without a Roman Empire, what might have happened with Christianity? Crikey. Well well okay, so it changed no, I know it changed it was a turning point

William Shepard, thank you very much the book's called The Persian War, everyone go and buy it thank you very much on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished and liquidated. One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen

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