Passed My Prime.

There's a curious passage in a book I just finished, British poet Robert Grave's autobiography Goodbye to All That, addressing the diminishing effects of the endocrine system on soldiers fighting in the trenches along the Somme during WWI:
"Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime.  For the first three weeks, an officer was of little use in the front line; he did not know his way around, had not learned the rules of health and safety, or grown accustomed to recognizing degrees of danger.  Between three weeks and four weeks he was at his best, unless he happened to have any particular bad shock or sequence of shocks. Then his usefulness gradually declined as neurasthenia developed. At six months he was still more or less alright; but by nine or ten months, unless he had been given a few weeks' rest on a technical course, or in a hospital, he usually became a drag on the other company officers. After a year or fifteen months he was often worse than useless.  Dr. W.H.R. Rivers told me later that the action of one of the ductless glands - I think the thyroid - caused this slow general decline of military usefulness, by failing at a certain point to pump its stimulating chemical into the blood.  Without its continued assistance the man went about his tasks in an apathetic and doped condition, cheated into further endurance. It has taken some ten years for my blood to recover."  I don't want to denigrate their sacrifice, but since I go about my tasks in an apathetic and doped condition, I can only logically assume that my stress is equivalent to that of an officer after a lengthy engagement at Ypres - although I do enjoy the luxury of mustard on my hot dog rather than in my lungs.

I started reading a book about another WWI soldier, although that's not what he's best known for:

I'm not terribly far into it, but this is my fourth McCullough book and he's rapidly becoming my favorite author du jour.  I finished his fantastic history of the Panama Canal with several schoolboy myths dispelled and a new appreciation for mosquitoes that don't carry yellow fever (I confess, any appreciation for mosquitoes must be classified as new).

I wish I could say I also developed a new appreciation for Douglas E. Richards' writing but, alas, although I just read his bestseller Wired last week I can't remember much of anything about it.  It cropped up on several science fiction favorites lists but those lists may have been written by teenage boys, the apparent target demographic. Richards, a molecular biologist by training, is a bright writer with intriguing ideas regarding genetic manipulation but I just couldn't suspend my disbelief long enough to suppress my yawns. I prefer the suspense of history, I suppose, even though I know what's coming.  I guess I'm getting old.