The Sad Absurdity of War Revisited
(ad nausium)

I was a somewhat late-blooming historian, having taken the standard history courses in high school with the usual half-interested disaffection common to so many young students of the 60s. It was not until I had matured a bit, gone on to college, the Southeast Asian War and finally lived & worked long-term as an expatriate overseas that I eventually came into my own as a devoted enthusiast of historical fact and circumstance; for somewhere along the line it fully dawned upon me that the key to understanding the semi-crazed, chaotic events of the real-time world hinged critically on gaining a reflective glimmer of exactly what experiential dynamics had set them all in motion to begin with.

This insight presupposes not just an interest in history, but the ability to store that knowledge and put it to good future use. Of course, if one is ‘blessed’ with limited genetic cognitive material at the outset, drowned in adolescent social effluvia, submerged within dysfunctional family affairs, and/or otherwise infected with the fatal bacterium of anti-societal failure, such awarenesses are not even on the peripheral mental horizon of possibilities!

All too typically, far too many students fail completely to truly seize upon a scholastic subject in early life that opens the door to enthused enlightenment, whilst in the early phases of their education. More usually, this sense of purposeful interest comes at a later stage of life (and of education), unless positive family influence, social pressure and peer circumstances take a greater part in the formative interests of one’s youth.

Sadly, in our modern times, the devastating distractions that surround and submerge those with actual potential to achieve and excel in a scholastic environment (and there are many, a partial list might include the ‘thuggery of PC diversity’, the vapid nihilism of highly material & capitalistic American pop culture, and the widespread hypocrisy that characterises modern political institutions and the personages active therein), thereby posing incredible difficulties on the path to meaningful personal development. As a result, few modern adolescents cultivate much of an interest in the ‘how, why and when’ of things that often embroil them in a war that has no real tangible, personal meaning to them beyond a faint glimmer in their heads of medals, heroic acts and perhaps a mind-matinee replay or two of old John Wayne war movies.

Vietnam certainly caught MY attention, but as a resident undergrad living in the San Francisco Bay Area (read: The Peoples’ Republic of Berkeley) I affected the expected automatic counter-culture rejection of that totally unnecessary war. But it wasn’t the assumed puerile glory of being a soldier-hero that piqued my interest, but the all-too-real fancied image of myself lying quite lifeless in some far-off rice paddy, half immersed in water contaminated with human excrement and sporting a nice little red hole (AK-47 sized) in my forehead. Since I had by that time long-since viewed William Holden’s superbly acted ‘Bridges at Toko-Ri’, the final scene of Brubaker & Forney (played by Mickey Rooney) greatly impressed me; how could I ever forget Bru and Forney, crouching in a similar irrigation ditch full of sewage, being riddled with enemy rounds to put the final exclamation point on author Mitchner’s unforgettable novel? I knew myself well enough to completely understand that, my intense interest in Japanese martial arts & Bushido at that time notwithstanding, I was a pussycat when it came to hanging my derriere out over that razor’s edge of mortal infinity, I was also somewhat of a cowardly fellow and I had a low pain threshold as well.

As an ardent pacifist (at that time), I had already done a considerable amount of reading in the area of anti-war history [I recall being shocked to discover an incredible anti-war book, dated 1917, that slammed pro-war proponents of First World War US intervention in a local book shop, titled…I’ll never forget…”War! What For?!”

Curiously, whilst the book was written in the early 1900s, its title almost parallels a very recent one by historian Ian Morris, titled ‘War! What is it Good For?’ [Strange further evidence of the eternal validity of philosopher George Santayana’s famed admonishment about repeating the lessons of the past.] In the mid-60s the war started ‘hotting up’ and they began yanking student deferments for those with less than a ‘C’ GPA (I think I was pulling a ‘C-‘ then, due to a bad score in Algebra). As a typically distracted undergrad, uncertain of anything at that point (and doubly handicapped with undiagnosed ADD), it was clear that I’d find that M-16 in my hands sooner than not, so I joined the USAF, hoping for some nice ‘rear echelon’ duty (and found it, as an Air Force medic).

At any rate, all of the foregoing really prompted me to do some serious thinking about war (and not just the Vietnam imbroglio). Prone to intense inner reflection by nature, my interest in warfare (and the human cost of mass conflicts) prompted me to think about taking an academic degree in history (this later led to an MA in this area). If it hadn’t been for Vietnam, it’s altogether possible that I’d have found something else to fix my attention on in terms of a life-goal.

Very recently I happened to start looking at German cinema of the early 1900s era, particularly that undertaken by various directors during the Weimar period (which was immensely influenced by the miserable outcome of the ‘Great War’, although there was little that was great about it other than the senseless loss of life and horrific mortality stats it engendered). Since I’ve always been particularly interested in German culture and history, it was only natural to take note of German film star and director Leni Riefenstal (whose cameras later helped define the Hitlerian Reich to the rest of the world), early in the 30s and onwards.

Riefenstal, an unusually ‘different’ but talented actress, gained a name for herself in a series of German films centered principally in the Alps. Given that Germanic nations have always found special meaning in the challenges of the high mountains, Riefenstal soon completed several noteworthy iterations of the ‘mountain cinema’ genre. Along with Riefenstal’s films, other German films of that period also came to my attention, one of them in particular titled ‘Berge in Flammen’(‘Mountains in Flames’ by director Luis Trenker) that consisted of a WW1 war drama focused upon an epic conflict between the Italian ‘Alpini’ (mountain troops) and their Austro-Hungarian counterparts (known as ‘Landesjaeger Bergtroopen’).

The story was quite interesting, consisting of a plot wherein a handful of beleaguered Austrian troops occupying a steep side-spur on a mountain managed to stubbornly withstand the continued efforts of far superior Italian forces to take the peak. Exciting stuff that, even for early 30s German cinema!

At any rate, the film turned my focus of interest slightly from WW2 Germany to the history of Austria-Hungary’s participation as part of the Central Powers in the first war. Since I have long had a fascination with Austria and especially Vienna, it was quite natural to start looking into the downfall of the Habsburg’s monarchy that the First War essentially effected.

Before long, a few especially good books caught my eye as I began researching this subject. The first book was titled ‘The White War; Life & Death on the Italian Front in WW1’, by English author & Cambridge academician Mark Thompson, and the second (fiction) was by Czech Bohemian author Jaroslav Hasek, whose immortal ‘anti-war’ protagonist named ‘Good Soldier Shvejk’ (first published in 1923) is now a renown classic among well-informed intelligentsia everywhere.

While Hasek’s book centers on the misadventures of its central character (Josef Shvejk, a modest man of beguiling simplicity and positively beatific nature who always manages to find himself making the best of the benighted chaos that was the lot of all Austro-Hungarian soldiers…and more about that later), Thompson’s book is a serious historical study of the disastrous Italian campaign against the Austro-Hungarian Army in the Julian Alps (comprising roughly the ‘South Tyrol’ region in Northern Italy). This is usually termed the ‘Italian Front’ in WW1.

Although Thompson’s very dry and somewhat stultified English nature permeates the book (he persists, for example, in referring to enlisted soldiers in the timeless English manner as ‘other ranks’, a tendency that never ceases to irritate me, with its condescending overtones of traditional British class bias), he has nevertheless cobbled together a very thorough and cogent overview of Italy’s costly campaign to wrest territory it felt was rightly Italy’s from the clutches of the Habsburg Empire.

The book, while analytically quite astute, focuses principally on the political and diplomatic machinations that plagued the conduct of that war, which is a shame, since this makes it not at all a smooth and effortless read. Furthermore, if one has any sort of strong interest in set-piece battles and the maneuvering of the antagonist armies, one is bound to be a bit let down, for the actual fighting at trench level is rather sparsely covered. Naturally, to one at least who is a mountaineer and therefore well acquainted with the often violently brutal effects of high altitude weather in the mountains, I was somewhat disappointed to find that it has been left to others to more fully render this aspect of fighting a savagely bloody ‘modern’ (for 1917, at least) war in that inhospitable region.

What did catch my interest significantly, however, were the actual circumstances & details that formed the factual basis of Trenker’s ‘Bergen in Flammen’ epic film battle. It seems that the Trenker film’s setting was a 400 meter high rock spur on the flank of Mount Tofana. That spur was named ‘the Castelleta’, since it stood proudly apart from the adjacent Italian-occupied Tofana massif and constituted a natural fortress that appeared near-impregnable.

The Austro-Hungarian forces in this area were sparse, and in terms of both manpower & artillery they were far outnumbered by the combined forces Italy faced them with. However, as military strategists harking back as far as the Chinese Master Sun Tzu have been ever quick to point out, defending high ground is infinitely easier than attacking and taking it. In this part of the Julian Alps that gem of military wisdom was impressively true, since the scree and particulate rock detritus littering the steep slopes of ‘the Castiletta’ were almost unimaginably difficult to advance up. Add to this the fire effects of the defenders and only a miracle could be expected to overcome even a sparsely defended mountain peak such as that.

The story is an interesting one, and sadly the details concerning it constitute the only real battle diorama Thompson illustrates in some detail. Found in the chapter titled ’Whiteness’, one learns that the senior Austro-Hungarian officer on the Castelleta was only a 19 year old Cadet Ensign (Hans Schneeberger), yet despite his tender years and inexperience, his brave actions and those of his far-outnumbered men kept this key peak in Austrian hands until late in the war (1917), when an Imperially ordered ‘strategic retreat’ finally allowed Italy to retake the pinnacle without any further casualties!

This one especially fascinating part of Thompson’s book aside, what emerges above all else in the story of the fault-plagued and poorly coordinated Italian campaign against the Habsburg troops is the stunning loss of life in this theatre of the Central Powers’ war. It is generally unknown to almost everyone today that despite the much publicized loss of life by both the Allies and the Central Powers along the Western Front, the losses suffered by both the Italians and the Austrians (but especially by the Italian forces) along this part of the Italian-Austrian border were far greater, proportionately speaking! With over 2,197,000 total deaths and severely injured casualties, the Italians sustained substantial losses in the war that are somehow generally overlooked today. By contrast, the Austrian losses in the Italian Front conflict were less than half-to-a-third that of Italy’s in most of the engagements. With regard to prisoners of war, conditions were such that Austrian prisoners died at a rate of two and a half times that of Italian prisoners in the respective camps and the privations endured were as brutal as any sustained by the German, French & English armies along the Western Front at any specific time.

The Austrians (and by this I mean any Austro-Hungarian Imperial troops) barely maintained parity, despite being heavily out-gunned and out-manned, due principally to the fact that they had far more of the new machine guns at the onset of the Italian Campaign than did Italy, but compounding the situation grievously was the hopelessly inept and inflexible officer corps of the Italian Army, a command structure further complicated by the Machiavellian politics that characterised wartime Italy’s government.

Contributing greatly to the hopeless sense that quickly spread throughout the Italian Forces of that period was a stridently dishonest propaganda campaign that purposefully understated Italian losses and grossly overstated Italian gains & victories. In fact, the war was not popular among the Italian people. The raw untruth of these governmental deceits resulted in widespread desertions and instances of needless surrender by large masses of Italian troops, throughout the campaign. Adding further to the lack of positive morale on the Italian side of the conflict was the use of ‘incentives’ to ‘encourage’ a fighting spirit among the Italians. Among these was the use of Italian machine guns set up behind the Italian trenches that were aimed at Italian troops, so that any who fled the battle or tuned and ran away were mercilessly gunned down by their own regiments!

Another device instituted to deal with deserters (aside from courts martial) was a policy known as ‘decimation’. This practice harkened back to Imperial Roman Empire times, when failure of a legion to fight successfully was dealt with by the random selection of every 10th man or so, who would then be executed on the spot. The Italian Army refined the process by selecting every 5th man in the shamed regiment or battalion to stand against the wall and be shot! Decimation at the time, and according to traditional Italian military thought, was thought well justified as a means of discouraging troops from showing anything less than an enthusiastic spirit of attack in fighting the Austrian enemy. Today, such measures are not only unthinkable, they are near inconceivable! By comparison, only the Bolshevik NKVD (in WW2) engaged in comparably savage atrocities with regard to its own troops, when Russian soldiers failed to advance against stalwart German (Wehrmacht/SS) defenders as the war closed in on Germany’s own home ground, and the Soviet NKVD ‘execution squads’ were far more notorious in this sense than the worst of similar Nazi efforts to discourage German cowardice in the final stages of defense of the German homeland.

One of the more salient points brought out by Thompson in his book is the fact that the average Italian soldier of the early 1900s was abysmally ignorant, since most were little more than unschooled provincial peasants who were given a rifle, very little military training and pushed up to the front to fight for ‘the honor of Italy’. Almost none, save a few of the more highly educated classes and some intellectuals who chose to join the fighting as ‘other ranks’, fully understood what they were fighting for. Absolutely none, within reason, knew much about the long standing history and/or politics of European history of that period (or the formative one immediately preceding it). Italian provincial soldiers were generally far more ignorant of such refined subjects as national history, national pride, etc., than the regular enlisted ranks of Austro-Hungarian soldiers, despite the fact that the Habsburg Monarchy consisted of no small number of smaller, subjugated ethnic enclaves (including Bosnians, Ruthenians, Romanians, Serbs, Czechs, the Austrians themselves, other Slavic minorities and both Christian and Muslim members of Franz Josef’s polyglot and extremely heterogeneous empire). At least and in contrast, thanks to the constant undertone of political maneuvering and conflicting sentiments, a far great number of the Austro-Hungarians ‘other ranks’ understood a glimmering of ‘why’ they were being urged to battle the common foe (Italy). Their contentiousness had other, more substantial bases than here patriotic pride. That said, there were orders of magnitude separating the officer class and the common soldiers.

Another point Thompson underscores is that the Italian Campaign was fought principally due to aggressive Italian expansionist aspirations and not due to Austro-Hungarian imperial ambitions. The pretext of solidarity that emerged from the joint declaration of the Central Powers prompted Italian ambitions to reconquer parts of its northern periphery that it had lost in earlier battles of the 1800s and it reckoned on what it regarded as certain: the disintegration of the Hapsburg Empire (as it turned out, rightfully) to bring about what its inglorious and grossly miss-coordinated military campaign failures could not. Italy was neither fighting a defensive war, nor was it entirely justified in attacking the Austro-Hungarian Empire that it shared a border with. In the end, when the Habsburg Empire did in fact fall apart, Italy added disgrace and comedic ineptitude to its list of wartime failings in its immediate post-war negotiations with the more powerful allies (England, France and the USA) to be given parts of the former South Austrian region of Tyrol. It is said that only thanks to a near-shameful display of Italian extreme emotion (tears and sobbing) in certain meetings with the ‘Big Three’ (Woodrow Wilson, Clemenceau and George) by Italy’s designated minister, Vittorio Orlando, did Italy achieve a few of these goals!

In the end, and due to the aggregate of Italy’s continuous martial incompetence throughout the ‘Italian Front’, Italy was regarded merely as somewhat of an irritating joke by the other three victorious Allies; it was not a status, given Italy’s highly capricious conduct of its wartime efforts, totally undeserved.

As most know, even deficit of any factual knowledge of Italy’s actual wartime conduct, the mixed outcome of the war for Italy resulted, as it did for the German nation, in the extremely unsettled social, economic and political circumstances that facilitated the rise of the Axis Powers somewhat later. In Italy, as in Germany, the subsequent ‘Second War’ was the direct, if slightly delayed, result of the disastrous mess that was the First.

Despite its many small shortcomings, I would not hesitate to recommend Mark Thompson’s book to other students of both European and military history. The subject of Italy’s involvement in the so called ‘Great War’ is so little known that any information we are fortunate to be presented on it is valuable in its own right, but be prepared for a dry discourse on the broader political background that underlay Italy’s military misadventures in the late years of the First World War. Lest I seem dismissive and/or somewhat condescending in my assessments & remarks about it, let me assure you that Mark Thompson has impeccable academic credentials (whereas I don’t) and although his book is more of a referential work than a purely research work, it constitutes very valuable insights into what remains a very little understood part of that the new century’s first war!

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From here to Jaroslav Hasek’s memorably comedic work (commonly known today as ‘The Good Soldier Shvejk’) is rather a leap, since in order to better understand the background to Hasek’s single, most well-known work, one should have at least a vague understanding of the patchwork quilt of conflicting ethnic and racial tensions upon which the story of recent European history has been established. Hasek was an extremely quirky individual in his own right, a quality well reflected in his protagonist ‘Shvejk’. He was also a true Bohemian in the sense that he reflected all the qualities of life that characterise the regions of Bohemia & Moravia in what is now the Czech Republic. In this affect he enjoyed a startlingly satirical bent, which found its way into short written pieces he prepared for publication in local newspapers and printed periodicals to make a living. Although an effortless writer of short, witty stories, he was largely unprepared to undertake anything of far more challenging substance, such as a book.

His personal early life consisted of that of an intelligent & keenly observant vagabond, experiences that proved complementary with various travels he took throughout both his home region and nearby Switzerland. After a short stint in the Austro-Hungarian Army, he wrote a couple of short stories around a character he named ‘Josef Shvejk’, who was ostensibly a somewhat simple, uncomplicated fellow who had a strongly mischievous mind-set. Enjoying nothing better than a beer with local friends in the nearest stube, he possessed no soaring ambitions as a serious writer, but managed to support himself through publications of his short stories that found a receptive audience in the public readers of periodicals. One day an inspiration occurred to write a couple of short anecdotes specifically about a private character named ‘Josef Shvejk’, who soon found himself in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Five stories resulted, all centered on the misadventures of Shvejk, a small, inconsequential and somewhat tubby fellow possessed of a cherubic face and a beguiling smile that was a fixture on his face. It has been stated that to a large extent, a large part of ‘Shvejk’ was Hasek himself.

Played off against the gross excesses of the effete Austro-Hungarian Empire’s German-influenced officer class, Shvejk undergoes a series of unintended adventures, yet always manages to shine through them, leaving a path of perplexity and frustration behind him. On this level alone, Hasek manages to have created a delightful romp that provides an entertaining read. On a deeper level, however, Hasek paints a picture of seething racial, national and cultural conflicts, antipathies, suspicions and mistrusts between the various component people of the Habsburg Empire, all dynamics that led to the eventual breakup of the Habsburg Monarchy.

As a Czech, Hasek portrays all this superbly in his ‘Shvejk’ protagonist, but Hasek’s own personal semi-anarchistic Bohemian sentiments carried him off on a number of adventures that included joining the ‘Czech Legion’ in Russia, remaining there (in Russia) and functioning as a low-level commissar, and playing just about every end he encountered off against the middle. In doing so, he alienated a great number of people who otherwise would have been supportive of his satire-laden wit. One of the results was that only much later did Hasek become acknowledged as a national author of eminence in the Czech Republic.

One of the chief products of Hasek’s works, of course, is a strong, yet subtle denunciation of the utter absurdity of war (technically the focus of this piece you are reading, but Hasek’s chief thesis as well), although he chooses to let his satire and punditry take on this task, somewhat indirectly, rather than make any straight-forward social criticisms. A critic once remarked that Hasek had a strong sense of ‘mischievousness’ in his make-up and that combined successfully with his inherent anarchistic tendencies to make the enduring statement about the ultimate absurdity of warfare that one discovers in ‘Shvejk’ today.

As you might expect, mark Thompson conveys, through his analysis of the disastrous Italian Campaign, a very detailed impression of how futile war is in terms of its profoundly disastrous effects on ordinary humanity. He remarks that wars only serve the powerful, the masters of any political regime in power, and observes that war relies upon the ‘cattle’ and the ‘cannon fodder’ that are the ordinary soldiers, to achieve those benefits. But even then, the ‘victories’ are almost hollow, for while certain select ‘uber-citizens’ may achieve advancement in material gain & personal wealth (today this would amount to corporations & commercial organisations that supply the materiel upon which wars rely) from warfare, quite often the lesser nations involved in wars totally exhaust themselves…even in victory. After all, wars are costly not only in human terms, but in national terms as well. Unless one has the relatively safe comfort of a location well removed from the actual conflict (such as the United States had in both WW1 and WW2), the resulting material devastation (especially for smaller, less wealthy nations) can be ruinous.

In an interesting parallel course, contemporary author Ian Morris has recently come out with a new book titled ‘War! What is it Good For?’. Morris is a historian of note, who has taken a long look at the history of war from the earliest conflicts of proto humans through the most modern wars of our era, and reaches a similar conclusion: that wars are devastating for human beings, but potentially beneficial for states. He plays the part of devil’s advocate here to a certain extent, for he explains somewhat further on in his book that wars, devastating as they have always been (for individuals), act as a necessary lubricant to allow progressive social & civil development of the species; he opines that although brutally cruel to most participants, war actually serves several useful purposes that may be viewed as 'positive'.

If one senses that he is not quite saying that in the overall scheme of things individual people really have no transcending value, one is probably right, since while people perish, and while even some states perish (if they lose a war), powerful victors gain immeasurably in the outcome. Again, the best example of this in modern times is our own United States of America. Ostensibly founded on the principles of ‘individual freedoms’, after all has been said & done, with perhaps millions of war dead, with lives utterly ruined on a microscopic level, on the macroscopic level the state draws its power, success and wealth off the lives and ‘sacrifices’ individuals have been willing to make for it. Another term for this sense of Lemming-like willingness to self-obliterate for the ‘greater’ cause is ‘patriotism’, or the willingness to throw away one’s entire span of mortal consciousness for a few medals, perhaps a few ‘atta-boys’ and perhaps an occasional reflection on the part of someone visiting a massive soldiers’ cemetery who takes a few seconds to wonder whether or not it was all worthwhile… Beyond that, the individual counts for little in the larger and it is the masses of ‘individuals’ who are the chief enablers of all wars and all warfare. Basically every soldier is little more than a pawn at best, a sucker at worst, for willingly allowing himself to be led off to the slaughter so as to further the material assets of war contractors and other powerful ‘masters’ of the military-industrial corporate complex. Sad to say.

If there were such a thing as a truly noble cause, a truly transcendent good and/or a supremely worthy objective with benefits for all, perhaps such sacrifices would be somewhat meaningful or perhaps even acceptable. But, as we all know, human affairs are anything but ‘just’, ‘ethical’, ‘altruistic’ or egalitarian and when the final distillates are filtered off from the witches brew that is war, one is left with a residue of personal power, wealth, and material success that constitute the exclusive domain of a select few who alone benefit from the stormy chaos of warfare.

Individuals such as Jaroslav Hasek (through his character ‘Shvejk’) knew this all too well, and today’s modern ‘proto-anarchists’ also appear to have the formula dialed in properly. The fact is that fighting a modern war is not unlike eating Chinese food (not long after the war, you feel like you haven’t fought a war at all…as the old joke goes), in that some years after all the fighting has ceased, chances are likely that aging foes from both sides have long since gotten together in a spirit of nostalgic fellowship and mutually wonder, amidst all the comraderly toasts to everyone’s good health, how they could possibly have hated each other so much as to try desperately to kill each other off!

Sadly enough, ‘states’ have no human feeling, no ‘consciousness’ and no discrete emotional potential for reflectivity. Only individuals possess these qualities, and yet despite the ability to put it all together and determine that in any war the millions of individuals who comprise the armies are the sole losers, most are willing to subordinate all that to some highly emotional promissory national flim-flam. And we ‘individuals’ are only granted a period of emotional awareness spanning a few decades, so why waste that precious gift of conscious life by allowing one’s self to be duped into taking a bullet for that highest, most privileged class of social status wherein all the power, wealth and status is clustered? Why indeed? There is much here to think about, by any reckoning.

I say all of the foregoing as an enthusiastic student of military history. One who finds the twists and turns of nebulous & nefarious national schemes of conquest, patriotic glory, subjugation and strategic gain to be utterly fascinating. I am also an occasional living history re-enactor, participating in recreations of WW1 & 2 history…a paradox if ever there was one!
I suppose if I had to explain all this, I’d have to say that if war is utterly absurd, destructive, mortally uncertain, dangerous and full of grief, so is life itself and no one…absolutely no one…gets out of this life experience alive. On those terms, the question of whether it’s somehow better to end one’s life taking a SAM-2 hit up the tailpipe whilst flying F-105 missions over Vietnam…or having one’s legs blown off by a landmine…or having half one’s face sheared off by an explosive projectile…or shitting one’s self to death in an extended care facility at the age of 98…is as moot as that infernal & utterly unanswerable question “What’s the ultimate meaning of life?”

If you somehow manage to stumble across that BIG answer, by the way, please contact me at your earliest convenience!

[Meanwhile, keep wrapping up those lambs in flags and keep the bands playing martial airs, because you never know when a few more lambchops in the fire might make that critical difference between a rising Wallstreet Index and a falling one...]

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[Addendum, 2 Feb 16: In case you ever wondered why young men fight the battles that older men conceive, plan and direct, here's the answer:

https://aeon.co/opinions/what-every-dictator-knows-young-men-are-natural-fanatics?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits ]