Adam Zientek
Description: Adam Zientek is an Assistant Professor of History at UC Davis. His research focuses on the social history of war in Europe, particularly in France. In this episode we talk about his book “A Thirst for Wine and War” which details the role of France’s wine rations in WW1 and how alcohol was used to numb the collective consciousness prior to battle. As we wrap up, Professor Zientek provides insight to his new research on aerial bombing and the depersonalization of war that has come from technological advancements.
Websites:
Book:
Show Notes:
[0:02] Introduction to Professor Adam Zentech
[4:20] The Journey to French History
[11:36] World War I Overview
[17:09] The Role of Trench Warfare
[20:17] The Evolution of Drinking Culture
[28:34] Alcohol Consumption and Morale
[31:33] The Distilled Alcohol Dilemma
[38:48] The Impact of Alcohol on Soldier Behavior
[45:20] The Temperance Movement in France
[54:00] Archival Research Experiences
[57:25] Transition to Aerial Warfare
[1:03:37] Debates on Targeting Civilians
[1:11:13] Advice for Aspiring Historians
Unedited AI Generated Transcript:
Brent:
[0:04] Welcome professor adam zentech thank you for coming on today thank.
Adam:
[0:18] You very much for having me today.
Keller:
[0:19] We'd love to start off by hearing a little bit more about your story what got you interested in french history and how you ended up at UC Davis?
Adam:
[0:25] That is an excellent question, actually. I am a first-generation college student, and so when I was in college, my parents had essentially told me that there were three options open to me, law school, medical school, or finance. So I came into school as a pre-med student, but the problem is I wasn't very good at science. But I was very good at history. So I took a history class my very first semester and then continued to take them because I kept doing well in them. And so my genius plan to get into medical school was to be very good at history, which would boost my GPA for my applications. But when I was a junior, I took a seminar with a professor who later became my advisor in graduate school. He was a graduate student at the time on violence in the 20th century. And we watched this film called The Battle of Algiers. This was like 2003. Are you familiar with this film at all? So it's a dramatic reenactment of a crucial part of the French Algerian War between late 1956 into 1957.
Adam:
[1:45] And I found it to be fascinating. The French Algerian War, of course, was this war of insurgency, counterinsurgency, terrorism, and counterterrorism. terrorism. And in 2003, uh, the United States was just getting involved in, in similar types of operations in, in Iraq and, and had been doing them for two years in Afghanistan up to that point. And I felt as though, uh, learning about the French Algerian war that I felt almost angry that nobody had ever taught me about this particular subject. Like I had never heard of it, But it seemed to be incredibly important, particularly in that historical moment. And so I became very interested in that particular conflict, which led me to French history. About a year later, I was taking a class in the history of the French empire. And the professor, Tyler Stavall was his name, pulled me aside after class one day and suggested I apply to graduate school in history. He said, basically, I think you'd be good at it. So I want you to write an honors thesis and think about applying. And so I wrote an honors thesis on the French-Algerian War and the use of torture during the war, which was very prevalent.
Adam:
[3:08] And applied to graduate school and got in. And so I figured the worst case scenario would be I'd spend six, seven years reading what I wanted to, living abroad, doing research.
Adam:
[3:23] And then I could go into consulting or something. Um, and the best case scenario would be that I'd get a tenure track job and become a professor. So I then went to graduate school, but I learned early on in maybe my second year, my advisor told me that if I wanted to be taken seriously as a historian of the French-Algerian War, I'd have to learn Arabic.
Adam:
[3:51] And that would have taken like another three, four years. And I didn't want to be in graduate school for 10 years. So I had to find a new topic. And I was scrounging around for one at the time that I was detailed to TA a class on the history of war in the 20th century. And when I was reading materials to prep for my World War I section,
Adam:
[4:14] I noticed that people were drinking all the time, basically any time they could. And so I just started asking a series of basic questions like, isn't this against the rules? Where are they getting the alcohol from? What role does it play in their lives? And so I found a new topic, which was alcohol consumption on the Western front in the First World War. And initially, my plan was to study both Great Britain and France comparatively. When I went abroad on an archive scouting mission, I found a wealth of material in the French archives, but very little in the British. So I decided I would focus entirely on France. So I wrote a dissertation on, on the subject, which became basically the source of my book and, uh, graduated in a, in a quick, uh, eight years. Uh, then I was a postdoc for two years, a teaching postdoc, um, at the same institution I got my PhD at and then came here. Was very lucky to, to land a tenure track job in, uh, in the UC system, which is basically a dream.
Brent:
[5:21] Yeah. Do you think your background of initially pursuing med school kind of gave you a different look at history because you kind of like try to incorporate like biology, neurobiology and all these different things into your study of history?
Adam:
[5:39] That's definitely the case. One of the most influential courses I took when I was an undergraduate was called Drugs in the Brain with Professor David Presti, who's like a legend at Berkeley. He uh like the first day of class he brought like a real brain into class and put put it on the slide projector and i think that that primed me to think about the role that alcohol plays in not just a cultural way but also in a biological way and so i've tried in my work to, use like the neuroscience of alcohol consumption to inform the way that I interpret the behaviors of people in the past.
Keller:
[6:27] What do we know about France's drinking culture before World War I? Because when we're reading some of the material you sent over, and it's like growing up too, you hear about France, and it's very much, you have wine and dinner, and drinking is just part of the natural life there. Was that the case before World War I, early 1900s?
Adam:
[6:46] So the, like the, the really, the wine drinking culture in France is the product of modernization in the 19th century that before like railroads and canals were dredged that would allow certain parts of France to specialize in exporting wine. Um drinking cultures were quite localized like in the north for instance people drank um beer and and cider primarily as their their daily drink uh whereas in in the west and in the south wine was much more prevalent but by around the time of the franco-prussian war so 1870 or so wine is considered in france to be like the national drink a patriotic drink and the french drank in the 19th century more than anybody else in the world, quite substantially, actually.
Adam:
[7:36] But then something very interesting happened. In the late 1870s into the 1880s, where an aphid comes from the United States during a viticultural exchange, the phylloxera, and infects the French vines, destroying about a third of them. So this leads wine production to just kind of plummet, prices to go up. And the French people look for a substitute for wine. And they land on this industrially distilled alcohol, which they typically call eau de vie. You know, it's like, usually it's a clear spirit, kind of similar to a neutral spirit like vodka. And they turn to this as a substitute. In particular, in the north of the country and in the urban centers.
Adam:
[8:34] And so this causes like a kind of moral panic amongst the French. Right because wine on the one hand is considered to be healthy good right it recharges your neurons makes your blood redder it gives you energy it's patriotic it ties you to the to the soil right it's the blood of france whereas this industrialized stuff is is evil and noxious it's unsafe at any dose so there's a kind of moral panic right around the turn of the century about alcoholism spreading throughout france and what's really interesting about the way the french think about alcoholism is they consider alcoholism at this time to be the product of distilled alcohol not wine yeah in fact the largest temperance organizations in france are bankrolled by the wine industry and doctors argue things like you know the solution to alcoholism is to make sure everybody has wine. And when you look at, uh, anti-alcohol propaganda from the time, often you will see the healthy vital wine drinker on one side of a poster and the decrepit, uh, kind of, uh, sallow and sick spirits drinker on the other side. Um, so this division between good wine and bad distilled alcohol carries over into the war quite clearly.
Brent:
[10:01] Okay and then when we were reading for this it they were saying that it was like making people murderous and like all these other things was there an increase in crime was there an increase in alcoholism throughout the country that kind of substantiated some of their claims so.
Adam:
[10:18] I mean i'm, Basically, like, modern epidemiologists have shown that increases of consumption and alcohol come with increased social problems. Right. So, my educated guess is that yes.
Brent:
[10:37] Yes.
Adam:
[10:37] But the way that French kind of governmental and medical elites reacted to this increase in consumption and spirits was, like, hysterical. Yeah uh like the alcohol drinker you mentioned he becomes murderous brutal he knows uh uh no love for his family for society he's a terrible soldier he's epileptic he passes idiocy down through the generations etc etc etc um the kind of framing of alcoholism as a moral problem and a social problem mirrors the way we talk about drugs like methamphetamine today.
Brent:
[11:20] Yeah. Super interesting.
Keller:
[11:23] And transitioning more towards your book, could you give us just a brief overview of World War I and I guess how France got involved in the first place?
Adam:
[11:31] Okay, so like the mini lecture on why World War I happens?
Brent:
[11:35] Sure, yeah.
Adam:
[11:37] So World War I happens primarily because of Germany and specifically because of German fears of Russian strength.
Adam:
[11:45] That German commanders believe that a series of military reforms that are going on in France and in Russia as of like 1912 will increase the power of this alliance, right? The French and the Russians form an alliance in 1896. And so the Germans believe they have essentially a ticking clock, right, where they could win a war if they were to fight it soon, but they would lose the war if they let Russia and France's power increase, but in particular Russia's power. And so when the opportunity comes to start a European war in the summer of 1914.
Adam:
[12:28] German high commanders jump at it, right? Because they think better now than later. And they assume that a general war is inevitable. So, basically, the Russians mobilized their armies in late June of 1914, which causes a kind of chain reaction. Mobilization is the process of taking your soldiers who are not under the colors, right? Like the trained reservists, getting them to their depots, equipping them with uniforms and rifles, moving them to their units and then to the front. And it all relies on a very precise timetable because it's all done by rail. So once mobilization starts, it can't be stopped and it can't be slowed down. Or it can be stopped, but then the armies will never get to the field.
Adam:
[13:19] So when Russia mobilizes, Germany mobilizes in response. And then France mobilizes. And so the entire continent is kind of very rapidly drawn into this war that Germany wanted to fight.
Adam:
[13:38] On August 4th, 1914 is when the war begins with the invasion of Belgium. And by the end of August, the Germans have moved through Belgium and are in France pressing towards Paris.
Adam:
[13:50] There is a big battle in September, September 5th, the 7th of 1917, the Battle of the Marne, which stops the German invasion. And after that, a series of lazy flanking maneuvers towards the channel that result in this basically unbroken front that stretches from the Swiss Alpine frontier to the channel. And this front is characterized by trenches because most of the weapons that are used by the armies at the time, like modern rifles, machine guns, and field guns, which are smaller caliber artillery pieces, they fire along flat trajectories. So digging a hole and getting in the hole provides you with a lot of protection.
Adam:
[14:35] Originally, the trenches were kind of improvised defensive fortifications to protect people against the effects of modern firepower. But they become deeper and more permanent. And by November of 1914, basically the French on one side and a small contingent of British in the north and the Germans on the other have besieged each other. And this creates like a new type of warfare, right? A warfare that's based primarily on attrition. rather than on movement. But it also opens up new possibilities for logistics. Because for the first time now, you've got all these armies that are in the same place. And behind them, you have sophisticated rail lines and transportation infrastructure. So it becomes possible to deliver supplies like in a just-in-time kind of way.
Adam:
[15:26] And it becomes possible to deliver wine to soldiers who are in the trenches who are actually fighting. Whereas before armies had had alcohol rations but they would take the alcohol with them while they were on campaign or they would requisition it which means you know steal from from villages through which they passed but now you've got an army of you know almost three million french soldiers locked in the same place uh in these dreadful conditions and in the in late 1914 early 1915, the French feel a kind of like a moral necessity to attack, right? Both to relieve pressure on the Eastern front because the Russians aren't doing very well, but also to drive out the invader, right? The Bosch as they call the Germans. So the question becomes like, how do you keep up morale and fighting spirit in these awful conditions? And the French army hits on the solution, which is to distribute wine.
Brent:
[16:30] That's super interesting because do you think without the trenches, this would have been complete, like the war would have gone a lot quicker? Because it seems like you just literally dig yourself a hole and wait. Was that kind of the mentality for a lot of these people?
Adam:
[16:49] Well, if the trenches weren't dug, the war might have been quicker, but it also probably would have been bloodier.
Brent:
[16:56] Even worse than like the conditions of the trenches.
Adam:
[16:58] The worst time to be in any of these armies is in August and September of 1914. That's when the armies suffer the highest casualties by far,
Adam:
[17:06] the first weeks of the war, before people dig in.
Brent:
[17:09] Okay. Did they have to build out rail lines to where the trenches were too, or were those established before?
Adam:
[17:15] So, in the French system, there is a kind of strategically built set of rails that are designed with military efficiency in mind to move French material and soldiers to the front. Although the French, of course, believed they would be fighting in Germany, right? Like, not fighting in their own country. But over the course of the war, there is a lot of kind of small rails that are built, miniature railways. That connect directly to kind of the mouth of the trenches.
Brent:
[17:49] Okay.
Keller:
[17:50] And how significant of a departure from prior European wars was World War I in terms of the trench warfare, like the dynamic of how it was fought?
Adam:
[17:58] Oh, it was completely different. Completely different for a couple of reasons. One, the modern weapons that were used on the battlefield in the First World War did things for the human body that were basically unimaginable, right? Shells, machine guns, bodies vaporized, they're cut in two. So they produced a kind of psychological stress and fear that was sustained over weeks, months, and years that really doesn't have a parallel, At least up until this point. It also undermines conceptions of masculine martialinity.
Adam:
[18:47] Yeah, that's the word I'm looking for. Because all the military theorists who are writing around the turn of the century emphasize the offensive. That the offensive is manly, the offensive is how you win, the defensive is for cowards and weaklings, and the way you prove yourself as a man is by charging across the field with a bayonet. But in the first world war basically destroys these, these somewhat old fashioned ideas of bravery and, and manliness because soldiers are rendered effectively helpless, right? They wait for the blow. They're not the ones giving the blow. They're being shot at by artillery. That's often kilometers away. They can't see death comes from above anonymously. This produces an incredible sense of helplessness amongst soldiers. So one of the arguments that I make in my book is that the drinking culture that evolves in the French army represents a kind of agency, if that makes sense.
Brent:
[19:55] Because you can have control over the drinking?
Adam:
[19:56] Because you can have control over the drinking, which means you can have control over your emotional responses to the war. That's exactly right.
Brent:
[20:03] Yeah. So can we dive deeper into how the drinking culture started and then evolved throughout the war?
Adam:
[20:10] Sure. So, so the wine ration starts out relatively small at, at a quarter liter per man per day.
Adam:
[20:17] Uh, by the end of the war, it's three quarters of a liter. So a full bottle for each of the 2.75 million French soldiers, uh, every day. Right. Um, but yeah. Basically, what happens is a confluence of circumstances. So first, there's an economic reason. The biggest drinkers in the country are all in the army, and they're all at the front. So the winemakers see their target audience essentially segregated from civilian society. And one of them hits upon an idea, which is to pressure the French army to adopt an army-wide wine ration, which would help them make money, would help with the oversupply of wine, because 1914 has the second largest wine harvest in modern French history up to that point, something like 67 million hectoliters. In 1915, by comparison, I think it's around 23 million, so substantially lower.
Adam:
[21:22] And the winemakers believed that this would be a way not only to kind of get rid of their excess stock, make a little bit of money during the war, but also to train soldiers to be wine drinkers for life, to create like a permanent market.
Adam:
[21:40] Which, you know, only works if they survive. So there's that economic pressure. And the wine lobby in France at the time is like the most powerful lobby. So there's this large public relations campaign that is primarily pursued through newspaper articles called the Wine for Soldiers campaign. Then there is this pressing need to maintain morale. And this is where the history of the alcohol ration kind of intersects with French ideas, French medical ideas about wine. Because the trenches make you sad, but wine makes you happy. The trenches drain you of energy. Wine fills you with it. The trenches are physically painful, but wine is like a salve for whatever ails you, right? Like the French consider wine to be like an omni-medicine, basically. That it can solve anything. And so this kind of biomedical reasoning intersects with the economic reasoning and the fact that soldiers are already drinking, right? They drink whatever they can get their hands on outside of official rations.
Brent:
[22:58] Yeah.
Adam:
[22:59] And so the minister of war in like late November of 1914, Alexandre Moulin decides to adopt an army-wide wine ration. Now, there is like a prehistory to this that soldiers who were on campaign in the kind of Fondaciec Third Republic Army could be allotted wine, although they weren't in practice. So, there was a kind of priming. The program didn't like come out of the blue. But the scale of these wine distributions was unprecedented in military history.
Keller:
[23:42] Was the wine, because it seems like once the wine business decided, okay, this is a good avenue for us to make our money, that it was kind of inevitable that it would go through. Was there any pushback to doing the rationing or did it kind of just line up with the needs of the military for morale and economic needs of the country?
Adam:
[24:00] Yeah, I didn't see any pushback in my research. I think it's just like a perfect confluence of circumstances.
Brent:
[24:06] Yeah. And then the wine wasn't just from France, correct? They started having to buy from all over the world to meet the needs, correct?
Adam:
[24:15] That's right. So the majority of it came from France, from France's traditional wine producing region. Something like 20% of it came from Algeria.
Brent:
[24:23] Okay.
Adam:
[24:25] You know, the Algerian settlers, the Pied Noir, found out early in the, well, basically in the middle of the 19th century, that Algeria's coastal plains are ideal for vines. So they develop, you know, their own wine industry. But the army also seeks contracts in Iberia from Spain and Portugal, gets a significant portion of the wine it consumes in 1916, for instance, from Spain and Portugal. Sends representatives all the way to Argentina in search of wine. There's even a plan, although I couldn't really trace it in the archives, the kind of trail evaporated to send people to California.
Brent:
[25:08] That's insane.
Adam:
[25:09] So yeah the army's thirst was global.
Brent:
[25:12] Yeah and were the people who supplied wine viewed as allies to france by germany.
Adam:
[25:20] You mean like did the germans consider supplying supplying wine to be like an act of war yeah not that i know yeah.
Keller:
[25:28] In terms of morale once these wine rations started was there i guess how did you track in your research the shift of morale the continuum of this aggressive force and did that continue clearly lining up with as the rations increased france's movement towards germany changing as well.
Adam:
[25:47] So how how do i know that it influenced morale yeah well there's there's a couple of sources that are useful for this um one is personal narratives right like journals memoirs semi-autobiographical novels basically all of them, have scenes of drinking, drinking wine. The soldiers call it pinar. So you have the pinar arrives, everybody gets up, their faces light up, they smile, they drink their wine, they come together and they talk about their families and the like. And they all say, wine is like the greatest thing to happen to us. Then there's this other set of sources, which are really fascinating, called trench journals, which were newspapers that were written by and edited by soldiers at the front and then would be printed usually in a rear area and brought back up. And they were typically, you know, by units.
Brent:
[26:47] So it was an internal newspaper.
Adam:
[26:49] Newspaper by soldiers for soldiers.
Brent:
[26:51] Okay.
Adam:
[26:51] And they contain things like poems and pictures. And there are literally hundreds of references to wine in these things.
Brent:
[27:01] Okay.
Adam:
[27:01] So it's everywhere. They do songs, you know, that are like eau de pinard or poems that are sometimes several stances long all about how wine makes them happy, how it's the blood of France, how they feel patriotic when they drink it. It gives them energy when they're tired, et cetera, et cetera. And then the third source that I used were extracts from soldiers' letters that were picked up by the French Postal Censorship Service. So there's extensive records in 1917 that they run to thousands of pages of extracts. And one of the things soldiers always talk about is wine and the price of wine. Because they're permitted when they're not in the trenches, when they're in the rear areas, usually billeted in a village. They have basically total freedom to drink as much wine as they want.
Brent:
[28:04] Okay. So then they were complaining to their loved ones back home that it was too expensive?
Adam:
[28:09] Too expensive, or this village is great because we can get wine at a good price.
Brent:
[28:14] And then the Postal Service was censoring those letters and not allowing them to be sent back home.
Adam:
[28:18] Well, the Postal Service was picking what it thought to be the important parts of people's letters. So there would be, you know, in the reports, there'd be a section on complaints about living conditions.
Brent:
[28:30] Oh, so they were reporting on what the letters had, but not like stopping them from being sent. Okay. Yeah. And then when did distilled liquor get introduced to the trenches?
Adam:
[28:40] So that's a good question, too. So this distilled liquor, the eau de vie, or the French soldiers call it knoll. Poses like a very pressing problem for the French army in late 1914, early 1915, because it's cheap. It's available, particularly in the North and soldiers are drinking it a lot.
Brent:
[29:06] Yeah.
Adam:
[29:06] So what emerges from this is, is essentially two things. On the one hand, the army by the middle of 1915 has adopted a, a hard alcohol ration for soldiers.
Brent:
[29:21] Okay. So about a year and yeah.
Adam:
[29:23] So far as I could tell, you know, the, the reports about receiving these rations, um, begin somewhere around like, yeah, the, the first third of 1915.
Brent:
[29:34] Okay.
Adam:
[29:35] Uh, but then there's also this campaign against the consumption of distilled alcohol outside of official rations. So there's this system, essentially, that emerges that uses distilled alcohol instrumentally, particularly before battles, but seeks to reduce or eliminate the consumption of distilled alcohol outside of that context so that alcoholism, murder, and the like don't spread through the army.
Brent:
[30:09] Yeah.
Keller:
[30:09] Was that system effective in keeping those kind of distinguishing factors between in battle and outside?
Adam:
[30:17] So the system prohibiting the sale and consumption of distilled alcohol in rear areas, I think, is generally effective. There are, for instance, like special police detachments whose only job is to go from alcohol shop to alcohol shop and make sure they're not selling to soldiers or to make sure they don't have an excessive amount in stock.
Brent:
[30:42] So the populace living in these towns, they could do whatever they wanted.
Adam:
[30:46] Well, if the, if they are in the army zones, um, they are basically prohibited from selling alcohol.
Brent:
[30:53] Okay.
Adam:
[30:53] There, there is this, uh, an attempt to allow civilians to continue to drink. Um, but by late 1915, this, uh, this, the army believes it's not working.
Brent:
[31:03] Okay.
Adam:
[31:04] So all the cafes are banned from selling distilled alcohol and they have set hours that soldiers can go there for.
Brent:
[31:11] Okay.
Adam:
[31:12] Okay. Um, so. I lost my train of thought.
Keller:
[31:20] Let me just pick up on. So within the, yeah, within the kind of use of distilled alcohol, how did that eventually kind of continue to grow outside of, you know, they had this maintained order,
Keller:
[31:33] they had this surveillance. And then what we read eventually led to mutiny in some areas and kind of became uncontrollable force that wasn't helping the morale was actually hurting the French military system, hurting the French, you know, national morale.
Adam:
[31:46] So this is like the most controversial part of my argument, I think, where historians have long debated the causes, nature, and meaning of these mutinies that take place beginning basically in late April of 1917 and continuing into maybe the middle of July of that year. These mutinies, some historians think they shouldn't even be called mutinies. They should be called strikes or acts of collective indiscipline. What they involve typically are units who are ordered into the trenches to continue this offensive, the Neville offensive, which began on April 16th, 1917 and was a disaster. They get ordered to go up into the trenches and they refuse. Basically, they mutiny before they can even be put in the line of fire. And what I found was that there are literally hundreds of reports in the French military archives suggesting that these soldiers whom you need were drunk, but they were drunk on wine.
Brent:
[32:56] Okay.
Adam:
[32:58] Right. So this, the system that the army develops that permits wine consumption in the rear as a kind of release valve, uh, ends up, they, they lose control of it in, in the, the, the, uh, the spring of 1917. And my argument is not that these soldiers got drunk and they were rowdy and so they just decided they were going to mutiny, but that the very things that made wine drinking useful to the army in the trenches, which is to say like bringing people together, giving them a common object of attention, a common focus, are then kind of weaponized by these soldiers who want to mutiny but are afraid to.
Brent:
[33:44] It kind of lowers that inhibition and allows them to speak to them.
Adam:
[33:47] Well, not only that, but many of these mutinies start in bars.
Brent:
[33:51] Oh.
Adam:
[33:53] Right? Like these guys will be drinking to the last minute before they have to go get on their lorries to go up to the front. Their officer will come down and tell them now's time to go, and they will revolt, take to the streets and the city. Sometimes they terrorize their officers. Sometimes it's relatively peaceful. There's there's a wide variety in the kind of character of these mutinies and.
Brent:
[34:15] Then didn't you say like some of them literally died down when they sobered up.
Adam:
[34:19] Yes that.
Brent:
[34:20] Same like night or whatever.
Adam:
[34:21] In some cases you you you see these this is like the case in the 82nd uh brigade of infantry which which mutinies on uh basically may 31st to to uh june june 2nd or so uh they terrorize their officers, they take over this town. The next morning at roll call, everybody shows up and acts like basically nothing happened. Right? So my argument is that like the indiscipline can be sustained so long as the alcohol is there.
Brent:
[34:53] Yeah.
Adam:
[34:54] Because the alcohol serves to lower the barrier of fear and tension that prevents outright indiscipline.
Brent:
[35:03] Yeah. But that's the same lowering a fear that they wanted with the distilled alcohol in the front lines.
Adam:
[35:09] Yes.
Brent:
[35:10] So, was that an effective system in the front lines to give them... How much were they given to drink?
Adam:
[35:19] Like before an attack?
Brent:
[35:20] Yeah.
Adam:
[35:21] So... The reports that soldiers themselves give kind of vary, but somewhere between, I want to say around four ounces, somewhere around there. But it was overproof, very strong. So strong, in fact, that many French soldiers believed what they were receiving was actually alcohol mixed with ether.
Adam:
[35:47] So there was this rumor in the French army that the army was doping people up with ether before attacks. Uh but the the there's no evidence of that that took place yeah um there's also rumors that the germans have vials of ether that they drink before they attack and um it's a way to kind of dehumanize the germans and and claim that their their bravery is is chemically coerced but then french soldiers think that their army would do the same thing to them so it's enough you imagine the experience of like the moments before a battle, before a big battle, right? You're usually brought up to your attack trenches under the cover of darkness.
Adam:
[36:28] Typically there's a preparatory barrage, which can last anywhere from a couple of hours to seven days. So you're camped out in these frontline trenches, counting down the minutes to H hour, right? When you attack, uh you're witnessing the spectacle of of destruction on the german trenches, and as the the clock gets closer to to uh h hour like the the sense of fear and tension builds and builds and builds and builds uh and so this this alcohol serves as a kind of intervention in that that psychological process again lowering the barrier of fear and tension And it's important in this context, the.
Adam:
[37:17] Kind of biomedical consensus about alcohol making people violent right because the soldiers who drink this stuff report that they became crazy that they became violent that they became murderous that they didn't know what they were doing almost.
Brent:
[37:31] Like the placebo from their cultural background.
Adam:
[37:35] Yeah well i would say it's not even a placebo right because the interoceptive experiences that we have when we consume a psychotropic drug or a psychoactive drug have no meaning in and of themselves, right? Like it's context, cultural and historical context that gives those bodily feeling like meaning and direction. So I think that these guys experienced the sense of intoxication in this particular context in such a way as to separate them from their ordinary moral selves.
Brent:
[38:15] Right?
Adam:
[38:16] The alcohol provides a kind of moral distancing mechanism that allows them to do things like kill that they ordinarily would not do.
Keller:
[38:27] Kind of tying back to the distribution networks we talked about earlier and the precision of the H-hour, were the officers giving out the alcohol in relation to the timing of H-hour or did the soldiers already have it? So they had it down to a science.
Adam:
[38:42] 15, 20 minutes before is what soldiers report. And it is given out by officers, yeah.
Adam:
[38:48] Some say that the officers stand over them and make them drink. Others say they just pretended to drink it and threw it on the ground because they didn't want to be deranged. They wanted to be sharp when they were attacking. So it's not as though everybody is forced to drink. There is some agency there. But most people do.
Brent:
[39:12] Yeah and then, this might this probably is like too specific but do you think there's some cases of the people who don't want to drink having more like ptsd than the ones who did or just generally speaking.
Adam:
[39:26] Do we see a difference.
Brent:
[39:27] In the rates of like post-war how people dealt with the stresses if they were like constantly drunk versus they remember everything well.
Adam:
[39:35] I mean that's that's a great question um like is it effective at treating combat fatigue and ptsd or shell shock as they called it at the time um there's no way really to know sure i don't think like i'm i'm i would be very interested in finding a source that could help me answer that question.
Brent:
[39:55] Yeah that makes sense.
Keller:
[39:57] And then kind of tying back to the increase in the rations going from was one quarter.
Adam:
[40:03] A quarter liter to.
Keller:
[40:04] Three quarters and the paper you sent us the initial rations i think came with also like anti-alcohol lectures or.
Adam:
[40:13] Is that that was uh um basically the army has a a quite a robust anti-alcohol program during peacetime right so the the french like in general don't receive the temperance movement very well yeah right like they think the temperance uh organizers are wet blankets and ninnies who were trying to ruin everybody's fun. And they're not entirely wrong, right?
Keller:
[40:44] And when does it hit France, the temperance movement?
Adam:
[40:47] The temperance movement, well, it hits the army and the schools in the 1890s. So in like 1894, France's primary schools all are essentially required to teach temperance. So there are textbooks that you get that, you know, show pictures of people in increasing states of filth and penury and suffering, uh, instructs the young kids, you know, between the ages of like seven and 13, that alcohol is a racial poison that will destroy the French army and lead to German hegemony over the country. And then when soldiers or when these young men become soldiers, usually between the ages of 19 and 21, they're subjected to another round of temperance education by the army. And so in their barracks, for instance, they get posters that say things like, If France keeps drinking like it does, there will soon be two German soldiers to every French one. Alcohol is the poison that destroys the French race. They go on Sunday expeditions to the countryside to keep them out of the bars.
Adam:
[42:02] There are regulations about selling distilled alcohol in army camps or around army camps. Wine, though, is permitted in moderate doses because, of course, wine is healthy. Super interesting so the only basically the the temperance movement in france is effective whenever the state has a captive audience right because the children and the soldiers have to be there and they have to listen.
Brent:
[42:28] Yeah so there was never prohibition there was never like a culturally wide.
Adam:
[42:33] Not a wide one yeah um they they're they're i mean french doctors at the time at the Fantasiak were very interested in alcoholism as a social problem. But the French populace was resistant to the idea that alcohol should be banned, right? Like, it's basically unthinkable.
Brent:
[42:56] Right?
Adam:
[42:56] Because they're free people in a free country, they can drink what they want to. And wine is the national drink. Like, the idea of floating a ban on wine would, I mean, And it's a non-star, oh, it's horrifying. And a significant portion of the French state's tax revenues come from the wine and the liquor industries. So temperance would mean 30%, 40% reduction in France's tax revenues.
Brent:
[43:24] Yeah.
Adam:
[43:25] Bankrupt the state.
Keller:
[43:26] Where was the temperance kind of, I know it wasn't a full movement, but where did that kind of stem from? Because in the US it was largely from religious groups and it was a kind of people-driven to large degree movement.
Adam:
[43:37] That's a great question. So French social reformers right before the first world war are obsessed with two concepts, right? Depopulation and degeneration. This is because France, during the French Revolutionary Wars, has the largest population in Europe, bigger than Russia even. But by the First World War, France's population has basically stagnated, whereas Germany and Russia and Great Britain have all increased. So French doctors, there are many physician legislators in the Third Republic at this time, are highly concerned with the ability of the French nation to fight with its conscript army. So that's really the entry point, right? This fear of racial degeneration, fear of weakness in the face of Germany. And the temperance movement is essentially revolves around this idea of increasing the vital power of the biological material in the French nation in the face of the threat of Germany.
Keller:
[44:46] And was the army at that time fully conscript or was there a standing army that was held?
Adam:
[44:51] I mean, most of the officers are professionals, and there are people who volunteer to stay in the army for long periods. But basically, the way it works is you're in the army from the ages of 19 to 21 or so. At least this is the case after 1913. And then you go into the reserves until you're 35, and then you go into the territorial reserves until you're 45. So in the event of a war, the French can pull basically all men between the ages of 19 and 45 for army service.
Brent:
[45:20] Okay is.
Keller:
[45:21] That a similar system that was held by germany and russia and other powerful nations at that time every.
Adam:
[45:26] Every great power with the exception of great britain has a conscription system yes.
Brent:
[45:30] And then kind of curious a little bit off topic on this, the translation for the distilled alcohol could you say what it was in french and then what it means in english like the Eau de vie? Yeah.
Adam:
[45:47] Well, Eau de vie means like water of life. That's the way you translate it.
Brent:
[45:51] Were there any people looking at that dichotomy of like giving you water of life before going out?
Adam:
[45:58] Temperance reformers would say things like, this is the water of death, not the water of life.
Brent:
[46:02] Yeah.
Adam:
[46:03] But the soldiers called it something different, Noel.
Brent:
[46:06] Okay.
Adam:
[46:08] A word whose origins is kind of hazy, but they say in their trench journals, one quote, for instance, in the rear, Eau de V kills at the front, Noel helps us kill.
Brent:
[46:24] Okay.
Keller:
[46:26] And then in your research on the impacts of wine with France, do you look at all into other kind of neurotropics or other kind of drug use for competing powers during World War I?
Adam:
[46:38] So, there is this rumor that circulates in 1915 in France that the Germans have a special pill that they are taking that gives them energy and focus, makes them aggressive and violent.
Brent:
[46:55] Was it meth.
Adam:
[46:57] It didn't exist oh okay but but by world war ii that pill does exist yeah methamphetamine okay which is distributed to to german soldiers and airmen uh and in fact, basically every every army and air force and navy that fights in in world war ii uh uses, amphetamines to one degree or another so the the americans and the british use regular amphetamine not methamphetamine. They actually run a series of trials as to which one of those two drugs would be better. Americans take it during the Pacific campaign. Really the only army that doesn't utilize stimulants to increase fighting power and morale is the Soviet army. They drink vodka and antifreeze, anything they can get their hands off.
Brent:
[47:51] Jesus.
Adam:
[47:53] But that's a great question. So one of the kind of like meta arguments that I make in my research is that, Like the moment it becomes possible to intervene in the processes of life, of biological processes, to create better soldiers, everybody does it, right? This is like a fundamental characteristic of 20th and 21st century warfare is this conception of the soldier as a kind of biological machine that can be optimized. And these psychotropic interventions are uh first basically inevitable um and second very widespread the alcohol is a very crude intervention uh to be sure uh and we are developing more and more targeted types of interventions like as we speak.
Keller:
[48:56] Yeah definitely and so yeah the world war one you would say is the first time that there's evidence of that or are there earlier wars.
Adam:
[49:04] So soldiers have always drank right and uh soldiers in cultures that didn't have alcohol uh would also take drugs right like incan soldiers would shoot coca leaves uh viking guys would take muskimal containing mushrooms to become berserkers so there is something like about war that lends itself uh kind of indigenously like almost automatically to uh psychotropic experimentation because because war is so horrible uh it's so disgusting and and and the primary emotions people feel are fear and anger and hatred right but fear fear is the primary one, these biochemical ways of manipulating the self uh so that the the self fits into the needs of the war right so that the self can become violent i think has always been there but what what marks the 20th century um from say like i don't know dutch soldiers drinking drinking rum in the 17th century is, is the scale, uh, the scale and, and the involvement of the state.
Brent:
[50:26] Definitely.
Keller:
[50:28] And kind of pivoting a little bit to more broad scale. Could you just tell us about your experience being in France and going to the archives and having access to all of this literature?
Adam:
[50:37] Yeah. So. Um, uh, most of my research was actually all, all of my, my archival research was done in Paris or just outside of Paris in the French military archives, which are, uh, in a, in a literal castle, right? Like you have to, you have to go over a moat to get there. And, uh, when I was doing the bulk of my research, the, the archive reading room was like this, just this awful, poorly lit place, but it's moved a couple of years ago to the queen's wing of this palace inside, you know, like there's walls, there's a moat, there's like a 13th century donjon. You can see there's a picture of it right there.
Keller:
[51:21] Actually.
Adam:
[51:22] That's the French military archives.
Brent:
[51:24] Okay.
Adam:
[51:25] There's a chapel for the king and the queen. And now it's in this gorgeous reading room that seats, you know, maybe 150 people and the ceilings are like 40 feet high and there's these huge paintings of like french guys killing british guys on the walls and it's it's a it's it's actually a i mean it's a really cool experience to to do archival research because you get a finding aid right and it'll list box numbers like carton 16 and 1521 is one that contains a lot of information about the mutinies the whole series uh 16 and 1519 to 26 are about the mutinies but you don't know what's in them right all it says is acts of collective and discipline june 1917 so you call up this box and you get this like a literal box with maybe 1600 pages of reports.
Brent:
[52:27] Wow.
Adam:
[52:28] Uh, some of them are handwritten, some of them are typed, some of them are long, some of them are short. And, you know, your job as a historian is to like read through them and then, puzzle out a story and it it's uh it's a lot of fun it it could be scared it was honestly i was quite scared at first uh to go to france and to go to the archives i was worried somebody would be like you're not allowed to come here you're not allowed to look at these documents but like the first time i got a document that said secret on it uh i was like this is awesome this is awesome like i shouldn't be shouldn't be looking at this and.
Brent:
[53:07] Were you allowed to because of like your connections.
Adam:
[53:09] It's just open that's.
Brent:
[53:10] Just you could just.
Adam:
[53:11] Anyone you could go there that's awesome and and call up these boxes and look at the documents that's.
Brent:
[53:17] Super cool and with that is that like pretty typical throughout most archival research just it's one or two keywords that classify a box and then you just get to pour through it.
Adam:
[53:27] Yeah i'd say that that's that's usually the uh uh that's kind of the rule um some archives have better finding aids than others, but in general it's like a it's kind of like a lottery like you don't know what you're going to find in the box and sometimes you find what you're expecting but more often than not you find something that is a complete surprise yeah and again your job as a historian is to like,
Adam:
[53:56] take the surprises and stitch them together into a story.
Brent:
[54:00] I definitely think that makes for a better story though yeah.
Adam:
[54:03] Yeah and and uh i also did some research in um in london at the imperial war museum and uh at the national archives which are outside of london in a town called q but i i was never able to use any of that research it.
Brent:
[54:20] Just didn't fit the storyline well enough.
Adam:
[54:22] Yeah and there was just so much more content in the french yeah uh in the french case because the british have a rum ration. So an eighth of a gill per man per day. What's a gill? That's a great question. It's about two and a half ounces.
Brent:
[54:43] Isn't that very little?
Adam:
[54:44] It's not a lot. It's like a shot and a half. But it was, usually it was like thick, overproof Navy rum that soldiers got. So they would, probably equivalent to three drinks, three standard drinks. The rum ration was distributed sometimes in the British Army, right? So it never formed the same kind of, it never developed like a cult around it. It wasn't as central to the British army as wine was to the French army, right? For the British army, the equivalent might be tea. But even British soldiers loved the rum ration.
Brent:
[55:23] I'm sure.
Adam:
[55:24] Yeah.
Keller:
[55:25] Have this might be a pretty crude question but when you get that box of 1600 pages is there a system you have for going through it or do you just say i'm going to be here for however long and i'm going to get through all of it and then organize as things come to light so.
Adam:
[55:40] I did a couple of things um first i would read the stuff in the box uh to get a feel for what's in it i'd It's embarrassing to admit, but I'd skip over the ones that have really bad handwriting. And then I would take pictures, digital pictures of all the pages. And one of the things that I did that I found to be very helpful was I compiled all these pictures for each box into a PDF, ran the PDF through like a OCR text recognition software, made it all text searchable. Yeah so i have uh on my laptop copies of every box that i've ever gotten from the french military archives and they're all text searchable yeah so read it to figure out what's going on then like you know i want to find out what's happening on june 2nd 1917 so i just type it june 2nd and i could go through and see all the reports from that date because uh unfortunately they're not well organized often they're out of chronological order um and it can be easy to miss one or two but digitizing making a text searchable has made made my work much easier.
Brent:
[56:54] And then are most of these archives now already doing that for the historians they're just leaving them.
Adam:
[57:00] Yeah because i mean there's so much material yeah there's so much material some some select stuff has been digitized uh but but the vast majority has not especially stuff in like regional archives departmental archives, the smaller ones, it would be an enormous project to make all this stuff available.
Brent:
[57:24] That makes sense.
Keller:
[57:26] Then kind of transitioning towards your newer book, which is on bombing, could you start off giving us just an overview of the use of aerial warfare?
Adam:
[57:39] So, aerial warfare, when do you want me to start?
Keller:
[57:44] I guess the earliest.
Brent:
[57:46] Like, kind of how did it come about? What brought you to this topic?
Adam:
[57:49] So, like, the key year in the history of aerial warfare is 1909, at least in early aerial warfare. This is the year when a guy named Louis Bluriot flies a monoplane across the English Channel. Uh, and the, the kind of keen military thinkers, the, the smart forward thinking ones and the early science fiction writers, um, instantly recognize what this means for warfare that eventually sooner rather than later, uh, cities will become vulnerable to aerial bombardment. And for the British, flying over the channel is particularly terrifying, right? Because the channels always protected them. But now, as of like the 1910s, the idea that wars could be ended by striking nerve centers behind the lines becomes something people are at least talking about, right? Like the vision of aerial bombardment is unattainable with World War I technology. Although in 1917, there's a German campaign that bombs London, kills something like 220 people. So not a lot, but it horrifies the British. Because for basically most of human history –.
Adam:
[59:11] Armies meet on the field, one of them wins, and then the winning side essentially holds the civilian population of the losing side hostage as leverage during the peace process. But the invention of aerial bombardment turns this on its head, right? Now you don't even need to win on the battlefield. You just need to win in the skies. And so I got really interested in early theories of strategic bombing, not only in a kind of technical sense, but in the moral and legal sense too. So the briefest possible history is that up until, say, March of 1915, aircraft were used almost exclusively for reconnaissance. There's some like early bombing attempts but but they involve like people literally throwing darts you know like these sharp darts called flechettes out of the side of their aircraft while they're flying or uh or taking grenades and throwing them out of their their aircraft i read one report of a guy who cut a hole in the bottom of like his fuselage so he could drop bombs between his legs.
Adam:
[1:00:24] Um but the lifting power of these early aircraft is not not significant right so they can't they can't go up with the thousand pound bombs that you see in the second world war so there's like a technological limitation but the uh the vision to do it is there uh things change in in early 1915 when the Germans uh debut a new aircraft the the Eindecker uh which has a uh a machine gun that can fire through the arc of the moving propeller due to this invention called the interrupter the synchronization gear.
Brent:
[1:01:00] So it's behind the propeller.
Adam:
[1:01:02] So yeah it shoots through the propeller.
Brent:
[1:01:05] Oh like through like the shaft that's like.
Adam:
[1:01:07] Yeah like um, I don't have any of my World War I models here. But typically, the machine guns, one or two, will be mounted on the fuselage immediately behind the propeller.
Brent:
[1:01:21] Okay.
Adam:
[1:01:22] And so the synchronization gear lets you shoot through the moving propeller.
Brent:
[1:01:26] That's crazy.
Adam:
[1:01:28] And this turns the aircraft essentially into like flying machine guns.
Brent:
[1:01:33] Yeah.
Adam:
[1:01:33] And it changes the face of aerial combat. Because now you can't just fly over the enemy. You have to deal with the potential that one of these Eindeckers will – the Fokkers also is what the British call them – will shoot you down. So then what happens is a kind of um hyper uh hyper quick technological arms race to see who can get aircraft that have the most lifting power the most you know so the biggest engines um the biggest machine guns and uh the the best maneuverability so by the end of 1917 you have um like real aerial combat involving dozens of aircraft uh the same time basically all the belligerents are working on ways uh to to construct heavy bombers what were heavy bombers at the time uh and again the idea of of bombing is to attack what strategists called the nerve centers of the enemy and the nerve centers essentially come into three categories right there is transportation and communication infrastructure uh there is industrial plant munitions factories and then there are civilian centers.
Brent:
[1:02:59] Were they like readily admitting we're going to target civilians.
Adam:
[1:03:04] So it's like a really contentious debate um about whether or not it's permissible to target civilians specifically.
Brent:
[1:03:15] Internally, they were having these debates? Okay.
Adam:
[1:03:18] There is a series, there's basically two peace conferences, one in 1899, one in 1907, the Hague conferences that outlaw aerial bombardment. But as soon as, basically as soon as it becomes a technological and practical possibility, then it gets used.
Keller:
[1:03:38] And when they started using planes for reconnaissance was it at that time that they kind of knew the direction was going to be towards bombing or was there a pivot that like was the technological pivot for the germans of actually getting close to having a plane that could get close to it that made that shift happen yeah.
Adam:
[1:03:57] I mean, that's a really good question. The kind of old-fashioned commanders and strategists thought that the aircraft would have virtually no use. Maybe reconnaissance, but probably nothing, right? Because the war was going to be decided by cavalry charges. But the forward-looking ones, I think, realized the potential of this new aerial weapon. And after the war, the theory of air power kind of comes into its own. And people in the 1920s from all the belligerents are writing books about how in the future, wars will be decided in the air by command of the air.
Brent:
[1:04:44] So then what is your book going to focus on in this context?
Adam:
[1:04:48] What I want to do is kind of reconstruct the strategic, moral, and legal debates that take place beginning in 1899 up to essentially like 1926.
Adam:
[1:05:05] Because after the First World War, bombing is used very widely in European empires. Right it's it's you know bombing bombing during the first world war is is kind of ineffectual right because you can't you can't target things especially when you're high you're trying to avoid anti-aircraft fire but when you're fighting against uh like colonized peoples who don't have artillery don't have machine guns don't have anti-aircraft batteries you can fly low and slow and you could target much more precisely. So what you see in these colonial policing campaigns, the British call them, is like firebombing villages in places. The British do it everywhere. Iraq, for instance. The French do it in North Africa. The Italians basically invent it. The first bombing campaign takes place in 1911 in an Italian colony. So basically the story that I want to tell is about how bombing is really about terror, that it's really about the civilians. Like that's when at least these military theorists say it's going to be effective, right? Because cities are big.
Adam:
[1:06:35] Hard to miss. Uh, but, um, some munitions plant somewhere in Germany, uh, is, is very, it's very difficult to just destroy one building or a complex of buildings, but it, but it's easy to drop a bomb somewhere in the vicinity of a city.
Keller:
[1:06:51] Yeah. That's a lot of how I think, like, I mean, it started in the twenties and thirties, but that seems like the military theory has continued for a lot of the recent wars.
Adam:
[1:06:59] Oh yeah. I mean, in, in, in the, uh, Second World War, the kind of vision of bombing and destruction that these forward-looking First World War and after guys have in their minds really comes to fruition. They were right that air forces are primarily offensive weapons. Their targets are primarily civilian centers during the second world war like the the american uh army air force takes great pains in its strategic bombing campaign in 1942 1943 into 1944 to fly during the day uh so that it can hit like this factory or this region of the city uh whereas the british as of 1940 adopt like a completely different strategy they fly high at night and they bomb civilian centers.
Brent:
[1:07:58] They just look for the light.
Adam:
[1:07:59] They just look for the light. So at first they just look for the lights. Eventually they develop these kind of pathfinding technologies that can direct them at night, even through bad weather to civilian centers. So they can find civilian centers and hit them even if they're under cloud cover.
Keller:
[1:08:20] And how important is this depersonalization of technology? Because it was one thing where they have technology that can kill more easily and people might be more afraid of the enemy, but now you don't even see the enemy necessarily.
Adam:
[1:08:34] So that's also a great question, that military psychologists, in particular one guy named David Grossman, who became rather famous for this idea, argue that the closer you get to the other person, the harder it is to enact violence on them, right? Uh, so, uh, when you're in the intimate distance, it's extremely hard. Um, but as you get progressively further away, technologically and, and, and physically, it becomes easier because you don't have to think about the person you're shooting at, uh, as a person.
Adam:
[1:09:10] So, you see this in the First World War with artillery guys, right? They're shooting usually indirect fire. They don't see who they're hitting. And that causes, provides a kind of, again, a moral distancing mechanism. Um, and aerial bombardment takes this to like a whole nother level where flyers basically never saw, uh, the, the consequences of their bombing campaigns, unless they were shot down. Right. And then brought through one of these cities. Um, it was, uh, um, that's not to say it was easy. Um, but it, it is to say that as technology separates us further and further from the actual act of, of killing on a battlefield, uh, it becomes easier and easier and, and, and actually produces a greater and greater moral hazard, right? Like you could think about, for instance, drone campaigns in the global war on terror in ironic quotations, um, right?
Adam:
[1:10:20] You got guys sitting in, you know, structures in Arizona. They drop their kids off at work or at school. They drive into the base. They suit up. Then they're flying a predator drone and blowing up some convoys somewhere in Iraq, right? Like there's an enormous distance that can develop. And when that distance developed, again, I think it provides a kind of moral hazard in the sense that it becomes easier. And if it becomes easier, it becomes more likely. And if it becomes more likely, then it becomes basically inevitable.
Brent:
[1:11:01] It's interesting to see how they wanted that distancing with the alcohol and they further progressed through technology to make it easier and easier to get that done.
Brent:
[1:11:13] Do you have anything else you'd like to share with the audience before we wrap up? any words of advice for students looking to get involved in history.
Adam:
[1:11:21] Oh read right like find what you're interested in read a book about it then look at the bibliography and read the books in the bibliography how.
Brent:
[1:11:34] Important do you think it is to go to that country if you have the means or can find the means.
Adam:
[1:11:38] You mean to do to do like primary research or just to visit either just to.
Brent:
[1:11:44] Experience what you're reading about.
Adam:
[1:11:45] I think it's incredibly important yeah yeah then um you know walking walking battlefields gives you a much greater understanding of why things happen the way they happened um than looking at a map in a book yeah and you get to you know experience uh oysters and and chilled white wine on you know in a parisian Cafe.
Brent:
[1:12:15] Definitely worse things.
Keller:
[1:12:16] Thank you for your time.
Adam:
[1:12:18] Yeah, thank you so much. This was great.
Brent:
[1:12:19] Thank you.