Emplacement

It's funny watching the development of a siege mentality. You see the 'fortress of paranoia' begin to develop, with the inward massacres and the purges, the gulags and the gratuitous moral violence. You hear people repeating in a panicked tone, "My conscience is clear!" and some other people saying, "We did what we thought was right!" (even if they would never have known anything of the sort).

The guns are emplaced, but facing the wrong way. The planes are a fair number, but their quality is depressingly out-of-date. Two battleships show up, but are sunk without adequate cover. The errors multiply, the blame increases. Some poor Lieutenant-General will be screwed over for a situation not his fault but totally attributable to him by design. The reason we remember him now is that he was born on 26 Dec 1887, and in December, we remember the helpless dead.