Thomas Wictor

Well, the US Postal Service theft ring missed one. The reason is because it was sent domestically instead of from Europe. The funny thing is, this is the most valuable purchase I’ve ever made.

It’s an original watercolor by Friedrich Ludwig Scharf (1884-1965), an artist who served in the Imperial German Army during World War I.

It shows a squad leader of the Guard Reserve Pioneer Regiment, 1916-1917, in full assault order and carrying a makeshift igniter for a large flamethrower. German flamethrowers of World War I all had automatic igniters, but they lasted only 90 seconds to two minutes. When the supply of igniters ran out, they used sticks with a bundle of kerosene-soaked rags on the end.

This squad leader also has cleated mountain boots, a shovel, a Mauser rifle instead of a carbine, and the Iron Cross First Class. Scharf was famous for painting what he saw. Everything about this noncommissioned officer is “wrong,” meaning it violates regulations in one way or another, but the Germans didn’t actually do much by the book. The Brits were far more rigid than the Germans.

A slightly different version of this painting was used in the book In the Service of the Kaiser, by Charles Woolley.

I like mine better. In my version, the guy doesn’t have a unibrow. Here’s the caption of the painting in the book. Click to enlarge.

I hadn’t yet published German Flamethrower Pioneers of World War I, but I could’ve told them that the makeshift stick igniter isn’t a detail not noted before. I noted it. When I was about eight.

But I don’t have a pedigree. My books aren’t important. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. Time to die.

Whoa! Got carried away there and quoted from Blade Runner, one of my favorite movies.

Rutger Hauer improvised that speech. He said the original was long and hokey, so he told Ridley Scott to turn on the camera, and away he went. Another reason I love Blade Runner is Sean Young.

Need I say more? I really disliked the way Harrison Ford treated her after she found out she was a replicant and not a human. It was unnecessarily cruel. I mean, imagine how you’d feel if you discovered that none of your memories were your own, and you were a manufactured product, not a born woman. Would you respond well to a man slamming you against the wall and ordering, “Kiss me!”

Then I found out that the crew called that the “hate scene” instead of the love scene. So my reaction to it was correct.

Being a watercolor artist herself, Mom loved the Friedrich Ludwig Scharf book. I wish she’d lived to see me buy an original Scharf. It’s got a big, round, torn spot on the back, so it was glued into an album. Some cretin ripped it off, and then someone else sold it on eBay without having the slightest notion of its worth. He misspelled the artist’s name and didn’t answer me when I asked him how he knew it was original.

When it arrived I could see that it’s a genuine, original Scharf, now the highlight of my collection. It’s only the second piece of original art I’ve bought, first being Leslie Ditto’s Deep Thoughts of a Pilot.

Both my Scharf and my Ditto are worth more to me due to what they signify rather than the profit I’d make if I sold them.

They represent beauty and transcendence. It was a long, hard day, full of disappointment that people I thought I knew have let themselves slide into mediocrity and ugly, putrid pettiness. But then my Scharf arrived unharmed.

I also finished The Good Man of Nanking, the diary of John Rabe. He was a person of jaw-dropping physical courage, the “Oscar Schindler of China,” as Iris Chang called him.

A devoted Nazi and an insulin-dependent diabetic, John Rabe went out night after night during the Rape of Nanking and saved Chinese from marauding Japanese soldiers. He approached unarmed, threw soldiers off of whomever they were assaulting, and took the victim to his house and the Safety Zone. It’s estimated that Rabe rescued about 250,000 people, making him one of them most effective benefactors in human history.

But we shall not be ingrates: We’re simply thankful that fate has kept us all alive and healthy!

—John Rabe, June 7, 1946