In February 1945, FDR, Churchill and Stalin decided there would be no summary executions of the surviving Nazi leadership.

They would instead be held as defendants in an international criminal trial.

Prosecutors and jurors would come from the four Allied powers, who would cobble together and apply the world’s first precepts of international criminal law.

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Thoughts on what we will miss in the coming days.

With words from Shakespeare.

The quality of mercy is not strained;

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath.

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On this day in 1916, the Battle of the Somme ended.

It had begun in July.

And, on its first day, fifty-seven thousand British men were wounded or killed.

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Reading the paper on Nov. 16, 1940.

In a raid the Nazi’s claimed was the ‘greatest attack in the history of aerial warfare,’ five hundred German aircraft, flying at high altitude, poured incendiary and demolition bombs over the industrial city of Coventry for more than ten hours two nights ago.

The Germans claimed the Coventry attack was in retaliation for the November 8 RAF bombing of Munich while Hitler and the Nazi Brown Shirts celebrated the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putch which had catapulted Hitler into the international spotlight.

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It is November 10, 1943.

The Pearl Harbor attack was twenty-three months ago.

And war is being fought across the globe.

At present, US Marines are engaged in heavy fighting on the South Pacific island of Bougainville, after making an amphibious assault there at the beginning of the month.

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It is 1906.

Mark Twain offers an explanation for why many people will live comfortably with the changes coming to America.

Nations do not think, they only feel.

They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains.

A nation can be brought—by force of circumstances, not argument

—to reconcile itself to any kind of government or religion that can be devised;

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It is August 17, 1864.

Young American men have been killing one another in the Civil War for more than three years at battles large and small across the middle of the country.

Bull Run; Shiloh; Antietam; Vicksburg; Gettysburg; Cold Harbor.

At present, Sherman’s forces are laying siege to Atlanta.

And Admiral Farragut’s Union fleet is battling to capture the Confederate port at Mobile, Alabama.

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To fail at everything.

If someone were to have written the life story of Solomon D. Butcher on the day he died in 1927, that would have been a fair statement.

Nothing he tried had worked out for him.

Solomon’s failures began early.

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A few words on disappointment.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare   Where Justice naked is,

Time watches from the shadow   And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry   Vaguely life leaks away,

And Time will have his fancy   To-morrow or to-day.

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Reading the paper on Nov. 9, 1944.

American infantry battled German infantry and tanks in ‘savage and inconclusive fighting’ in the fifty-four-square-mile Hürtgen Forest, which straddles the border of Belgium and Germany.

Across eastern France, the cold, torrential rain of the past ten days is expected to continue, further hindering the work of Allied aircraft and the advance of heavy trucks, tanks and artillery.

US Army troops advanced several miles through waist-deep mud in the Lorraine region, liberating a dozen towns and villages in house-to-house fighting.

US fighter pilots returning from missions over northern Germany emerged from their aircraft with ice on their flight jackets, as bitter cold air covers the region.

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