Martin Hale

Eighty Stabs and a Letter to the Pope On the night of January 8, 1354, armed men forced their way into an inn at L’Aigle, Normandy, and stabbed Charles de la Cerda, Constable of France and closest confidant of King Jean II, approximately 80 times. That figure comes from medieval narrative sources and should be … Read more

Beidaihe, After Midnight Sometime after midnight on 13 September 1971, a convoy left the leadership retreat at Beidaihe and drove to Shanhaiguan Airport, carrying Lin Biao, his wife Ye Qun, and his son Lin Liguo. At approximately 00:32, a Hawker Siddeley HS-121 Trident 1E aircraft, registration B-256, lifted off without clearance, without completing routine pre-flight … Read more

The Studio on the Strait Singapore in 1940 was a British Crown Colony, a major port, and a city moving fast. Workers were arriving from across the region, cash wages were replacing older arrangements, and the population was acquiring habits that could not have existed a generation before. One of those habits was cinema. Before … Read more

The Silence Came First Rescuers reaching the villages around Lake Nyos in the days after August 21, 1986, reported something that stayed with them: not the bodies, though there were many, but the quiet. No insects hummed. No birds called. Cattle lay dead at elevations up to 330 feet (100 meters) above the crater rim. … Read more

Fifty-Three Dead Before the Bunting Came Down On November 17, 1921, Edward, Prince of Wales, came ashore at Apollo Bunder in Bombay [now Mumbai] aboard HMS Renown, greeted by Viceroy Lord Reading and the Governor of Bombay, Sir George Lloyd. Across the city, hartals, mass shutdowns organized as public mourning, had paralyzed dozens of towns … Read more

The Pyrenees Run France collapsed in June 1940. Andrée Borrel, twenty years old and recently employed as a shop assistant after leaving school at fourteen, did not wait to see what settled. She moved south into the unoccupied zone and joined an escape line pulling downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees into Spain. On one … Read more

A House Set Apart On March 26, 1915, sixteen blinded soldiers and sailors moved into St Dunstan’s Lodge in Regent’s Park, London. The house had been lent, free of charge, by Otto Hermann Kahn, an American financier who also maintained the 15-acre (roughly 6-hectare) grounds and permitted structural alterations. The villa’s name derived from a … Read more

A Promise Written at a Distance On April 4, 1660, Charles II was still in exile at Breda when he signed the Declaration of Breda, offering “a liberty to tender consciences” and promising that no one would be “disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matter of religion which do not disturb … Read more

What the Altimeter Saw A radar altimeter sends a radio pulse straight down, waits for it to bounce back, and converts the round-trip travel time into a height reading. Pilots trust it the way they trust a fuel gauge. Over glacial ice, the principle breaks. Certain radio frequencies pass through ice rather than reflecting off … Read more

A Settlement, Not a Battlefield Tú Cung hamlet sits on the central Vietnamese coast, about 7 miles (11 km) northeast of Quảng Ngãi city. In March 1968 it was part of the larger village of Sơn Mỹ, and on the morning of March 16 its population was what you would find in any coastal farming … Read more