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ISSUE 058 · FUN FACTS · USELESS BUT FASCINATING

On 2 November 1932, Major G. P. W. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery arrived in the Campion district of Western Australia with two Lewis machine guns, 10,000 rounds of ammunition, two soldiers and a cinematographer to film the victory.

His enemy was roughly 20,000 emus, which had migrated inland during a drought and were flattening the wheat crops of veterans settled on marginal land after the First World War. The farmers had petitioned not the Minister for Agriculture but the Minister for Defence, on the reasonable grounds that they had all been soldiers themselves.

It went badly from the first engagement. The birds scattered rather than clustering. A gun jammed during an ambush on around a thousand of them at a waterhole. Mounting a Lewis gun on a truck failed because the ground was too rough and the emus were faster. By the third day about thirty birds were dead.

Parliament turned on the operation almost immediately. When one member suggested medals for the troops, another replied that the medals should go to the emus, who had won every round so far. The Defence Minister suspended the campaign on 8 November, then restarted it four days later under pressure from farmers.

Final tally on 10 December: 986 emus killed, from 9,860 rounds fired. Ten bullets a bird. Meredith's own assessment of his opponent has aged into one of the great lines in military reporting — that a division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds would face any army in the world, and that they could take machine gun fire with the invulnerability of tanks.

The postscript is the part that stings. The government abandoned the military approach and introduced a bounty instead. In six months, farmers claimed more than 57,000 of them.

In 1940 the RAF began flying with Airborne Interception radar, a genuinely secret technology that let a night fighter be guided onto a bomber in the dark. On 19 November, squadron leader John Cunningham used it to score the first night kill. He finished the war with twenty victories, nineteen of them at night.

The press needed an explanation, and the Air Ministry gave them one: carrots. Cunningham was nicknamed “Cat's Eyes” and his eyesight was attributed to a diet heavy in vitamin A. Posters went up. There were recipes for carrot pie and carrot jam, and a cartoon mascot called Doctor Carrot.

Cunningham himself explained it afterwards without much ceremony: the Air Ministry gave him the nickname to cover up the fact that they were flying aircraft with radar, because radar could not be mentioned at the time.

Here is the part that gets left out. The tidy version of this story — plucky Britons fooling the Germans with vegetables — is itself doubtful. The RAF Museum's assistant curator has pointed out that the Air Ministry were happy to go along with the story but never set out to deceive the Germans, who already knew about British ground radar and would hardly be surprised by radar in an aircraft. The campaign's real audience was the British public, and its real purpose was to get people eating a vegetable that could be grown at home while imports were being sunk in the Atlantic. It worked: by 1942 Britain had a hundred thousand tonnes of surplus carrots.

The word sounds exactly like what everyone thinks it means: a room where Romans went to be sick between courses so they could keep eating.

It was an exit. In Roman architecture a vomitorium is the passageway through which crowds poured in and out of a stadium, theatre or amphitheatre. You have walked through one at a football ground. The name comes from the same root as “vomit” because the building disgorges its audience, which is a rather good metaphor that somebody at some point took far too literally.

The phrase is “qu'ils mangent de la brioche” — let them eat brioche, an enriched bread, not cake. It appears in Book VI of Rousseau's Confessions, written around 1765, attributed only to “a great princess”.

Marie Antoinette was nine years old at the time and living in Austria. Versions of the same story circulate much earlier: a sixteenth-century German tale has a noblewoman wondering why the poor do not simply eat sweet bread, and the line has also been pinned on Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV, and on two of Louis XVI's aunts.

Now the second layer, which almost nobody knows. The usual correction is that revolutionaries invented the quote as propaganda against the queen. Researchers have looked for it in the newspapers and pamphlets of the period and cannot find it. The earliest known source attaching the line to Marie Antoinette appeared in 1843 — fifty years after she was executed.

So the myth is not revolutionary propaganda. It is a nineteenth-century accident that has been retrofitted onto a woman who was dead before anyone thought to blame her for it.

Twenty people were executed in the Salem trials of 1692 and 1693. Nineteen were hanged. One, Giles Corey, was pressed to death under stones after refusing to enter a plea. Several more died in jail. None went to the stake.

The mix-up comes from merging two different legal traditions. Burning was used in parts of continental Europe, where witchcraft was prosecuted as heresy and fire was understood as purification. English law treated it as a felony, and the English penalty was hanging. Colonial Massachusetts followed English law.

Centuries of European witch hunts, medieval heresy trials and one short outbreak in a Massachusetts village have been compressed in the popular imagination into a single image of a woman at a stake. It is vivid, it is memorable, and for Salem it is the wrong country.

Emu War: Britannica, “Emu War”; Johnson, M. “Feathered Foes: Soldier Settlers and Western Australia's Emu War of 1932.” Journal of Australian Studies; contemporary reporting in the Melbourne Argus, November 1932.

Carrots and radar: Smithsonian Magazine, “Carrots Can't Help You See in the Dark”; Bryan Legate, RAF Museum, quoted in Scientific American (2014); Cunningham's own account of the “Cat's Eyes” nickname.

Vomitorium: standard references on Roman amphitheatre architecture; Merriam-Webster on the word's history.

Marie Antoinette: Rousseau, J-J., Confessions, Book VI (written c. 1765, published 1782); Britannica, “Did Marie-Antoinette Really Say ‘Let Them Eat Cake’?”, including the 1843 Les Guêpes attribution; Fraser, A., Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2001).

Salem: Hoffer, P. C., The Salem Witchcraft Trials: A Legal History; Salem Witch Museum and University of Virginia Salem archive records of the twenty executions.

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