Prisoner of war cage in France, the autumn of 1944. The fighting has moved east and behind the lines a young American mess sergeant is doing the most ordinary thing in the world. He is ladling stew. In front of him a line and the line is wrong. At least it is wrong to the German officers standing in it because in that line a lieutenant colonel of the United States Army is standing behind a private, a private who was three weeks ago a clerk in Ohio.
The colonel has his mess kit out. He is waiting his turn. When he reaches the front he gets the same stew in the same tin as the 18-year-old ahead of him. No separate table, no better cut, no servant carrying his plate and the captured German officers watching this cannot understand it. Not because they are offended, though some of them are.
Something stranger is happening behind their eyes. They’re trying to fit what they’re seeing into a picture of how an army is supposed to work and it will not fit. In their world the uniform tells you who eats first. The plate tells you who gives orders. Take away the plate and the orders stop working. Yet these Americans had just driven them out of France.
Here is the strange part, the part that took me three passes through the records to believe. The thing those German officers found baffling was not that the Americans ate worse than their officers. The truth is almost the reverse. In the German army, by the army’s own regulations, officers and enlisted men were supposed to eat the very same ration.
So why would a German officer be baffled by Americans doing something Germans also did on paper? That question is the whole video. The answer is not in the food, it is in what the food meant. And to understand why a tin of American stew could shake a Prussian trained officer’s picture of the world, we have to go back about 150 years to a defeat so total that it rebuilt the German idea of an officer from the ground up.
Then we have to come forward slowly until we are standing in that chow line again, and this time we understand exactly what the German is seeing. Stay with me because by the end the simple sentence in the title is going to turn into something much larger. It is going to become a question about where authority actually comes from, >> >> and the men of two armies answered that question in completely different ways, and one of those answers won.
Part one, the officer as a different kind of human being. Let us start with a fact that surprises almost everyone because the popular story has it backwards. If you search the internet, you will find dozens of videos and posts telling you that German officers ate like kings while their men starved, and that Americans were shocked by the contrast. And that is a good story.
It is also, at the level of the official ration, simply not true. The German army of the Second World War, the Wehrmacht, was one of only two major armies in the entire war that did not have a separate better ration class for officers. The other one was the Soviet Red Army. According to the German army’s own reference, the Lexicon der Wehrmacht, the same field ration went to officers and enlisted men alike, and this rule was followed almost without exception all the way up to the level of a core staff. So, if you measured it in grams
of bread and tins of meat, the German lieutenant and the German rifleman were eating off the same sheet of paper. Hold on to that fact. We are going to need it later because it is exactly what makes the bafflement in the title so interesting. The German officer was not baffled by a thing he had never seen.
He was baffled by a thing he thought he understood done in a way that broke the meaning he had attached to it. To see what that meaning was, you have to understand where the German officer came from, and he came from a wound. In 1806, at twin battles called Jena and Auerstedt, Napoleon destroyed the Prussian army in a single day.
Not defeated, destroyed. The army of Frederick the Great, the most admired military machine in Europe, collapsed like a sandcastle. To understand the shock, you have to understand what the army had been. For most of the previous century, the Prussian officer corps was nearly the private property of the landed nobility, the Junkers.
As late as the death of Frederick the Great in 1786, only about one officer in 10 came from the middle class. Command was a birthright. The well-born led, the common man marched and obeyed, and the system had worked so well for so long that the Prussians had stopped questioning it. Then, a French artillery officer who had risen on talent alone swept it off the board in an afternoon.
The humiliation was so deep that a group of reformers, men whose names ring through German military history, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Clausewitz, sat down and asked a question that armies almost never ask honestly, “Why did we lose?” Part of their answer was about the officer. The old Prussian officer was an aristocrat by birth, a nobleman.
He held his commission because of who his father was, not because of what he knew. The reformers tried to change that. There’s a famous line from the Prussian military reorganization of 1808 stating that the only claim to an officer’s position would be, in peacetime, education and professional knowledge, and in war, outstanding bravery and a quick grasp of the situation.
Every man, regardless of his origins, would in theory have equal rights to rise. That is a radical sentence. It is almost an American sentence. And here is the first twist of our story, The kind of twist that should make you sit up. That egalitarian promise was never really kept. Reactionary forces, frightened of a democratized army, especially after the revolutions of 1848, made sure the aristocracy kept its grip on the officer corps.
By 1913, on the eve of the First World War, around 80% of Prussian cavalry officers were still noblemen. The promise of merit was real on paper and quietly strangled in practice. Why does this matter for a video about food? Because it tells you what the officer’s rank had become in the German mind. It was not just a job.
It was a station, a kind of person. There is a Prussian document from 1889 describing the ideology of the officer corps, and it says that even the young officer from a middle-class family, by choosing the profession, declares that he now belongs to what it calls an aristocracy of spirit, a modern knighthood.
The German phrase that haunts all of this is older and simpler. Noblesse oblige. Rank carries obligations, but it also unmistakably carries apartness. So, picture the German officer, even the decent one, even the brave one. He has been raised inside a culture that tells him an officer is a separate order of being.
Not richer in calories necessarily, separate in essence. He has a personal orderly, a soldier the Germans called the Bursche, a word that means something like boy or valet, who cleans his boots, carries his kit, brings his food to him. The orderly system existed in almost every European army. The British called the man a batman. But, in the German army, it sat on top of that older idea of the officer as a higher caste.
The food might be identical. The hand that carried it was not. And here is where the title starts to come alive. Because what would unsettle a man like that is not a smaller portion. It is the sight of an officer voluntarily erasing the apartness. An American colonel standing in line holding his own mess kit, taking his own tin, with no orderly and no separate table, is not eating worse food.
He is making a statement the German officer’s entire world says is impossible. He is saying, “The rank is real, but it does not make me a different kind of human being.” The German officer looks at that, and his mind does something specific. It does not feel pity. It feels confusion. Because if the officer is not apart, then where exactly does his authority come from? In the German system, the answer was partly the apartness itself.
The distance was the discipline. Remove the distance, the theory said, and the order should stop working. But the orders did not stop working. That was the thing they could not solve. The Americans, with their colonels in the chow line and their privates arguing about baseball, kept winning. And to understand why that broke something in the German officer’s head, we first have to look at how each army actually built an officer in the first place.
Because the two systems took young men and did almost opposite things to them, and the results would meet with rifles in a forest. That is where we are going next. But keep the chow line in your mind. We will be coming back to it. And each time we return, you will see a little more of what the German is really looking at. Part two. Two ways to build an officer.
Here is the paradox at the center of this entire story. And a historian named Jörg Muth spent years in the archives of both armies proving it. His book, Command Culture, is now required reading for senior American Marines and was placed on the United States Army Chief of Staff’s professional reading list. So, this is not a fringe idea.
It is mainstream military scholarship. And what it found turns the obvious assumption upside down. The assumption goes like this. Germany was an authoritarian society. America was democracy. So surely the German army crushed initiative out of its officers and the American army encouraged it. Surely the German officer was a robot waiting for orders and the American was a free-thinking individualist.
Muth found the opposite. He found that German officers came from a closed authoritarian society but received an astonishingly open-minded military education. And American officers came from one of the most democratic societies on earth but received a rigid narrow education that in his words harnessed their minds and limited their initiative.
The free society built its officers like machine parts. The unfree society taught its officers to think for themselves. Read that twice because it is the engine of everything that follows. Look at how each system treated a brand new cadet. At West Point, in the American Military Academy, the new arrival, the plebe, walked into a world of systematic hazing.
This was not a secret. When a future five-star general named Douglas MacArthur was a young cadet, the abuse of plebes at West Point was so severe that Congress investigated it after cadet named Oscar Booz left the academy following months of torment and later died. The system that hazed MacArthur was the same one he would preside over 20 years later as superintendent.
The American Academy ran on rote learning, on demerits for tiny infractions, on what Muth calls the approved school solution. There was a single correct answer to every tactical problem handed down from above, and a cadet who offered a creative alternative was, by definition, wrong. Now cross the ocean to the German cadet schools and the war academy, the Kriegsakademie.
Muth describes a culture that worked hard to prevent bullying and to reward flexibility of thought. Instructors were chosen for their teaching skill and their professional knowledge. And the crucial difference? When a German cadet were given a tactical problem, there was deliberately no single school solution. A student who reached a defensible answer by his own reasoning was praised, >> >> even if it differed from the instructors.
The German system was training a habit, the habit of deciding. Follow the American officer one more step past West Point to the school that mattered most for his career, >> >> the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. This was the gateway to high command. And Muth’s verdict on it is brutal.
The men who clawed their way through the erratic American system to reach Leavenworth often arrived hungry to learn real war and found again a faculty he describes as below average and a method built once more on the approved school solution. After every exercise, the student was made to accept the single answer the school had decided was correct.
An officer who solved the problem a different way, even a better way, was marked wrong. The most democratic society on earth was teaching its future generals that there is one right answer and it comes from above. Sit with the strangeness of that. The country built on argument was schooling its officers in obedience to the school solution, while the authoritarian state was schooling its officers to argue.
That habit had a name, Auftragstaktik. It is usually translated as mission command and it is one of the most important ideas in modern military history. The principle is simple to say and very hard to do. A commander tells a subordinate what result he wants and why it matters and then leaves the how to the man on the spot.
He gives him a mission, not a set of orders. This idea was forged, again, out of the wound of 1806, out of the Prussian recognition that war is full of fog and confusion, and that no plan from headquarters survives contact with reality. So, the man who can see the reality must be trusted to act. And now watch the chow line come back because this is the first return.
And it pays. In the German system, trust flowed downward through the structure of authority. The officer was trusted to decide, but that trust was vertical. It moved from the senior to the junior along a chain that everyone understood. And the officer’s apartness, his separate station, was part of what made the chain legible.
You obeyed the lieutenant because the lieutenant was, in an almost sacred sense, your superior. The distance was not cruelty. The distance was the wiring. In the American system, the officer was trying to build trust the other direction, from the bottom up, by standing in the line, by eating last, by carrying his own pack.
The American officer was not abolishing his authority. He was sourcing it somewhere else. He was saying, in effect, “Follow me because you have seen that I will not ask you to suffer anything I will not suffer myself.” The German officer’s authority came from his position above the men. The American officer’s authority came, at least in part, from his refusal to stand above them at the dinner hour.
Two completely different theories of why a man obeys. And here’s the thing a German officer in that prison cage was struggling to process. He was looking at an army that had thrown away the visible wiring of authority, the apartness, the separate table, the orderly with the plate, and somehow the current was still flowing. The lights were still on.
He could not see the wire, so he could not understand the machine. That is what bafflement is. It is not ignorance. It is watching something work for reasons you cannot locate, but a theory is just a theory until it meets a bullet. And the first time these two systems met in earnest in the desert of North Africa, the American theory did not look impressive at all.
It looked like a disaster. Because there is a dark middle to this story, a place where the egalitarian American army nearly proved the German officer right. Before we go into the desert, one quiet word. The men we are talking about, the colonel in the chow line, the clerk from Ohio, did not do these things for a camera or a medal.
They did them because of a shared idea about what they owed each other. That idea is worth keeping in view. If this story matters to you, a like on this video keeps it in front of other people who care about getting the history right. That is all. It costs you a second and it keeps the record alive a little longer.
Part three. The desert that almost proved the Germans right. February 1943. A mountain pass in Tunisia called Kasserine. The United States Army had been in serious combat against the Germans for only a few months and it went badly. So badly that it remains one of the most painful early defeats in the army’s modern history.
Against the Americans stood Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and a German force hardened by years of desert war. The American units were green, poorly coordinated and led in too many cases by officers who had risen through exactly the rigid peacetime system we just described. The result was a rout. Thousands of Americans were captured.
The line buckled and ran. And to a German observer, the lesson [clears throat] seemed obvious and satisfying. The amateur army, the citizen army with its informal officers, had been exposed. War, the German could tell himself, is a profession for a professional cast. These shopkeepers in uniform had just learned it the hard way.
Now, here is where I have to be careful with you because the easy version of this story is a lie, and you deserve the true one. The easy version says the friendly, egalitarian American officer was always a better leader. That is not what the record shows. The record shows that the American system had a real and dangerous flaw, and that the flaw was, in part, the very thing we have been praising.
Listen to this. Because it is documented, and it is uncomfortable. The historian Stephen Ambrose, in his book Citizen Soldiers, describes a problem that became, in his word, endemic in the American army in Europe. American commanders were not going to the front. Not even battalion commanders, in some cases, were going forward to see the ground their men were dying on.
The problem got so bad that a British general, Brian Horrocks, had to order American staff officers and their commanders to go and physically check on their own soldiers. Ambrose calls it humiliating, and the cost was real. He argues that the absence of those officers helped feed the meat grinder battles in places like the Hurtgen Forest, where tens of thousands of young Americans and Germans died in fighting that achieved very little.
Do you see the danger here? Eating with your men is a beautiful symbol, but a symbol is not the same as leadership. An officer can stand in the chow line at breakfast and still fail to climb out of his command post and walk to the front at noon. The American informality could decay into something hollow, a familiarity without responsibility, a colonel who was friendly with his men but would not share their actual danger.
And at Kasserine, and in the Hurtgen, you can see what that decay costs. So, for a moment, in the desert, the German officer’s worldview held. His theory of the apart, professional officer seemed vindicated by American failure. If the story ended here, the title of this video would have a sad answer. The Germans were baffled by American informality because American informality was, in fact, a weakness dressed up as a virtue.
But, the story does not end there because the Americans did something that the rigid cast-bound system was, strangely, very good at. Something the German army, for all its brilliance, could not do as well. The Americans looked at the disaster, admitted it in plain language, and changed. A general named Omar Bradley was brought in to fix the broken cores.
He did not throw out the citizen army and try to build a Prussian cast. He took the raw material, the farm boys and the clerks and the mechanics, and he enforced the things that had been missing. Officers were pushed forward. Commanders who would not lead from the front were relieved. And here is the second return to our theme, and it goes deeper than the first.
The American officer’s authority, remember, came from the bottom up, from the men’s belief that he would share their lot. At Kasserine, that authority had been counterfeit in too many units, the symbol without the substance. What Bradley and the hard school of combat did was force the symbol and the substance back together.
Now, the officer who ate with his men also bled with them. Now, the colonel in the chow line was also the colonel in the forward observation post. And when those two things locked together, when the man who refuses the separate table is also the man who refuses the safe rear, you get a kind of authority that is almost impossible to break because the men have seen it tested with their own eyes.
The German army never had to learn this lesson in reverse, and that turned out to be a quiet tragedy for them. Their officers were often magnificent at the front, brave to the point of recklessness, leading from the very tip of the attack. But, their system could not easily question itself, could not easily say in writing, “We were wrong.
Here is the fix. Send it to every unit. The The Americans built whole institutions for admitting failure and spreading the correction. They have one to this day. The German strength was the individual officer. The American strength, the one being born in the rubble of Kasserine, was the system that learns.
And a system that learns is about to produce something the German officer will find even harder to understand than a colonel in a chow line. Because the next thing the German encounters is not an American officer at all. It is an American private. A private who does something no German private would dream of doing. And what that private reveals will turn the whole question of the title inside out.
>> Part four. >> The private who talked back to feel the next layer. You have to imagine yourself as a captured German soldier being marched through an American rear area in 1944. You have lost the battle. You’re tired and you are watching your captors closely, the way prisoners always do, looking for the shape of the people who beat you.
And you see things that do not compute. You see, as a real prisoner named Oskar Schmolling later recounted of his capture by Americans, the strange informality of it, the speed and the confusion, men who did not behave like the soldiers of a proper army. You hear American enlisted men address their officers in a tone that, in your army, would end in punishment.
You see soldiers who do not snap rigid when an officer passes. You see, perhaps the thing Ambrose records from the European front, an American sentry pointing his rifle at a general’s stomach and shouting, “Who the hell are you?” because he genuinely does not recognize him, and genuinely does not care about the rank until he is sure.
Now, a German officer watching this has two possible reactions. And which one he has tells you everything about the trap he is in. He can sneer and say, “This is a rabble, an undisciplined mob. No wonder they needed a whole world to help them beat us.” Many German officers did exactly that, right to the end.
And some kept saying it even in captivity, even after the rabble had taken Paris and was driving for the Rhine. Or he can do the harder thing, the thing that produces real bafflement. He can notice that the rabble keeps winning and ask why. And if he asks why, he runs straight into a wall his entire education built for him. Because his definition of discipline was the visible kind, straight backs, instant salutes, the separate table, the apartness.
He had been taught in that closed aristocratic culture that without the visible hierarchy, the army would dissolve into a mob. And here was an army that had thrown away half the visible hierarchy and had not dissolved. It had become, if anything, more dangerous. This is the heart of the title, so let me say it as plainly as I can.
The German officer was not baffled because the Americans ate the same food. Remember, German officers ate the same ration as their men, too. He was baffled because the Americans had detached authority from apartness, and his world view said that was impossible. In the German mind, the officer’s separate station and the soldier’s obedience were the same fact seen from two sides.
The American had pulled them apart, kept the obedience, thrown away much of the station, and the soldier obeyed anyway, fought anyway, and fought well. The German was looking at an effect with no visible cause. That is the precise texture of being baffled, as opposed to being merely surprised or angry.
Surprise fades, anger discharges. Bafflement just sits there because the mind cannot file the thing away. And the American private was the proof of the impossible. He would argue with a sergeant about the best way to take a building and then take the building. He would grumble about his lieutenant, complain about the food, mock the brass, and then follow that same lieutenant across open ground under fire.
His obedience was not the obedience of a man who believed his officer was a higher form of life. It was the obedience of a man who had decided freely that this officer was worth following. It was conditional, earned, and for exactly that reason ferocious. You cannot easily frighten such a man into running because he was never held in place by fear of the hierarchy in the first place.
He was held by something he chose. There is a deep irony buried here and it connects back to Muth’s paradox. The German officer had been trained to think for himself, given that open-minded education, taught Auftragstaktik, taught to decide. But he came from a society that told the common man to obey his betters.
The American officer had been trained narrowly, almost crushed into conformity by his rigid schools. But he came from a society that told the common man he was nobody’s inferior. And when you put them in the field, the German genius for command sat on top of soldiers conditioned to be commanded. While the American system, clumsy at the top, rested on a foundation of men who’d been raised to believe that no station made another man their master.
Two armies, each strong at the opposite end from where you would expect. The food was never the point. The food was the visible edge of the whole submerged thing. When the German officer stared at the chow line, what unsettled him was not stew in a tin. It was a glimpse through that small window of a different answer to the oldest question in any army.
Why do men obey? His civilization answered, “Because some men are above others.” The American answered, “Because a leader has earned it from below.” And the second answer, it turned out, could survive a beating that the first answer could not. We are about to see exactly how on the day the German system was tested at its own root.
A request before the last part, and it is a sincere one. The men who fought this war are leaving us now, and their stories are going with them. If your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the American army or any other, I would be honored to read about them in the comments. What unit were they in? Where did they serve? What did they say on the rare occasions they said anything at all? Those few sentences in a comment are increasingly the only place some of these memories still live.
Part five, where authority really lives, and the verdict. Now, we close the circle. We have the chow line. We have the two ways of building an officer. We have the desert that nearly proved the German right, and the private who proved him wrong. The last piece is the verdict itself, and to reach it honestly, we have to give the German system its full due.
Because the easy patriotic answer is not the true one. Hand the German army the respect it earned. Unit for unit, in the judgment of serious historians, the German soldier of the Second World War was often a formidable, deeply effective fighter. And the German genius for small unit command, that habit of pushing decisions down to the man who could see the ground, was studied and borrowed by the very Americans who beat them.
After the war, American and Allied officers poured over German methods. The United States Marine Corps built much of its modern maneuver warfare thinking on German concepts, even using the German words Schwerpunkt, Auftragstaktik. The student admitted that the teacher had been brilliant in the classroom of tactics. And we have to be fair about the limits of our own theme, because honesty is the whole point of this channel.
It would be a lie to say that German officers were cold aristocrats who despised their men. Many shared every hardship of the front, slept in the same mud, died at the same rate, were loved by their soldiers. The bond between a German company commander and his men could be as fierce and as real as anything in the American army.
The difference we are tracing is not a difference between warmth and cruelty. It is a difference in where the authority was rooted. In the German system, even the warmest officer drew his authority partly from the structure above him, from his station. In the American system, the officer increasingly drew it from the men below him, from their verdict on whether he had earned it.
So, why did the second root hold better when everything was collapsing? Here is the answer, and it is the verdict on the title. Authority rooted in apartness depends on the whole structure staying intact. The soldier obeys because the hierarchy is real, the state is real, the Kaiser or the Führer at the top is real, and the officer is a link in that sacred chain.
But, pull the top out, let the state start to crumble, let the cause rot, and every link weakens at once, because each link borrowed its strength from the whole chain. The German army in the final months did not lack brave officers. Studies of ordinary, non-elite German units in late 1944 found that what increasingly held men in place was not the old magic of the hierarchy, but raw coercion from the top, threats against soldiers’ families, executions of deserters.
One careful study of a normal German corps on the Western Front in the autumn of 1944 concluded that its morale had sunk to something resembling the German army in the collapse year of 1918, and that the main difference keeping it in the field was the high command’s willingness to intimidate its own soldiers into fighting.
The visible structure was being propped up by terror because its inner meaning was failing. Authority rooted in the men’s own judgment does not depend on the structure in the same way. The American private followed his lieutenant not because a sacred chain ran up to Washington, but because he had personally watched this man eat last and lead first.
And that bond did not need the whole edifice to be intact. It lived at the level of the squad, the platoon, the company. It was local, personal, and chosen. And you cannot easily strip it away from the outside because it was never bolted on from the outside. It grew from the bottom, and things that grow from the bottom are very hard to kill from the top.
That is why the German officer in the prison cage was baffled. And now we can state it with full force. He was watching an army whose discipline did not depend on the thing he thought discipline depended on. He had been taught that the officer’s apartness, the separate table, the station, the distance was load-bearing.
Take it away and the building falls. The Americans took much of it away and the building stood. And then the building walked into Germany. He was staring at load-bearing apartness that turned out not to be load-bearing at all. His whole architecture of obedience had a pillar in it that he now realized was decorative. That realization, arriving through the small window of a chow line, is not a feeling that resolves.
It is a feeling that haunts. It is bafflement in its deepest form. The discovery that something you built your life around was not holding up the roof. Now, run the test, the title demands. If you remove the word baffled and put in the word amused or angered or impressed, would the story change? It would.
Amusement would mean the German thought the Americans were merely quaint. Anger would mean he felt insulted by their informality. Impressed would mean he understood and admired. Baffled is the only word that captures the specific thing. He could not make it fit, and the reason he could not make it fit is that it threatened a belief he could not afford to give up while the war was still on.
The belief that his kind of authority, the apart kind, was the only kind that worked. The food was the doorway. What stood on the other side was a question about the foundations of his entire profession. Come back, finally, to the chow line in France where we started. The colonel with his mess kit, the clerk from Ohio ahead of him, the German officers in the line watching, unable to file what they see.
Now you know what they were really looking at, not a smaller portion, not a richer enemy. They were looking at a different theory of why human beings obey one another made visible for one quiet moment in the act of waiting your turn for stew. One theory said, “I am above you, therefore you follow me.
” The other said, “I have earned it from you, therefore you follow me.” Both produced brave armies. Only one produced an army whose discipline could outlast the collapse of everything around it. The German officer could not see the wire because the wire ran the other way, from the bottom up, invisible to a man trained to look only from the top down.
He kept searching the American army for the source of its discipline and kept failing to find it because he was looking in the officers’ separate dining room, and the answer was standing in the chow line, holding a tin, waiting like everybody else. The verdict then is this. German commanders were not baffled because American officers ate worse than their own officers.
Their own officers ate the same ration as their men. They were baffled because the Americans had quietly proven that an officer does not need to be a separate kind of person to be obeyed and that a soldier raised to bow to no one will follow a leader he has freely judged worthy further and longer and through worse than a soldier who follows because the hierarchy tells him he must.
The tin of stew did not feed the bafflement it revealed it. It was the smallest possible window onto the largest possible difference between two armies. Not how they ate but where they kept the thing that made men obey. If this gave you something to turn over in your mind, a like helps this channel reach the people who want the real version of the history, not the comfortable one and not the made up one.
Subscribe if you want the next chapter because there are more of these quiet windows, more small ordinary things that turn out to hold up whole worlds. And remember this because it is the truth underneath the whole story. An army is not a machine, it is a web of trust. The Germans built theirs from the top down, magnificent and brittle.
The Americans, almost by accident, built theirs from the bottom up, clumsy and unbreakable. The food was never the point, the trust was. And the men who held that trust, the colonel who ate last, the private who followed because he chose to, were not numbers in a ration table, they had names and they deserved to be remembered by them.
