Here a house is set on fire.

VLEEPTRON SPECIAL REQUEST: The first depiction in European art of the terror ordinary (nameless, unnamed) people experience when war comes to their lives.

HIC DOMVS INCENDITVR
Here a house is set on fire.

... and a mother runs from her burning house clutching her child.

After World War II, questions began to be asked -- by the winning side -- about the Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden, a gorgeous ancient city which assisted the German war effort primarily by continuing to make exquisite porcelain china figurines, pretty little shepherdesses, beautiful fairy-tale princesses and handsome cherry-lipped princes dancing gavottes, etc.

The city was not only reduced to rubble by British night bomber sorties, but magnesium bombs were used to superheat the air and suck the oxygen out of the city, asphyxiating many of its civilian residents, searing their lungs as they tried to breath. (An eyewitness account of the firebombing of Dresden can be found in the novel, "Slaughterhouse Five," by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Vonnegut was a young American soldier prisoner of war who survived because his detainee chamber was underground in an unused slaughterhouse.)

No one on the Allied side wanted to talk much about Dresden and no general or air marshal wanted to take any credit for it. You can wade through entire chapters and books and come to the conclusion that a machine in Allied Headquarters in London accidentally typed: FIREBOMB DRESDEN and no one realized the mistake or caught it in time.

But according to one recent account, it wasn't a mistake. It had a strategic purpose. Dresden was selected as a target so that for weeks to come, the roads and highways of that part of Germany would be filled with tens of thousands of injured and terrified civilians fleeing the city in all directions, thus blocking orderly Germany military movements and paralyzing the region, preventing the Germany military from defending against approaching enemy armies.

WHAT I LEARNED TODAY: When filching images from the Bayeux Tapestry, avoid the replica which was made in England during the Victorian era and hangs in Reading today. From the website "Britain's Bayeux Tapestry":

The mysterious incident on the far right seems to have nothing to do with the main story, but it may have been well known in the 11th century. It might refer to a sexual scandal - the man in the lower border is naked in the original tapestry, but he has been provided with shorts by the Victorian embroiderers who made this copy.