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History’s Most Lunatic Events and People

Khalid Elhassan August 21, 2020 34 min

La Belle Alliance - Battle of Waterloo — Blucher, left, meeting Wellington at Waterloo. Wikimedia

34. At Least He Was Self Aware

Another of Blucher’s lunatic episodes occurred when the house was roused by the sounds of a ferocious struggle coming from the general’s bedroom. When servants and aides rushed in, they discovered that Blucher was fighting thin air. He claimed that he was in a life and death struggle with the vindictive ghost of a dead officer, whom Blucher had dismissed from the Prussian Army.

To his credit, Blucher realized during his stretches of lucidity that there was something wrong with his head. However, the problem according to him was that his head was made of stone. He did not mean that as a figure of speech: he literally thought his noggin was made of stone, and routinely asked people to smite him in the head with a hammer.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.