Strong Spirits: A 1941 Court Martial Case of Canadian Sappers in England Who Decided to Shoot Up the Town
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper presents the story of two Canadian sappers Lorne Long and Maurice Francis Flynn, who were stationed in England in February of 1941. In the true spirit of a hard days’ night, these sappers went pub crawling, got drunk, and decided to grab a rifle and shoot up the nearby town. When their bunkmate overheard the conversation, he reported it to their Lance Corporal, also drunk at the time, who in turn tried to apprehend them in the dark English countryside. Sapper Long did not like that and shot at him five times, missing every shot. Armed with a flashlight, the intoxicated Lance Corporal returned to the garrison garage and attempted to commandeer a truck for the manhunt. A sober captain stepped in and stopped him. The next morning, the hungover Long woke up in the woods as a stray dog was licking his face. He walked back, passed the guards without a problem, missed the formation while cleaning his rifle, and was promptly arrested. Looking at this incident through courts martial files and related documents, we will reconstruct the events and characters involved and try to understand why these men could behave like this only twenty years after prohibition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".