Today -100: August 9, 1917: Of controlled food, conscription, and fake assassins

The Senate finally passes the Food Control Bill.

Canada’s Senate passes a bill for conscription.

Now that Russia’s political prisoners have been released, returning Siberian exiles are being feted and showered with gifts, leading, inevitably, to people like Catherine Smirnov, who made out like a bandit assassin when she claimed in Minsk that she had assassinated Ivanov, the governor of Odessa. She is arrested when it turns out Odessa never had a governor named Ivanov, but it did have a con artist named Catherine Smirnov.

And here's Siegfried Sassoon on Passchendaele.

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