The Foreign Service Journal, October 2022

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2022 69 Someone with a small forge on the outskirts of Warsaw must be turning out the authentic- looking projectiles for the Scandinavian tourist trade, I speculated. quantity and at that price had to be fakes. Someone with a small forge on the outskirts of Warsawmust be turning out the authentic-looking projectiles for the Scandinavian tourist trade, I speculated. Au contraire, exclaimed Branko. His Danish military attaché colleague had taken one of the cannonballs back to Copenhagen to a government ordnance lab for evaluation. Its analysts told him that while there was no definitive way to establish the age of such metal objects, they had examined the interior structure of the projectile and found it to be the same as that of known Swedish cannon- balls from the 17th century. If someone were producing fakes, they were going to a great deal of trouble to do so. Branko’s explanation was good enough for me, so I bought one, which now sits on my desk at our summer home in Sweden (a homecoming of sorts?). On a subse- quent trip to Warsaw, I purchased one for each of our two children. Though Gerd remains skeptical about the authenticity of my cannonball, I like to think that I own a small bit of Swedish (and Polish) history, as well as a happy memory of my friend Branko. Afterword : In June 2019, Gerd and I visited Huseby Bruk, an ancient estate and museum located in south-central Sweden (Småland). We learned there that the bruk, or “works,” had begun smelting iron in 1629 and was a major manufacturer of canons and cannonballs for the Swedish military by the 1630s. Thus, it is entirely possible, but in no way provable, that my cannonball, if authentic, was produced at Huseby, about an hour’s drive fromGerd’s hometown. Yet another twist in the saga of the Swed- ish cannonball. n