Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 406
But at this point, with a lot still to say about British and Canadian culture, I must close. As the professors say to their classes, “That will be all for today,” expecting a deep sigh.
Generals I Have Trained
IT IS A great pleasure to me in these days, when war has shown how necessary preliminary training is, to look back to the fact that I have myself trained a very great number of army officers now serving at home and overseas. In particular, I have trained no less than six Canadian generals. So much so that I may regard myself, in a sense, as a professional general-trainer.
I thought nothing of it at the time. Those who can remember as far back as a little over fifty years ago will recall how little we thought then of military things. This was because it was known that war was quite obsolete and bygone, and was a thing only to be applied to savages such as the Matabeles and Mashonas. These were called “tribesmen,” and it was understood that every now and then they would “rise” and when they rose they would be mowed down again by Mr. Gatling’s new gun. After which the British government would lend them money to rebuild their kraals and they would crawl back.
But apart from that, there wasn’t any idea that war could come back to us a terrific reality. In fact, we lived in a world of which no one of a later generation can ever dream. I remember in my student days in Toronto how ridiculous we thought a little group of obsolete students, way behind the time, who kept up military drill, calling themselves, “Company K” of the Queen’s Own Rifles. They used to “form fours” out in front of the Varsity Building, with only two or three to each four, while we others stood around and laughed at them. You see, they had been organized in 1861 to repel the American Civil War and apparently they didn’t know it was over. One of them was called Howard Ferguson (even then very bossy; he was an officer, of course), and one afterwards wrote Flanders Field, and several others now sleep there. But all that we couldn’t know. We stood and laughed. So did the world.
But the time when I came to train generals personally was just after that. I had become a resident master — the senior resident master — at Upper Canada College. This school had been founded originally with the idea of training (turning out, they called it) Christian gentlemen. That was all right as an ideal. As a matter of fact, it was found that the school had to turn them out before they got trained into Christian gentlemen. Those are hard fellers to make. In fact, the “gentleman” part of it proved quite impossible. I do not know to this day just how you train a gentleman. I admit he’s unmistakable when he’s trained and anyway you can tell him by his old school tie. But it didn’t seem to work at Upper Canada College. Year after year the Principal used to announce from the platform in the Prayer Hall that this was a school for Christian gentlemen and that its aim was to train boys for a Christian life. Everybody was glad when they gave up the ideal of training Christians and it was announced that the school would train boys for the Royal Military College at Kingston.
That was a much better aim. And it was good musketry, too; aim low and you hit something. So for years after that and all through my resident time (1891-1899), one of the successful features of the work at Upper Canada College was training boys for the R.M.C. That’s where my generals came in; they passed from me to the R.M.C.; from there (in those days) to the Imperial Army; and from there all over the globe. But I was the start.
Hence I thought it might be of use to record my methods in training generals. Well, in the first place, I began with kindness. When a new general came into my hands, I used to go along to his room and sit on the bed and talk to him, mostly about his home. Not a word about discipline, about his having to take a bath once a week and that sort of stuff. Give him a chance. He might want to do it. But just at first, kindness.
I recall in this connection one particular general, one of the smallest and sturdiest generals I ever trained — in fact, he looked hard and tough and bullet-headed even at eleven years old, this little general. He told me he’d come down all the way from the Yukon, had taken nearly a year to make the trip; spoke of his Husky dog teams that he’d used for his sleds and about his portages after the “break-up.” I forget if he mentioned other people coming with him; at any rate, knowing him then and later, I’m sure that he didn’t need them. He seemed to think a lot of the North but very little of the school and the staff. He said he doubted whether any of the masters he’d seen in the school that day would make much of a showing in a canoe. And he said he had a friend, a Siwash Indian, who could have thrown the Principal over the fence.
I recall the similar case of a general, newly arrived from Hamilton, Ontario, his home at the time, though his address just now is North Africa and Italy. He wasn’t feeling so good, just sitting on the edge of his bed and looking downhearted. So I asked him where he came from and said Hamilton was a great place, and the general said it was the greatest iron and steel centre in Ontario. As he said it, the tears broke into his eyes at the thought of it.... I saw it mentioned in the papers the other day that he is a man of iron determination. They got it wrong — iron and steel, rolled iron, ingots and steel bullets — in other words, from Hamilton. Yet I am sure that he still keeps the softer side that I first saw. If anyone whispered, “What about Burlington Bay in the moonlight of June?” — his iron (and steel) reserve might break.
But I found out that soft stuff alone would never make a general. There comes a time when you need firmness, the iron hand. If I found a general burning his light after hours, with a rug over the fanlight so as to fry sausages for a group of junior officers (as they turned out to be), I never spared him. I’d condemn him to five hundred lines of Virgil as quick as look at him, friend or not. I see the result of it now, though heaven knows I get little credit for it. “General So-and-so,” said one of the Sicilian press reports, “can put more into a five hundred word dispatch than any man in the army.” Of course he can; he wouldn’t waste a word. He counts them as he writes them.
Of another of my generals the press said, “General So-and-so has no knowledge of Italian, but he astonished some of his staff by addressing a few words of well-chosen Latin to a Neopolitan delegation.” Yes, but who chose it for him? I did fifty years ago. I chose him the whole first declension (but without the irregular Dative Plural) and the whole of the second declension, including the Vocative Case. He spent all one Saturday afternoon (the incident arose in connection with his having jumped over the school fence on Friday) in writing out these declensions again and again and again. They were the only ones he ever knew. He never went further. And wasn’t it lucky? They are the only ones that Southern Italians use anyway! And the Vocative Case, the only one he needed to address them. The papers said it seemed marvellous that he had kept his grip on Latin! So it does, unless he opens up his hand.
So that’s the way it went. Steady day-to-day work on these generals gradually taught them duty, self-reliance, the need of a bath once a week, love of country, the folly of jumping fences, the acceptance of discipline and the power of written Latin for the redemption of sin. With that they passed out of my care to what they thought was the beginning of their military life as Cadets in the old “Stone Frigate.” But the real beginning, the channel in the sand that later is the fold in the rock, was mine.
All this is true. Yet perhaps I have spoken too much as if I did it all alone. I was reminded of this in receiving a letter the other day from my old friend, Sir Edward Peacock, of London, England. He is now one of the Empire’s greatest financiers but in the days of which I speak he was my colleague at Upper Canada College and of no more account in the world than I was — in fact, both nothing. He wrote, “Do you know that you and I taught six of the chief Canadian generals at Upper Canada College?” I have answered, “Take three and give me three; I prefer to keep my staff as a unit.”
III
THERE FOLLOW HERE SIX ESSAYS ON THE POST-WAR WORLD AND SOME OF THE THINGS THAT SHOULD BE DONE TO ACHIEVE A BETTER PLACE IN WHICH TO LIVE, ENDING WITH THE SUGGESTION THAT ONE OF THE FIRST NEEDS IS THAT WE RECONSTRUCT OURSELVES.
This Business of Prophecy
I USED TO go in a great deal for prophecy. I found it safer and easier than fact, and more impressive. During my long years of lecturing at McGill I used to say to my classes, “Mark my words, gentlemen, in another fifty years you will see” so and so; or, “Mark me, gentlemen, in another half century you will see the end of” of pretty well everything. The students were tremendously impressed. They didn’t see how I could see it all coming. They just lived on the hope of it.
The only mistake was that I made the prophecies too short. They’ll soon fall due. I began in 1901, and the first of the prophecies will come around in 1951. It is true that a great many of the older students have dropped out. Even those left begin to look pretty shaky. So I guess it will be all right. Yet it was timed too close. I wouldn’t do it again.
But in any case, I have gone out of the prophecy business. Too many people are crowding into it, people without experience. And it is a thing that demands long preparation. Look at those prophets of the Old Testament. They were mature men, 500 to 600 years old, with a bombing range of 3,000 years.
But now everybody’s in it. Why, only yesterday at my club a man told me to mark him that the world would be an absolutely different place after the war. I marked him right away (with a piece of billiard chalk) but I doubt if I can find him again — after the war.
That’s it, all the time — after the war. They’re prophesying and planning all the big things that are going to be done after the war. It seems that the whole framework of society has got to be reconstructed — from top to bottom, or from bottom to top. Some will begin at one end, some the other. Fascinating, isn’t it? In fact, some of us can hardly wait till the war is over, and would end it right now so as to get at this post-war stuff. It seems that we’ve been living in the wrong ideology — I think that’s it. Anyway it’s all got to change.
Naturally the biggest thing of all is the question of the future of Europe. We have simply got to consider what that is to be. In fact, it is a thing that should have been attended to long ago. Only last week I heard two men discussing quite eagerly, indeed, almost angrily, whether Europe after the war is to be a federation or just a loose conglomerate under a guarantee of conglomeration.
It is a thing you have to face. These two men were going to a meeting (I was so sorry I couldn’t go) where they were to thresh this out. They said that after the discussion the future of Europe would probably be thrown open to the audience. That was nice, wasn’t it? I forgot to look in the paper to see what happened; often so much war stuff gets into the papers that you miss the news.
But, anyway, what is needed here is one of those big general polls of public opinion that show exactly what is going to be, or, rather, the percentage of everything that is going to be. A lot of us would like to see the future of Europe put to a poll that way, along the lines: (1) Future; (2) no Future; (3) any damn Future. I’ll bet you it would show Europe 62 per cent, or say 63, conglomerated. That’s what I’d do with it.
Of course there would be the usual 17 per cent “indifferent.” Those fellows should keep out of the poll. If they don’t care, why do they vote? In fact, the real trouble with these polls is that the very people whose opinions we don’t want in the poll are the kind of people who give their opinions, and those we do, don’t. Do you see what I mean? If we could get the solid thought of the country to think, it would be better.
But there are big things to plan for at home, too. Take education, one of the biggest. They are saying that after the war education will have to be reconstructed from top to bottom. They say it won’t be recognizable. You won’t be able to tell whether a man is educated or not. It seems there are a lot of committees, some of the biggest educationalists in the country, sitting on it already. One committee is sitting on arithmetic and working on the multiplication table. They’re up to nine times nine already. They may scrap the rest. Another is working on long division; it’s too long for them.
But, of course, the biggest post-war thing of all is the reconstruction of the cities. I imagine that that question has come up everywhere. I know that with us in my city it is the most acute problem of all and there’s no use ending the war till we solve it. There’s no doubt our city has got to go; it’s no darned use; the streets all run the wrong way and cross one another. Indeed, the only thing to do with it is to knock it all down and shovel it away.
When I look at my own house, I just want to take a spade and knock it down flat. The thing is worthless; the upstairs ought to be downstairs. Anybody can see that now. And it’s the same way with all the apartment buildings. That’s the fascination of city planning. You see it all so clearly when you see it. You see, in practically all the apartments the bottom floor should be the top one — to get proper light.
Anyway, in our city we all see eye to eye about it, though in different directions. I see my own house best. However, we’ve got a committee of experts working on it and they are beginning right at the beginning, at the very foundation of reconstruction — drainage. Are we draining properly? And after that leakage, and then seepage, and then garbage. We had a big man here a week or two back talking garbage. He was certainly right up in it. He’s been invited to talk elsewhere. That’s the way with these experts; they know their stuff.
But of course it all takes time and spade work. One of our speakers put it pretty neatly the other day by saying you can’t rebuild without spade work. That seems to put it in a nutshell, or at any rate in a steam shovel. The only trouble is the time. It would never do to have the war end on us and the city still right here.
Then there’s post-war finance — I suppose the nation’s greatest problem of the lot. But here the biggest experts, on the biggest salaries, seem to be pretty well agreed: after the war we must keep right on with big expenditure and high salaries for fear of a collapse. It seems that, quite apart from the other Allies, the United States and Great Britain and Canada are spending 365 billion dollars a year. That means a billion dollars a day, and, spread out among the 200 million of us, it means five dollars a day each! I just can’t think now how I’ll spend mine.
So you see, with all these fascinating post-war problems to think about, you can’t blame people if the war news sometimes seems a little dull. There is so much to plan and so little time. I hope those who are fighting won’t stop till we get our ideology ready.
Rebuilding the Cities
WAR IS A strange business. It does what peace can never effect. The bombing of the great European cities has brought out the fact that they needed bombing anyway. The booksellers of Paternoster Row in London stand among the debris, rubbing their hands to think what a fine book quarter they can make of it now. They expect great things in Bristol, too, though they still need a few edges trimmed off. Similarly we expect to give the Germans a fine chance with Berlin, and the Italians are to have a whole lot of fun with Naples and Genoa.
But with the cities — well, we can all see it so clearly now. They are all wrong. Some are so old and so crooked that you can’t move around in them, you can’t drain them, you can’t light them. Some are so tall and so congested that you can’t see out of them and the sun can’t get into them. Dr. Alexis Carrel said that soon human beings wouldn’t be able to live in New York. I can’t already.
All the streets in all the cities are too narrow. Yet the queer thing is they’ve been making them wider and wider for centuries. When Peter Kalm came to Montreal in 1749, he spoke of the beautiful wide streets — and he meant it — and he was talking of the old French town at that — St. James Street, Notre Dame and St. Paul. They were certainly wide as compared with what he knew in Europe — streets with names that sound like Rue des Anges, Rue des Saints, and in England, Pump Court and Brick Alley.
When Governor Simcoe laid out Yonge Street in Toronto, he made it wide, hopelessly too wide, they said. Go and look at it now. It’s that little path that runs north through the middle of the city; look close and you’ll see it. Wider and wider they built them; St. Catherine’s Road below the Montreal mountain farms was spaciousness itself. Three buggies could pass abreast. The only towns that built streets wide enough were the towns that never grew. I know a place in Missouri — it’s called Centre Something — where the street (there is only one) is so wide that it’s too wide to cross. People live either on one side or the other. I remember that when I lectured there they asked me which side I’d like to lecture to. The rest of that town is railway tracks, great belts of them. Centre Something doesn’t need to rebuild; only to wait.
So there we see already Lesson Number One in city planning. Look far enough ahead; no short sight this time.
But the only trouble is that it is so hard to see what’s ahead. Hence what I want to do in this discussion is to show where the difficulties lie rather than to hope to solve them. For example — the first insuperable difficulty — will there be cities at all? Already in England the bombing of industrial cities has led to the decentralization of industry — putting the factories out in the country. Some people are saying that they’ll never come back. Why should they? With telephones, everybody can talk to everybody; air travel lands anybody anywhere (or nowhere) in a few minutes; goods and material move more easily in decentralized areas. As to the workers — bring them all along, into new homes, with the breath of the country in the back yards. The first time those fellows see a primrose, they’ll go crazy.
