Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 658
Cable
Secretary, League of Nations, Geneva.
Collect.
Regret to say that war with the Welsh practically out of question Stop Great interest international bagpipe competition Inverness keeps our people breathless Stop Apprehend war financially injurious to the interest Scotch International Aberdeen Terrier Show Stop
Aha! Notice that. The dogs, wiser than men, know nothing of our little quarrels. The Aberdeen terrier, an international character, wagging his tail in every quarter of the globe and holding his international show! We have to deal with him. So you see the Scotch, much though they would like to get into this business, are held back. Their cable ends:
Suggest you apply instead Japanese Bureau of Oriental Love Stop But send us that Loan Anyway Stop
Again I would not wish to be disparaging of the League of Nations. Everybody says it is a good thing, and it must be. Some day, if we live long enough, we shall see it in real operation. And it is not the fault of the League; it is the fault of us, its ‘unseen assassins,’ as Norman Angell calls us. There can never be a league of nations, there can never be any institution, until there is a spirit outside which sanctions and maintains it, a spirit which corresponds to it. And the world is not yet ready for that.
But even then it is well to keep the form, perhaps, while still the substance is lacking. Let us be like Pygmalion and have the statue first and put the right spirit into our Galatea afterwards, and let the League at any rate stand for an aspiration of the future.
Of course, mind you, when I say that we, each and all of us, are working against the common welfare, perhaps you do not realize how much there is, how many small minor annoyances in which all Americans sneer at all Englishmen or all Englishmen sneer at all Americans.
You remember that famous character of Alphonse Daudet’s, Tartarin of Tarascon, that mock-hero of southern France filled with the meridional spirit. You recall how it was rumoured that he was, after all his tall talk, not going to Africa to hunt the lions, and there was a mob collected around his house to mock at him, and Tartarin, facing the crowd, threw himself up into one of his noble postures and said— ‘Des coups d’épée, messieurs, mais pas de coups d’épingles!’ (‘Strike me with a sword if you like, but not with pinpricks.’) It is the pinpricks very often that are the major offence.
I have gathered here (as Exhibit No. 4) some little extracts that were actually taken from the press, just coloured a little, not much, and they — well, sometimes truth is not good enough, and half the truth is better, just as half a brick carries further in an argument than a whole one. I have gathered together specimens of those pleasing little comments that pass back and forth across the Atlantic, in which some English traveller comes out here, takes a look for a week, let us say, at our education, and then denounces it. You see if he had approved it that wouldn’t be news. News has to be dirty and disagreeable. Happiness is never news, only misfortune.
Well, you get this kind of thing: Extract from the New York Press:
NEW YORK, SUCH AND SUCH A DATE
DENOUNCES AMERICAN EDUCATION
Mr. Farquhar McSquirt, who holds a high position in the kindergarten department of the Scottish Orphan Asylum at Dumn Foolish, landed yesterday from the ‘Moratorium’ on a tour of American and Canadian schools and at once uttered a scathing denunciation of education on this continent. He considers that the whole system of education in America is punk. He admits the pupils attend school, but denies that they learn anything. He considers that the average boy of twelve in the Orkney Islands knows more than a graduate of Harvard.
So he may, perhaps. It wouldn’t hurt him.
The American student, he says, has never learned to think, whereas the Scotch boy begins to think soon after he learns to talk
Well, he goes on with half a column of that kind of thing. And then of course, when he has said all that, half a dozen college presidents have to be called up to know whether that is so. And then they say, in denying it, that they ‘have not the honour of knowing Mr. McSquirt personally,’ etc. — That is the dirtiest thing you can say about any man. If you want to get after a person good and hard, just say you don’t know him, personally — never heard of him.
However, before they have time to wipe it all up, the account is balanced from the other side, from London. Thus:
DENOUNCES OXFORD
Mr. Phineas Q. Cactus, TQ, PF, president and principal of the Texas Agricultural Institute for Feeble-Minded Navajo Indians, uttered a scathing denunciation of the University of Oxford. He says that after a man leaves Oxford he is fit for nothing except the House of Lords, or the church, or the bar. He claims that the average Oxford professor would make only a poor showing as a cowboy in Texas.
But of course the most cruel denunciation is when they start at our women. Now, there you touch us where we live! When any outsider dares for a moment to criticize our English women, or our American women, then we rise, the whole nation solid in a lump. Listen to this:
DENOUNCES AMERICAN GIRLS
Lady Violet Longshanks, a direct descendant of Edward I in the male line, landed yesterday from the ‘Rule Britannia’ and at once gave an interview to the press which has practically jarred society off its hinges. Lady Violet who represents the ‘haut ton’ of the oldest ‘noblesse’ and is absolutely ‘carte blanche,’ gave expression to a scathing denunciation of the American Girl. She declares that the American Girl has no manners, doesn’t know how to enter a room, still less how to get out again when she is in, and doesn’t even know how to use her feet.
Well, that is awful! So, naturally, of course, the press send out warm tokens of assurance to the effect that the American girl will use her feet if Lady Violet doesn’t get a move on back to England.
Then back comes a similar denunciation from the other side:
DENOUNCES ENGLISH GIRLS
Mrs. Potter Pancake, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, President of the American Women’s International Friendship League, has just jarred English society off its base by a denunciation handed out from the window of her hotel against English girls. Mrs. Pancake says the English girl is without grace and her movements inferior to those of a horse. She attributes this to the fact that the English girl drinks gin in inordinate quantities.
Well, of course, when you get to that, that might lead to a serious situation, but in England they have one or two old-fashioned remedies that can always be brought out to put oil on the troubled waters. For instance, somebody can ask a question in the House of Commons. Just why they do it, or what the questions mean, I don’t know, but in this connection, of course, somebody would probably have risen up and asked whether ‘ministers’ — they never use the definite article there — Students of language please take notice of this queer old-fashioned habit — whether ministers are aware that English girls are less graceful than a horse. The answer to this question, it seems, is that ministers are not aware, but will bring a horse and a girl, and see.
But better still, in any dilemma, of course, we can appeal to the Primate of the Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and it is a part of his functions, carried down since Edward the Confessor, to say something soothing, something that, without giving offence, leaves the whole thing — well, this is what he said in this case, that he had yet to know of any English girl drinking gin in what he considered inordinate quantities.
So there you have the press. One wonders, how can the world stand up against this tidal wave of minor annoyances? How can the barriers between the nations, the ramparts that have to be levelled to an open plain of friendship — how can they ever be abandoned if there must always be the need of repelling these invidious attacks?
Then as soon as the press run short of these personal denunciations, the military experts step in with another set of interviews, this time about the character of the next war. To give it the proper thrill of interest they refer to it as the next ‘World War.’ It is understood that everybody will want to get into it on one side or the other. The only difficulty the experts find is with the alignment. That means who fights who. It is one of the most important things about a world war to get it properly ‘aligned,’ because if it’s not it runs out on you after a few years. The last war, it appears, was badly aligned. We ought to have given the Germans the Portuguese and lent them at least some of the Chinese. Properly aligned, it would have been going on still.
Hence the importance of alignment for the next World War. Here for example is, in substance, an interview given recently to the New York press, by Colonel the Honourable Fizzle Bungspark, a member of the British general staff, and, as everybody knows, a son of Lord Angletoad — in fact, so far, nobody has ever doubted it.
The colonel [writes the interviewer] is confident that in the next World War (which may begin in the spring), the most probable alignment is Great Britain, France and the United States against Germany and Russia; but he thinks it might be Great Britain, Russia and Germany against France, the United States and Portugal. On the other hand, the colonel admits that if the Chinese wish to come in it would be scarcely possible to keep them out. The Chinese, he says, have practically reached the level of a Christian nation. Their knowledge of poison gas is as yet a little inferior, but they will rapidly be able to take their place on an honourable footing in the coming contest.
After the sensation over the Colonel has died down a little, there lands in New York a great French Air Expert, and another interview follows, this time not on alignment but on matériel. This is the French word that means what they hit you with.
General le Marquis de Rochambeau LaFayette, director in chief of the French Aerial Forces, was interviewed yesterday as to the prospects of world peace. The General, whose name is Charles Marie Felix Rochambeau LaFayette de Liancourt, belongs to the old ‘noblesse’ of France and is a cultivated French gentleman of the old school, a veteran of seven wars, decorated with the ‘croix de guerre,’ the ‘croix de feu,’ the ‘nom de plume’ and the ‘cri de Paris.’ He thinks the next war will begin or perhaps be preceded by blowing up New York from the air. ‘The skyscrapers and hotels’ he said, ‘will offer an admirable ‘point de mire,’ but he is afraid it will be hard to hit the churches, unless more space is cleared around them. But the public streets and squares will offer plenty of targets.
That’s good! And yet somehow I don’t like this target business! It gives one the jumps. It seems to mean that, in the next war, we, we ourselves, get blown up — right here! Now that’s ridiculous!
The old, old wars were so safe, so far away, so romantic. A hundred years ago an expedition sailed away to God-knows-where. The band played and they went away, and then presently they came back from God-knows-where, looking a little bewhiskered and brown, but they had licked somebody somewhere, and everything was grand! And then war began to get a little nearer and a little nearer and to take a heavier and heavier toll, and now they actually propose to drop the bombs on us. That makes me think it is time to quit the war business.
But that isn’t the whole of it.
We have got a new and first-class implement of war all forged in the new mechanism of publicity. If there is a war, we are going to have the hideous, gloating satisfaction of following, as we can now in unhappy Spain, every stage of slaughter and holocaust — gloating, exulting, with all the worst that is in us, reading, with that kind of half-hidden delight, of the horrors and misfortunes that go with war. In the old times some kind of shield and shelter, some kind of darkness, hung over those black spots. When Saragossa was torn, as Madrid is now, the world knew nothing of it at the moment. When Napoleon’s army froze and suffered in the snow, the world did not see it with television, as it will when the next great army goes under. For now we have got already, or will have for the next war, a hideous commercial instrument of money-making that will sell us the sight of the war, day by day, and agony by agony.
It is not the fault of anyone. What I am trying to say is that humanity has now been caught up by forces for which no single person is to blame — not the capitalist, not the Socialist, not even all together. What the Greeks called Ananke, the fate of man. But whereas the Greek submitted to Ananke and let himself be borne along, like Œdipus, by fate, we have learned a different attitude; and I think we won’t suffer it for ever, but we shall manage, somehow, to bend ourselves into a different direction and alter our fate.
But I am not saying the fault is that of any one person or country or any particular creed. It is a huge collective fault, and with it goes that strange thing ‘publicity’ by which war will be turned into money.
Let us suppose they had had publicity in the wars of the past, that everything came over the radio as it happened. Let us imagine that when Duke William of Normandy went across the Channel to invade England, the radio followed him and could send back the news to a Norman castle, and they could tune in and hear what was happening at Stamford Bridge and Senlac Hill and how the battle was going.
Carry yourselves with me to a Norman castle. It is the castle, let us say, of a Norman knight who has gone with William of Normandy. We are in the castle of Count Guesshard de Discard, one of the companions of William. Count Guesshard has gone, but his wife, Lady Margaret of the Rubber Neck, and her beautiful daughter, Lady Angela of the Angle Eye, are there. They are supposed, by an anachronism, to have a radio there and they are tuning in to try and get some word of what is happening over at the Battle of Hastings.
It is difficult at first. When they try to tune in they strike a Welsh Bard — as you would now. The bards are not like the good; they don’t die young. But after having tried in vain, Lady Margaret and Lady Angela twist the dials on this mediaeval instrument in their bower. (That means something like a stone cow-stable, what the historians call a ‘tapestried bower.’ It is, as I say, like a stone cow-stable with old cloth hung up; no glass windows, and rushes and dirt on the floor.) But by anachronism there is a beautiful radio at the side, to skip ten centuries for them, and thus they tune in; and then the voice of the announcer, sounding just the same a thousand years ago as it does now:
Announcer: Now, folks, this is Senlac Hill, and we’re going to put a real battle on the air for you, and it’s going to be some battle. The principals are Harold, King of England — lift your helmet, Harold — and William, the Dook, or, as some call him, the Duck, of Normandy. Both the boys are much of a size, both trained down to weight, and each has got with him as nice a bunch of knights and archers as you’d see east of Pittsburgh. Umpires are: for Harold, the Reverend Allbald of the Soft Head, Archbishop of Canterbury; for William, Odo the Ten-Spot, Bishop of Bayeux. Side lines, Shorty Sigismund and Count Felix Marie du Pâté de Foie Gras. Referee, King Swatitoff of Sweden, ex-Champion of the Scandinavian League. Battle called at exactly ten a.m. They’re off. The Norman boys make a rush for the hill. Harold’s centre-forwards shoot arrows at them. William leads a rush at the right centre. Attaboy, William! That’s the stuff! Harold’s boys block the rush. Two Norman knights ruled off for interference. William hurls his mace. Forward Pass. Ten-year penalty. Quarter time.
The radio stops.
Lady Margaret: How terrifically exciting! Do you think we are winning?
Lady Angela: It is very hard to tell. I’ve often heard Papa say that in the first quarter of a battle they don’t really get warmed up.
The radio starts.
Announcer: Battle of Senlac. Second Quarter. Change of Ground. Duke William has won the west end. The Normans make a rush against the left centre. Hand-to-hand scrimmage with Harold’s front line. Many knights unhorsed and out of the game. Several men hurt on both sides. Count Guesshard de Discard receives a crack on the bean with a mace.
Lady Angela: Oh, Mamma, Papa got one on the bean.
Lady Margaret (Laughing): He certainly did. I can just see your papa’s face when someone landed him one!
Lady Angela: What happens to you, Mamma, if Papa gets knocked out?
Lady Margaret (Looking at her little steel mirror): I don’t know, but I think Cousin William is to give me to one of his knights.
And if you think that exaggerated, oh, no, that isn’t it. Not at all!
Announcer: Second half of the game —
And just then the radio, even in 1066, suddenly got full of static, and only static, and when they get it going again, the battle is all over and the announcer is saying:
The foul Saxon, Harold, lies dead across the fifty-yard line with his whole centre scrimmage dead round him. Spectators leaving in all directions in great haste. The noble William is everywhere victorious. Norman crowd invading the club house. Number of injured and dead knights being piled up at the side of the field. Among the dead are Count Roger the Sardine, Count Felix Marie du Pâté de Foie Gras, the Seneschal Pilaffe de Volatile and Count Guesshard de Discard.
Lady Angela: Ah, do you hear that, Mamma? Odd’s life, Papa’s killed. That must have been that smack on the bean. I had a notion that Papa would get it, hadn’t you?
Lady Margaret (Picking up the little steel mirror again and adjusting her cap): Oh, I was sure of it. A juggler prophesied it to me last Whitsuntide. I wonder which of the knights Count William will give me to. Isn’t war exciting, darling?
Oh, yes, and still is — still is. But in those days on such a different footing — on such a very different footing — from what it is now.
So here you have, as far as I can give it in that kind of picture, some notion of the two forces between which humanity is torn. Fortunately there are, though less spectacular, enormous forces moving the other way — economic forces, forces which are beginning to insist that the world economically and physically is all one, that the old days when a valley made a nation and a river separated two peoples and the world was broken by its own geography, that that is finished, and that modern power and modern flight and the whispering currents that pass everywhere — those uniting forces and the forces of disunion are locked in a deadly struggle.
