The Once and Future King (#1-4) by T. H. White
Merlyn leaned back in his chair, put his finger—tips together, and cleared his throat.
‘The first thing,’ he said, ‘which we must do before considering examples, is to define the subject. What is War? War, I take it, may be defined as an aggressive use of might between collections of the same species. It must be between collections, for otherwise it is mere assault and battery. An attack of one mad wolf upon a pack of wolves would not be war. And then again, it must be between members of the same species. Birds preying on locusts, cats preying on mice, or even tunny preying on herrings – that is, fish of one species preying upon fish of another – none of these are true examples of war. Thus we see that there are two essentials: that the combatants should be of the one family, and that they should be of a gregarious family. We can therefore begin by dismissing all animals which are not gregarious, before we search for examples of warfare in nature. Having done that, we find ourselves left with large numbers of animals such as starlings, minnows, rabbits, bees, and thousands of others. Upon beginning our search for warfare among these, however, we find a dearth of examples. How many animals can you think of, which take concerted aggressive action against groups of their own species?’
Merlyn waited two seconds for the old man to answer, and continued with his lecture.
‘Exactly. You were about to mention a few insects, man, various microbes or blood corpuscles – if these can be said to be of the same species – and then you would have been at a loss. The gross immorality of warfare is, as I mentioned before, an oddity in nature. We sit down, therefore, relieved by this fortunate coincidence of a bundle of data which might have proved too bulky, and we examine the special peculiarities of those species which do engage in hostilities. What do we find? Do we find, as badger’s famous communists would postulate, that it is the species which owns individual property that fights? On the contrary, we find that the warfaring animals are the very ones which tend to limit or to banish individual possessions. It is the ants and bees, with their communal stomachs and territories, and the men, with their national property, who slit each other’s throats; while it is the birds, with their private wives, nests and hunting grounds, the rabbits with their own burrows and stomachs, the minnows with their individual homesteads, and the lyre—birds with their personal treasure houses and ornamental pleasure—grounds, who remain at peace. You must not despise mere nests and hunting grounds as forms of property: they are as much a form of property to the animals as a home and business is to man. And the important thing is that they are private property. The owners of private property in nature are pacific, while those who have invented public property go to war. This, you will observe, is exactly the opposite of the totalist doctrine.
‘Of course the owners of private property in nature are sometimes forced to defend their holdings against piracy by other individuals. This rarely results in bloodshed, and men themselves need not fear it, because our king has already persuaded them to adopt the principle of a police force.
‘But you want to object that perhaps the link which binds the warfaring animals together is not the link of nationalism: perhaps they go to war for other reasons – because they are all manufacturers, or all owners of domestic animals, or all agriculturalists like some of the ants, or because they all have stores of food. I need not trouble you with a discussion of possibilities, for you must examine them for yourself. Spiders are the greatest of manufacturers, yet do no battle: bees have no domestic animals or agriculture, yet go to war: many ants who are belligerent have no stores of food. By some such mental process as this, as in finding out the Highest Common Factor in mathematics, you will end with the explanation which I have offered: an explanation which is, indeed, self—evident when you come to look at it. War is due to communal property, the very thing which is advocated by nearly all the demagogues who peddle what they call a New Order.
‘I have out—run my examples. We must return to the concrete instances, to examine the case. Let us look at a rookery.
‘Here is a gregarious animal like the ant, which lives together with its comrades in airy communities. The rookery is conscious of its nationalism to the extent that it will molest other rooks, from distant congeries, if they attempt to build in its own trees. The rook is not only gregarious but also faintly nationalistic. But the important thing is that it does not make any claim to national property in its feeding grounds. Any adjacent field that is rich in seed or worms will be frequented not only by the rooks of this community but also by those of all nearby communities, and, indeed, by the jackdaws and pigeons of the neighbourhood, without the outbreak of hostilities. The rooks, in fact, do not claim national property except to the minor extent of their nesting site, and the result is that they are free from the scourge of war. They agree to the obvious natural truth, that access to raw materials must be free to private enterprise.
‘Then turn to the geese: one of the oldest races, one of the most cultured, one of the best supplied with language. Admirable musicians and poets, masters of the air for millions of years without ever having dropped a bomb, monogamous, disciplined, intelligent, gregarious, moral, responsible, we find them adamant in their belief that the natural resources of the world cannot be claimed by any particular sect or family of their tribe. If there is a good bed of Zostera marina or a good field of stubble, there may be two hundred geese on it today, ten thousand tomorrow. In one skein of geese which is moving from feeding ground to resting place, we may find white—fronts mingled with pink—feet or grey—lags or even with the bernicles. The world is free to all. Yet do not suppose that they are communists. Each individual goose is prepared to assault his neighbour for the possession of a rotten potato, while their wives and nests are strictly private. They have no communal home or stomach, like the ants. And these beautiful creatures, who migrate freely over the whole surface of the globe without making claim to any part of it, have never fought a war.
‘It is nationalism, the claims of small communities to parts of the indifferent earth as communal property, which is the curse of man. The petty and drivelling advocates of Irish or Polish nationalism: these are the enemies of man. Yes, and the English, who fight a major war ostensibly for “the rights of small nations,” while erecting a monument to a woman who was martyred for the remark that patriotism was not good enough, these people can only be regarded as a collection of benevolent imbeciles conducted by bemused crooks. Nor is it fair to pick on the English or the Irish or the Poles. All of us are in it. It is the general idiocy of Homo impoliticus. Aye, and when I speak rudely of the English in this particular, I would like to add at once that I have lived among them during several centuries. Even if they are a collection of imbecile crooks, they are at least bemused and benevolent about it, which I cannot help thinking is preferable to the tyrannous and cynical stupidity of the Huns who fight against them. Make no mistake about that.’
‘And what,’ asked the badger politely, ‘is the practical solution?’
‘The simplest and easiest in the world. You must abolish such things as tariff barriers, passports and immigration laws, converting mankind into a federation of individuals. In fact, you must abolish nations, and not only nations but states also; indeed, you must tolerate no unit larger than the family. Perhaps it will be necessary to limit private incomes on a generous scale, for fear that very rich people might become a kind of nation in themselves. That the individuals should be turned into communists or anything else is quite unnecessary, however, and it is against the laws of nature. In the course of a thousand years we should hope to have a common language if we were lucky, but the main thing is that we must make it possible for a man living at Stonehenge to pack up his traps overnight and to seek his fortune without hindrance in Timbuktu…
‘Man might become migratory,’ he added as an afterthought, with some surprise.
‘But this would spell disaster!’ exclaimed the badger. ‘Japanese labour…Trade would be undercut!’
‘Fiddlesticks. All men h
‘But it would be the deathblow of civilization! It would lower the standard of living…’
‘Fudge. It would raise the coolie’s standard of living. If he is as good a man as you are in open competition, or a better one, good luck to him. He is the man we want. As for civilization, look at it.’
‘It would mean an economic revolution!’
‘Would you rather have a series of Armageddons? Nothing of value was ever yet got in this world, my badger, without being paid for.’
‘Certainly,’ agreed the badger suddenly, ‘it seems the thing to do.’
‘So there you have it. Leave man to his petty tragedy, if he prefers to embrace it, and look about you at two hundred and fifty thousand other animals. They, at any rate, with a few trifling exceptions, have political sense. It is a straight choice between the ant and the goose, and all our king will need to do, when he returns, will be to make their situation obvious.’
The badger, who was a faithful opponent to all kinds of exaggeration, objected strongly.
‘Surely,’ he said, ‘this is a piece of muddled thinking, to say that man may choose between the ants and the geese? In the first place man can be neither, and secondly, as we know, the ants are not unhappy as themselves.’
Merlyn covered his argument at once.
‘I should not have said so. It was a manner of speaking. Actually there are never more than two choices open to a species: either to evolve along its own lines of evolution, or else to be liquidated. The ants had to choose between being ants or being extinct, and the geese had to choose between extinction and being geese. It is not that the ants are wrong while the geese are right. Antism is right for ants and goosyness is right for geese. In the same way, man will have to choose between being liquidated and being manly. And a great part of being manly lies in the intelligent solution of these very problems of force, which we have been examining through the eyes of other creatures. That is what the king must try to make them see.’
Archimedes coughed and said, ‘Excuse me, Master, but is your backsight clear enough today, to tell us if he will succeed?’
Merlyn scratched his head and wiped his spectacles.
‘He will succeed in the end,’ he said eventually. ‘That I am certain of. Otherwise the race must perish like the American wood—pigeons, who, I may add, were considerably more numerous than the human family, yet became extinct in the course of a dozen years at the end of the nineteenth century. But whether it is to be this time or another is still obscure to me. The difficulty of living backwards and thinking forwards is that you become confused about the present. It is also the reason why one prefers to escape into the abstract.’
The old gentleman folded his hands upon his stomach, toasted his feet at the fire, and, reflecting upon his own predicament in Time, began to recite from one of his favourite authors.
‘I saw,’ he quoted, ‘the histories of mortal men of many different races being enacted before my eyes…Kings and queens and emperors and republicans and patricians and plebeians swept in reverse order across my view…Time rushed backward in tremendous panoramas. Great men died before they won their fame. Kings were deposed before they were crowned. Nero and the Borgias and Cromwell and Asquith and the Jesuits enjoyed eternal infamy and then began to earn it. My motherland…melted into barbaric Britain; Byzantion melted into Rome; Venice into Henetian Altino; Hellas into innumerable migrations. Blows fell; and then were struck.’
In the silence which succeeded this impressive picture, the goat returned to an earlier topic.
‘He is looking unhappy,’ said he, ‘whatever you may say.’
So they looked at the king for the first time since his return, and fell silent.
Chapter XVII
He was watching them with the feather in his hand. He held it out unconsciously, his fragment of beauty. He kept them off with it, as if it were a weapon to hold them back.
‘I am not going,’ he said. ‘You must find another ox to draw for you. Why have you brought me away? Why should I die for man when you speak of him contemptuously yourselves? For it would be death. It is all too true that people are ferocious and stupid. They have given me every sorrow but death. Do you suppose that they will listen to wisdom, that the dullard will understand and throw down his arms? No, he will kill me for it: kill me as the ants would have killed an albino.
‘And Merlyn,’ he cried, ‘I am afraid to die, because I have never had a chance to live! I never had a life of my own, nor time for beauty, and I had just begun to find it. You show me beauty, and snatch it from me. You move me like a piece at chess. Have you the right to take my soul and twist it into shapes, to rob a mind of its mind?
‘Oh, animals, I have failed you, I know. I have betrayed your trust. But I cannot face the collar again, because you have driven me into it too long. Why should I leave Lyó—lyok? I was never clever, but I was patient, and even patience goes. Nobody can bear it all his life.’
They did not dare to answer, could think of nothing to say.
His feeling of guilt and of love frustrated had made him wretched, so that now he had to rage in self—defence.
‘Yes, you are clever. You know the long words and how to juggle with them. If the sentence is a pretty one, you laugh and make it. But these are human souls you are cackling about, and it is my soul, the only one I have, which you have put in the index. And Lyó—lyok had a soul. Who made you into gods to meddle with destiny, or set you over hearts to bid them come and go? I will do this filthy work no longer; I will trouble with your filthy plans no further; I will go away into some quiet place with the goose—people, where I can die in peace.’
His voice broke down into that of an old and miserable beggar, as he threw himself back in the chair, covering his eyes with his hands.
The urchin was found to be standing in the middle of the floor. With his little, purplish fingers clenched into tight fists, with a truculent nose questing for opposition, breathing heavily, bristling with dead twigs, small, indignant, vulgar and flea—bitten, the hedgehog confronted the committee and faced them down.
‘Leave off, wullee?’ he demanded. ‘Stand back, carnt ’ee? Give ter lad fair play.’
And he placed his body sturdily between them and his hero, prepared to knock the first man down who interfered.
‘Ar,’ he said sarcastically. ‘A fine parcel of bougers, us do say. A fine picking o’ Bumtious Pilates, for to depose of Man. Gibble—gabble, gibble—gabble. But ding the mun as stirs is finger or us busts un’s bloudie neck.’
Merlyn protested miserably: ‘Nobody would have wished him to do anything that he did not want…’
The hedgehog walked up to him, put his twitching nose to within an inch of the magician’s spectacles, so that he drew back in alarm, and blew in his face.
‘Ar,’ he said. ‘Nobody wished nuthink never. Excepting for to remember as ’ee mighter wished suthink for ‘isself.’
Then he returned to the broken—hearted king, halting at a distance with tact and dignity, because of his fleas.
‘Nay, Mëaster,’ he said. ‘Tha hast been within too long. Let thee come art along of a nugly hurchin, that tha mayest sniff God’s air to thy nostrils, an lay thy head to the boozum o’ the earth.
‘Tëak no thought fer them bougers,’ he continued. ‘Lave ’un fer to argyfy theirselves inter the hy—stericks, that’ull plaze ’un. Let thee smell a peck of air wi’ ter humble mun, an have thy pleasure of the sky.’
Arthur held out his hand for the urchin’s, who gave it reluctantly, after wiping it on the prickles of his back.
‘He’m verminous,’ he explained regretfully, ‘but he’m honest.’
They went together to the door, where the hedgehog, turning round
‘Orryvoyer,’ he observed good—humouredly, regarding the committee with ineffable contempt. ‘Mind yer doant destroy ter universt afore as we comes back. No creating of another, mind.’
And he bowed sarcastically to the stricken Merlyn.
‘God ter Father.’
To the wretched Archimedes, who elongated himself, closed his eyes, and looked the other way.
‘God ter Son.’
To the imploring badger.
‘And God ter Holy Post.’
Chapter XVIII
There is nothing so wonderful as to be out on a spring night in the country; but really in the latest part of night, and, best of all, if you can be alone. Then, when you can hear the wild world scamper, and the cows chewing just before you tumble over them, and the leaves living secretly, and the nibblings and grass pluckings and the blood’s tide in your own veins: when you can see the loom of trees and hills in deeper darkness and the stars twirling in their oiled grooves for yourself: when there is one light in one cottage far away, marking a sickness or an early riser upon a mysterious errand: when the horse hoofs with squeaking cart behind plod to an unknown market, dragging their bundled man, in sacks, asleep: when the dogs’ chains rattle at the farms, and the vixen yelps once, and the owls have fallen silent: then is a grand time to be alive and vastly conscious, when all else human is unconscious, homebound, bed—sprawled, at the mercy of the midnight mind.
The wind had dropped to rest. The powdery stars expanded and contracted in the serene, making a sight which would have jingled, if it had been a sound. The great tor which they were climbing rose against the sky, a mirk of majesty, like a horizon which aspired.
The little hedgehog, toiling from tussock to tussock, fell into the marshy puddles with grunts, panted as he struggled with the miniature cliffs. The weary king gave him a hand at the worst places, hoisting him into a better foothold or giving him a shove behind, noticing how pathetic and defenceless his bare legs looked from the back.