Delphi complete works of.., p.362
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 362
‘Soldier, soldier, will you marry me, With your knapsack, fife and drum?’
And he sings back, miserable fellow:
‘Oh no, my pretty maid, I can’t marry now, For I haven’t got a shirt to put on.’
So the pretty housemaid gives the soldier a shirt and sings again for matrimony. But the soldier sings back for boots...and then for a hat, and so on endlessly. If there was an end, a final gift, it was not one for the nursery to hear.
After popular ballads had had their crack at the soldier, the comic poetry of the day took its turn in laughing at him Here is Tom Hood, England’s comic poet par excellence:
‘Ben Battle was a soldier bold
And used to war’s alarms,
But a cannon ball took off his legs,
And he laid down his arms’
It appears that Ben Battle had ‘left his legs in Badajoz’s breeches,’ an amusing memory of the fun of the Peninsular War. This may perhaps have been mere superficial laughter without malice. But there is a certain underlying meaning in it. An old soldier was taken for granted as a pauper, an object of charity. People may still recall the game, ‘Here comes an old soldier to town, pray what will you give him?’
All that represents not what the British soldier was really like, but the character that the Victorian generations insisted on fastening on him. Kipling never wrote truer lines than the ones in which he speaks of the treatment of Mr. Thomas Atkins at the hands of his fellow-citizens:
‘I went into a public house to get a glass of beer, The publican, he up and say: “We don’t serve soldiers ’ere.” For it’s “Tommy this” and “Tommy that” and “chuck ’im out, the brute!—” But it’s thin red line of heroes when the guns begin to shoot.’
The British public ever since early Victoria days, and, indeed, for a century more or less before that, has always looked on soldiers of the ranks in that same way. In time of peace it resents their existence, deplores their low morals, and at first threat of war suddenly discovers that they are the ‘nation’s defenders,’ the ‘boys in blue, or in khaki’ or the ‘thin red line of heroes’ — made thin, no doubt, by low feeding in peace time. When the war ends they are welcomed home under arches of flowers, with all the girls leaping for their necks — and within six months they are expected to vanish into thin air, keep out of the public-houses and give no trouble.
This attitude is all the more strange as contrasted with the typical British attitude towards the ‘sailor.’ Fact, fiction and fancy have enveloped the British sailor with qualities as endearing as those of Mr. Thomas Atkins are, supposedly, offensive and discreditable. The sailor is a ‘Jolly Jack Tar’ — the more tar on him the better. It is his business to be perpetually drunk and ‘to take his Nancy on his knee’ — the same Nancy who, as a housemaid, won’t walk out with Mr. Atkins because she ‘doesn’t hold with soldiers.’ But the Jack Tar stuff gets the girls every time. In return, they are supposed to take all his money, clean his pockets out and when it’s all gone, send him off to sea again. The Jolly Jack Tar is supposed to have ‘a wife in every port,’ but if Tommy Atkins in barracks ever ventures on having a Mary or two, there’s a terrible fuss about it.
Think of all our ballads, poetry and songs that exalt the life of a sailor:
‘In No. 9, Old Richmond Square,
Mark well what I do say
My Nancy Dawson, she lives there,
She is a maiden passing fair,
With bright blue eyes and golden hair,
But I’ll go no more a-ro-o-ving
For you, fair maid.’
Turn on the gramophone of recollection and over it comes a mingled melody of ballads in exaltation of the sailor and the sea— ‘Stretch every stitch of canvas, boys, to catch the flowing wind’. ‘Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main, Full many a stormy wind shall blow ere Jack comes home again.’
And as the sounds die lower and fainter one seizes among them the requiem of the dead, the dirge for the sailors claimed by the sea:
‘Here’s to the health of poor Tom Bowling,
The darling of the crew!
No more he’ll hear the wind a-rolling
For death hath broached him to!’
How deep the sounds echo and reverberate like the boom of the sea itself.
And all this — this national tribute of romance, of affection, of gratitude, how much has the soldier? Little, mighty little — at least in life. Our poets, apart from Kipling, always sing of his death, never of his life.
‘Half a league, half a league, half a league onward.
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs but to do or die.’
Exactly. Theirs not to make any trouble! Neither in life, nor in death.
Students of literature will think to contradict me by reminding us of odd notes that sound in our poetry in praise of the soldier’s life. Here’s Shakespeare. He always is, right on the spot. Is it Iago singing? I forget.
‘Then clink to the cannikin, clink,
Why shouldn’t a soldier drink?
For life’s but a span, so enjoy it who can,
And clink to the cannikin, clink.’
But better students of literature will tell us that this apparent exception proves the rule. Such drinking songs as these are meant to show what a wicked fellow the soldier is, how essentially without serious thought of a future life — in short, hell for him.
To understand this attitude we have to look back into history. The English, historically speaking, always hated ‘soldiers,’ ‘paid men,’ as the word literally means, men hired to kill instead of fighting for anger’s sake. An Englishman could look after himself; his house was his castle. There were no regular soldiers in England till Charles II, as said above, kept over some of Cromwell’s standing army as a permanent force (the Coldstream Guards, etc.). William of Orange added to it. But, even with that, the power to keep an army was granted by Parliament so grudgingly that it went on only from year to year. The Supply Act only granted money, and the Mutiny Act only sanctioned discipline by legislation renewed every year. Without that, the army would come to a full stop for want of pay, and the officer’s authority vanish for want of legal sanction. Without the renewal of the act, if an officer said, ‘Eyes right!’ the soldier might answer, ‘Don’t disturb me; I’m looking at something pretty good.’ This was true, in all peace time, up to the advent of the present war.
So the unhappy soldier had to pay for the sins of an evil profession. His treatment and his pay reflected this so late as the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign, the soldier lived in barracks without heat or ventilation; slept two, and even four, in a bed and was swept off by disease like vermin. There was little public heed of it. There were so many paupers and people of despair in the ‘Merry England’ of a century ago that recruits were always findable; the Queen’s shilling could keep pace with Death.
The Victorian soldier’s pay was twopence halfpenny a day, but there were so many odd charges and deductions at the start that a recruit might not get any pay at all for four months. The soldier lived under a savage code of flogging and punishment. He got no education. Before the Board schools of 1870 most soldiers could not read or write. The recruit was given (after 1829) a little record book (which he could not read) with a sample name in it — Thomas Atkins. That stood for him. Later he turned it to glory.
Thus a soldier was supposed to be a disreputable sort of person, whose aim in life was to get housemaids ‘into trouble.’ Soldiers, not officers! That was entirely different. Just as common soldiers had too little, so officers had too much in the long stretches of Victorian peace. These were days before modern inventiveness had turned an officer’s life into industry and algebra. An officer in between wars was supposed to do nothing — except to go to lawn parties, hunts, drags — God knows what — I forget the names of their entertainments — and accept the role of the pampered darling of the ladies. Every now and then there came along a ‘little war,’ and thither the officer went to play his part with infinite courage and no algebra; conquered the natives till they said, ‘Quit!’ then taught them how to play cricket.
How the times have changed! One thinks now of European expansion, and the expansions imitated from it, as one vast horror of flaming gas and tearing detonations — how different it waswhen Quanko Sambo, laying down his assegai, took up a cricket bat to develop his marvellous native ability at a cut to the off, and his permanent native inability to stand firm against a fast leg break...Of the ‘little wars’ of the time of which I speak, were the Abyssinian and the Ashanti, and the second Afghan and the first Boer — all of that enough and plenty, if all mixed with a period of service in India to give the officer his right to tea and muffins and the favour of the fair sex in the intervening intervals of leisure; enough to rank him above the curate, the doctor, the lawyer and the banker; the ‘business men’ they were not yet respectable. The officers, all feathers and whiskers, ruled the roost.
But, oddly enough, the reasoning that created the social esteem of the officer was not applied to Mr. Thomas Atkins. He was in all the wars, big or little, just as much as his officer — but he got no thanks for it at home. I think one reason was that in the ‘Victorian’ period of peace from Waterloo to the Crimea — there was, literally, a generation who went into the army as young men after 1815 and served a whole lifetime, from subalterns to colonels, and never heard a shot fired except blank cartridges at a review. And here was a corresponding British public — the public of Charles Dickens’s time, who had grown to forget war, who were absolutely removed from all possibility of invasion or civil war, who could not foresee in fancy the days of falling bombs — such a nation, sunk in the utter security of peace, sunk, by millions, in the utter hopelessness of poverty, what could they know or realize of soldiers? Soldiers! To the working men of the Chartist days, soldiers meant the men with guns called out to shoot down workmen in the massacre of Peterloo (1819). Soldiers, Yah! just a butcher with a red-coat. Honestly, ever so many workmen in England felt like that in the period of Victorian Peace. And officers! to the plain people, outside of society, great and small — officers, just fuss and feathers, India and hot curry!
Turn over the pages of Punch, which began its life as a radical paper of protest and grew with years to the mellowness of saddened wisdom — and there you will see the officer and the soldier, in their Victorian feathers and in their Victorian ‘pubs.’
No pages reflect this attitude more than the volumes of Charles Dickens, a repository of social history. Dickens had, with all his genius, the narrow short sight of his day and class, sentimental tears for poverty but no vision to remove it except by inviting everybody to be as noble a fellow as himself. War to Dickens was needless and silly; foreigners, comic people, who lacked stability; officers, fops; soldiers, loafers. Here and there, I admit, are bright exceptions (for I know my Dickens as a Scottish divine knows his Bible); I can recall, of course, Mr. Bagshot and Trooper George. But speaking by and large, the whole military art was, to Dickens, either needless or comic. Witness the famous Chatham review in Pickwick, or the stock figure of the ‘recruiting sergeant,’ as in Barnaby Rudge and elsewhere — the Sergeant with the King’s shilling — an engine of temptation and corruption to the young — seducing young men into ‘going for a soldier’.’
It was only as the old standing army was passing away, at the close of the century, to give place to the new Nation under Arms, that the ‘soldier’ began to come into his own...The South African War rediscovered Thomas Atkins as a ‘Soldier of the Queen,’ and sang invocations to him, ‘as a good ‘un heart and hand, as a credit to his calling and to all his native land.’ But before the change had time to be more than begun the Great War of 1914 swept away the foolish complacency of Victorian Britain and set in a true light the values that had been disregarded.
But why — as the comedians say — why rake all that up now? So that we’ll know better next time.
LITERARY STUDIES II - THE MATHEMATICAL PROBLEM OF THE LOST CHORD
EVERYONE IS FAMILIAR with the melodious yet melancholy song of the Lost Chord. It tells us how, seated one day at the piano, weary, alone and sad, the player let his fingers roam idly over the keys, when suddenly, strangely, he ‘struck one chord which echoed like the sound of a Great Amen.’
But he could never find it again. And ever since then there has gone up from myriad pianos the mournful laments for the Lost Chord. Ever since then, and this happened eighty years ago, wandering fingers search for the Lost Chord. No musician can ever find it.
But the trouble with musicians is that they are too dreamy, too unsystematic. Of course they could never find the Lost Chord by letting their fingers idly roam over the keys. What is needed is method, such as is used in mathematics every day. So where the musician fails let the mathematician try. He’ll find it. It’s only a matter of time.
The mathematician’s method is perfectly simple — a matter of what he calls Permutations and Combinations — in other words, trying out all the Combinations till you get the right one.
He proposes to sound all the Combinations that there are, listen to them, and see which is the Great Amen. Of course a lot of the combinations are not chords at all. They would agonize a musician. But the mathematician won’t notice any difference. In fact the only one he would recognize is Amen itself, because it’s the one when you leave church.
He first calculates how many chords he can strike in a given time. Allowing time for striking the chord, listening to it and letting it die away, he estimates that he can strike one every fifteen seconds, or four to a minute, two hundred and forty to an hour. Working seven hours a day with Sundays off and a half day off on Saturday and a short vacation (at a summer school in mathematics), he reaches the encouraging conclusion that if need be — if he didn’t find the Chord sooner — he could sound as many as half a million chords within a single year!
The next question is how many combinations there are to strike. The mournful piano player would have sat strumming away for ever and never have thought that out. But it’s not hard to calculate. A piano has fifty-two white notes and thirty-six black. The player can make a combination by striking ten at a time (with all his fingers and thumbs), or any less number down to two at a time. Moreover he can, if a trained player, strike any ten, adjacent or distant. Even if he has to strike notes at the extreme left and in the middle and at the extreme right all in the same combination, he does it by rapidly sweeping his left hand towards the right, or his right towards the left. There is a minute fraction between the initial strokes of certain notes, but not enough to prevent them sounding together as a combination.
This makes the calculation simplicity itself. It merely means calculating the total combinations of eighty-eight things, taken two at a time, three at a time and so on up to ten at a time.
The combinations, 2 notes at a time, are: 88 * 87 / 1 * 2 = 3,828
For 3 at a time: 88 * 87 * 86 / 1 * 2 * 3 = 109,736
For 4 at a time: 88 * 87 * 86 * 85 / 1 * 2 * 3 * 4 = 2,331,890
For 5 at a time: 88 * 87 * 86 * 85 * 84 / 1 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 = 39,175,750
For 6 at a time: 88 * 87 * 86 * 85 * 84 * 83 / 1 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 6 = 541,931,236
For 7 at a time: 88 * 87 * 86 * 85 * 84 * 83 * 82 / 1 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 6 * 7 = 6,348,337,336
For 8 at a time: 88 * 87 * 86 * 85 * 84 * 83 * 82 * 81 / 1 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 6 * 7 * 8 = 64,276,915,527
For 9 at a time: 88 * 87 * 86 * 85 * 84 * 83 * 82 * 81 * 80 / 1 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 6 * 7 * 8 * 9 = 571,350,360,240
For 10 at a time: 88 * 87 * 86 * 85 * 84 * 83 * 82 * 81 * 80 * 79 / 1 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 6 * 7 * 8 * 9 * 10 = 4,513,667,845,896
For all combinations: 5,156,227,011,439
This gives us then an honest straight-forward basis on which to start the search. The player setting out at his conscientious pace of half a million a year has the consoling feeling that he may find the Great Amen first shot, and at any rate he’s certain to find it in 10,000,000 years.
It’s a pity that the disconsolate players were so easily discouraged. The song was only written eighty years ago; they’ve hardly begun. Keep on, boys.
LITERARY STUDIES III - THE PASSING OF THE KITCHEN
I HAVE A friend in my home town in front of whose modest house on the highway appeared a little while ago the sign ‘Tourists.’ Meeting him casually, I asked, ‘How are you getting on with the tourist trade? Are you getting any?’ ‘Fine,’ he answered. ‘You see, it’s all in the way you treat them. Tourists come to the house and we show them up to their bedroom, and after a while the wife goes up and says, “Now you come right down to the kitchen. That’s the place for you.”’
With which, as my text, I will venture to assert that the kitchen is, and has been for generations and centuries, the most human part of any establishment.
Personally, like all my ageing generation, from actual experience I know what a kitchen used to mean. In the Canadian country setting in which I was brought up sixty years ago, the kitchen was par excellence ‘the room’ of the house. It was the only room with any size to it and the only room where it was always warm. A kitchen stove well filled with split hemlock maintained a heat of anything from 100 Fahrenheit to about 1000 Centigrade. You regulated the heat you wanted by the distance you sat from it. I am told that a kitchen of to-day can be regulated to an even 70 degrees by automatic stoking that is done in the cellar. On the other hand, we had the fun of moving our chairs backwards and forwards. These old kitchens when the farmhouses were laid out were practically the one room of the house. The others were just small spaces built off it. Later on, as the farmers got richer — or no, I don’t quite mean that, as they got a little further into debt — they added a room called the ‘parlour.’ This was a swell room with an oilcloth on the floor and what was called an ‘organ’, on which the girls of the family learned to play ‘Pull for the Shore, Sailor.’ But the ‘parlour’ proved a false start — it was too good for daily occupation; so after a while it was used only for funerals, and the kitchen came into its own again.
