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Authors: Anthony Burgess
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took four thousand Turks. Some of them were parolemen of Gaza. None could be fed, none could be freed. The field officer said from caked lips:
“But I promised quarter. It was the condition of their surrender.”
“On whose authority?”
“I assumed—”
“Never assume in war.” And, after two days of discussion with his staff, he strode up and down, boots softly crunching, a fluent parcel of red and shadow in the night-fires. “Anything, some have said, but that to which we are, I am, ineluctably led. We freed the Gaza prisoners and they considered it weakness. Djezzar Pasha and his friend Sir Sidney Smith are watching. What would Djezzar Pasha do if he took four thousand Frenchmen? What, in fact, has he done, or encouraged to be done, to the Greeks they hold in the bondage of terror? I need not answer. He fights with the British but he fights in his own way.” He was puzzled at the image of a kind of French savant he knew of, a cousin of Paul Barras, a gross-bellied man in a madhouse. What was his name? “We have to decide now how to execute a regrettable duty, putting out of our minds the humane philosophies on which our Revolution is based, thinking only, as soldiers should, of the technic or method.” A man full of dreams of slaughter and earthquakes, frotting his yard with glee as he dreamed. “So how? Split the entire corpus into forty centuries, conducting each century without the walls for an entire infantry company to dispatch with ordered rifle-fire. The task could be completed in a day.”
An anonymous deputy aide started to retch.
“Take that officer away. Give him cognac. Unfortunately, we are not rich in ammunition. Spent cannonballs, as you have been informed, may soon have to be collected from the field, a nominal money prize awarded for each retrieval. Steel, however, iron, points and edges, are not spent as bullets are. How many heads has our guillotine in Paris shorn?” One or two staff officers thought of the guillotine for an instant with homesickness that threatened tears: a cup of coffee, a cognac (and not for nausea), a stroll by that killer, trapezoid of light in the air, Paris.
“Iron, steel, gentlemen. They that live by the etcetera etcetera. Practicable would be a narrow egress in the outer wall—our engineers could blast one speedily, the prisoners to walk as to freedom through it, an endless file with gaps of several meters to obviate panic, two men to grasp the emergent Turk, one to fell him with a club, the executioner to perform his office—executioners in shifts, a roster can be drawn up, two men to drag the body away. The technic of execution. The axe? That means the grotesquerie of thousands of severed heads, always more frightening to the squeamish than a corpse minimally mutilated by some entering instrument. The bayonet? Our men are, ha, well-used to the bayonet. Perhaps I might depute the choice of actual mode of dispatch. General Berthier would welcome volunteers.” “Bbb—”
“Think about it, gentlemen.” He took on a visionary look that the fires made devilish, angelic. “Conceivably a thesis might be written, a considered conspectus drawn up. The army’s functions expand, we have our Institute we need theory, thought, speculation, philosophy, all within the army. Consider, for instance, the efficient annihilation of a whole disaffected city. The unventilated room crammed with subjects—we must not think of victims, prisoners, the terms being emotive—and the introduction, by a simple pumping device, of some venomous inhalant. Our army chemists may work on such things. New methods, gentlemen, for new wars. We are done with dancing minuets.”
T hey sarabanded to Acre. Captain Croisier and the rest saw a crusaders’ castle white in the glare beyond a wide ditch and the great groins of ramparts. Sea-glare and sand-glare. Nearly three hundred cannon and jolly English tars under Sir Smith, known to the Commander-in-Chief from his days at Toulon. And
“But I promised quarter. It was the condition of their surrender.”
“On whose authority?”
“I assumed—”
“Never assume in war.” And, after two days of discussion with his staff, he strode up and down, boots softly crunching, a fluent parcel of red and shadow in the night-fires. “Anything, some have said, but that to which we are, I am, ineluctably led. We freed the Gaza prisoners and they considered it weakness. Djezzar Pasha and his friend Sir Sidney Smith are watching. What would Djezzar Pasha do if he took four thousand Frenchmen? What, in fact, has he done, or encouraged to be done, to the Greeks they hold in the bondage of terror? I need not answer. He fights with the British but he fights in his own way.” He was puzzled at the image of a kind of French savant he knew of, a cousin of Paul Barras, a gross-bellied man in a madhouse. What was his name? “We have to decide now how to execute a regrettable duty, putting out of our minds the humane philosophies on which our Revolution is based, thinking only, as soldiers should, of the technic or method.” A man full of dreams of slaughter and earthquakes, frotting his yard with glee as he dreamed. “So how? Split the entire corpus into forty centuries, conducting each century without the walls for an entire infantry company to dispatch with ordered rifle-fire. The task could be completed in a day.”
An anonymous deputy aide started to retch.
“Take that officer away. Give him cognac. Unfortunately, we are not rich in ammunition. Spent cannonballs, as you have been informed, may soon have to be collected from the field, a nominal money prize awarded for each retrieval. Steel, however, iron, points and edges, are not spent as bullets are. How many heads has our guillotine in Paris shorn?” One or two staff officers thought of the guillotine for an instant with homesickness that threatened tears: a cup of coffee, a cognac (and not for nausea), a stroll by that killer, trapezoid of light in the air, Paris.
“Iron, steel, gentlemen. They that live by the etcetera etcetera. Practicable would be a narrow egress in the outer wall—our engineers could blast one speedily, the prisoners to walk as to freedom through it, an endless file with gaps of several meters to obviate panic, two men to grasp the emergent Turk, one to fell him with a club, the executioner to perform his office—executioners in shifts, a roster can be drawn up, two men to drag the body away. The technic of execution. The axe? That means the grotesquerie of thousands of severed heads, always more frightening to the squeamish than a corpse minimally mutilated by some entering instrument. The bayonet? Our men are, ha, well-used to the bayonet. Perhaps I might depute the choice of actual mode of dispatch. General Berthier would welcome volunteers.” “Bbb—”
“Think about it, gentlemen.” He took on a visionary look that the fires made devilish, angelic. “Conceivably a thesis might be written, a considered conspectus drawn up. The army’s functions expand, we have our Institute we need theory, thought, speculation, philosophy, all within the army. Consider, for instance, the efficient annihilation of a whole disaffected city. The unventilated room crammed with subjects—we must not think of victims, prisoners, the terms being emotive—and the introduction, by a simple pumping device, of some venomous inhalant. Our army chemists may work on such things. New methods, gentlemen, for new wars. We are done with dancing minuets.”
T hey sarabanded to Acre. Captain Croisier and the rest saw a crusaders’ castle white in the glare beyond a wide ditch and the great groins of ramparts. Sea-glare and sand-glare. Nearly three hundred cannon and jolly English tars under Sir Smith, known to the Commander-in-Chief from his days at Toulon. And
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