The Absolute at Large

a spirit of exaltation and fervour. At any rate, when the great Emperor proclaimed, two days after his coronation, that the hour had come for France to cover the whole earth with her banner, a unanimous roar of enthusiasm gave him his answer.

Bobinet’s plan was the following:⁠—

1. To occupy Spain, and by taking Gibraltar secure the key to the Mediterranean Sea.

2. To occupy the Danube valley as far as Budapest as the key to the interior of Europe.

3. To occupy Denmark as the key to the North Sea area.

And since territorial keys have usually to be smeared with blood, France fitted out three armies which won for her tremendous glory.

The fourth army occupied Asia Minor as the key to the East.

The fifth army made itself master of the mouth of the St. Lawrence as the key to America.

The sixth army went down in the naval battle off the English coast.

The seventh army laid siege to Sebastopol.

By New Year’s Eve, 1944, the Emperor Bobinet had all his keys in the pocket of his artillery breeches.

XXV

The So-Called Greatest War

It is a foible of our human nature that when we have an extremely unpleasant experience, it gives us a peculiar satisfaction if it is “the biggest” of its disagreeable kind that has happened since the world began. During a heat wave, for instance, we are very pleased if the papers announce that it is “the highest temperature reached since the year 1881,” and we feel a little resentment towards the year 1881 for having gone us one better. Or if our ears are frozen till all the skin peels off, it fills us with a certain happiness to learn that “it was the hardest frost recorded since 1786.” It is just the same with wars. The war in progress is either the most righteous or the bloodiest, or the most successful, or the longest, since such and such a time; any superlative whatever always affords us the proud satisfaction of having been through something extraordinary and record-breaking.

Well, the war which lasted from February 12, 1944 to the autumn of 1953, was in all truthfulness and without any exaggeration (on my honour!) the Greatest War. Do not let us rob those who lived through it of this one solitary and well-earned satisfaction. 198,000,000 men took part in the fighting, and all but thirteen of them fell. I could give you figures by which accountants and statisticians have attempted to illustrate these enormous losses⁠—for instance, how many thousand kilometres the bodies would stretch if laid one beside the other, and for how many hours an express train would have to run if the bodies were put on the line in place of sleepers; or if the index fingers of all the fallen were cut off and put in sardine-tins, how many hundred goods trucks could be filled with such a load, and so on. But I have a poor memory for figures, and I don’t want to cheat you out of a single miserable statistical truckload. So I repeat that it was the greatest war since the creation of the world, whether you take into consideration the loss of life or the extent of the theatre of war.

Once again the present chronicler has to excuse himself for not caring very much for descriptions of events on the grand scale. Perhaps he ought to relate how the war swung from the Rhine to the Euphrates, from Korea to Denmark, from Lugano to Haparanda, and so forth. Instead of this, he would far rather depict the arrival of the Bedouins in their white burnouses at Geneva, and how they came galloping in with the heads of their enemies stuck on their six-foot spears; or the love adventures of a French poilu in Tibet; the cavalcades of Russian Cossacks that crossed the Sahara; the nightly encounters of Macedonian comitadjis with Senegalese sharpshooters on the shores of the lakes of Finland. As you see, there is the greatest diversity of material. Bobinet’s victorious regiments flew, so to speak, in one dazzling swoop in the footprints of Alexander the Great across India to China; but meanwhile the Yellow invasion swept over Siberia and Russia into France and Spain, thus cutting off from their native land the Muslims who were operating in Sweden. The Russian regiments, retreating before the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Chinese, found themselves in North Africa, where Sergei Nikolayevich Zlocin established his Czardom. He was soon murdered, however, because his Bavarian generals conspired against his Prussian hetmans, and Sergei Fyodorovich Zlosin thereupon ascended the Imperial throne in Timbuktu.

Czechoslovakia was held by the Swedes, French, Turks, Russians and Chinese in succession; each of these invasions killed off the native population to the last man. In the course of those years services were held, or Mass celebrated, in the Church of St. Vitus by a pastor, a solicitor, an Imam, an Archimandrite and a bonze, none of them enjoying any permanent success. The only gratifying change was that the Stavovsky Theatre was invariably full, being used for the purposes of an army store.

When the Japanese had thrust the Chinese out of Eastern Europe in the year 1951 there arose for a brief space a new Middle Kingdom (as the Chinese call their native land), and chance willed that it should fall precisely within the frontiers of the old empire of Austria-Hungary. Once again an aged ruler dwelt in Schönbrunn, the old mandarin Jaja Wir Weana, one hundred and six years old, “to whose consecrated head rejoicing nations turn their eyes with childlike love,” as the Wiener Mittagszeitung assured its readers daily. The official language was Chinese, which at one sweep did away with all nationalistic rivalries. The State god was Buddha. The stubborn Catholics of Bohemia and Moravia moved out of the country, or became the victims of Chinese dragonades and confiscations, by which the number of national martyrs was increased to a remarkable extent. On the other hand, several prominent