Turks while allowing that Lord Raglan, the British Commander in Chief, though competent, was somewhat inexperienced and asserting Lord Cardigan to be a man of great sagacity and leadership skills. Miss Bornstein, Hymie and I had been conducting an involved correspondence on the very volumes Mango was quoting from.
‘According to Miss Bornstein, A. W. Kinglake was commissioned by the War Office to write the series, which was never a good start. The book has been republished several times and the 1864 version, slightly amended, was the fourth edition. More appeared after the first Boer War when the Transvaal had regained its independence, previously having been shamefully annexed by Britain after gold had fortuitously been discovered. The history was meant to remind the British of their recent glorious past so that they wouldn’t dwell too heavily on the trouncing they’d received from a handful of determined farmers who aimed straight and didn’t form into a square to fight. According to Miss Bornstein it is rather long on glory and somewhat short on the true facts. The volumes were republished again, just two years before the declaration of the second Boer War. They were, of course, ideally timed and put the British public in the mood for another territorial rape and pillage in the name of Queen and Empire.’ Hymie had exactly quoted a passage in one of Miss Bornstein’s letters, it was word perfect, even comma perfect.
Mango Cobett’s usually deathly pale face had flushed a dark red. ‘Are you challenging the integrity of one of the finest historians to come out of the British Isles, Levy?’
‘No, sir,’ Hymie said. ‘Miss Bornstein is.’ The class broke into spontaneous laughter again.
‘Shut up! Shut up!’ Mango yelled. ‘I’ve heard enough!’ The class settled down and a flushed Mango Cobett commenced to walk up and down the length of the classroom. ‘The Battle of Alma, the first in the Crimea, where the British took the Russian General Menshikov head on, Russians 9,000 dead, British 2,000! Those, gentlemen, are the facts.’
I jumped in. ‘According to Miss Bornstein, Lord Raglan lost control of the Battle of Alma almost from the moment it started. He set the frontal attack and then lost control while the French climbed the steep cliffs near the mouth of the river and outflanked Menshikov with few casualties.’
‘Nine thousand Russians, two thousand British!’ Mango said emphatically.
‘Two thousand dead in three hours!’ I retaliated. ‘The French lost less than two hundred men.’
‘The Russians were peasants without any training and fought in dense columns. Menshikov had scrambled eggs for brains,’ Hymie said, to the delight of the classroom.
Mango Cobett pressed on. ‘The Battle of Inkerman, Russians 11,000 dead, the British 2,640!’ He leaned on the figure forty to emphasize his exact knowledge of the numbers involved.
‘According to Miss Bornstein, Lord Raglan exercised no influence on the course of the fighting. The Battle of Inkerman was called the “Soldiers’ Battle” because units were committed to the battle piecemeal and the soldiers had to work it out for themselves,’ Hymie replied.
‘The Russians on the other hand were commanded by General Russian eggs himself,’ I said smugly, causing the class to laugh once more.
‘That will be enough, Peekay,’ Mango said, not too happy about arguing on two fronts. ‘We have one more battle to go, the Redan.’
‘Ah, the Redan! According to Miss Bornstein …’
‘Quiet, Levy!’ Mango demanded. ‘The Russian losses are not known but are thought to be twice that of the British.’
‘The British lost five thousand men at the Redan, and again Lord Raglan lost control of the battle,’ I said, determined that he should not be allowed to cover up the British losses.
‘Lord Raglan was a very sick man and died of cholera ten days after the Redan. He can’t be entirely blamed for the huge losses,’ Mango retorted.
‘You’ve missed the Charge of the Light Brigade, sir,’ Hymie said with a grin.
‘Ah yes, Lord Cardigan’s Light Brigade, a mistake, a question of a misunderstanding and an ill-drafted order.’
‘And under pig’s-trotters-for-brains Lord Cardigan, seven hundred mounted troopers charged into the valley of death and four hundred died!’
‘I don’t like your attitude, Levy, Lord Cardigan was a member of the British aristocracy and is not subject to schoolboy humour. While we’re on the subject, Peekay, Menshikov was a respected Russian general and also above your puerile wit. You will both see me outside the masters’ common room at the conclusion of school. Your attitude to this history lesson has been reprehensible to say the least.’ The bell went for recess and the colour drained back out of Mango Cobett’s face. As we were leaving the class he had one last jibe. ‘Let me assure you both, England did not conquer half the known world including this country because she placed stupid commanders in the field.’
‘According to Miss Bornstein…’ we both began, and Hymie finished… ‘that’s not true.’
The expression was born. From that moment on, any boy in the Prince of Wales School who disagreed with a statement made by a master would signal his disagreement by prefacing it with, ‘According to Miss Bornstein…’ It caused so much exasperation amongst the teaching staff that it was eventually taken to the head, St John Burnham MA (Oxon), known as Singe ’n Burn, who prided himself on being a liberal educationalist. To the mortification of the masters and in particular Mr Hemming the senior English master, Singe ’n Burn declared the expression, ‘A legitimate paraphrase for a dissenting opinion.’ And so the expression, ‘According to Miss Bornstein,’ was officially written into the school vocabulary.
We arrived outside the masters’ common room just after three o’clock armed with Miss Bornstein’s two letters on the subject of the Crimean War. But Mango refused to continue the argument and simply gave us two hours of detention and a two thousand word essay to write on the Crimean War. He added that the next indiscretion would result in a visit to the head.
Hymie said in disgust, ‘I told you history was all bullshit. There goes another generation of Christian gentlemen school boys who will grow up to believe the Charge of the Light Brigade was one of England’s finest hours.’
‘But it was,’ I said.
‘It was what?’ Hymie said, not sure he’d heard me correctly.
‘It was one of England’s finest hours. What’s important is not whether you win or lose but how you play the game.’
‘Bullshit! If the Jews had played that game we’d have been extinct fifteen hundred years ago.’
‘You have to be a Christian gentleman to understand,’ I kidded him.
‘Do me a favour, Peekay, don’t just read history, feel it. Try to imagine being an ordinary guy on a half- starved horse, your regiment decimated by cholera, you’ve got a lance in your hand and are looking into the barrels of the Russian artillery holding the Vorontsov Ridge at Balaclava. Do you know why the English managed to conquer half the globe? Because they were so bloody stupid! Some halfwitted lord jumped up in a general’s uniform would simply advance on a position and expend men, he didn’t care, they were only yeomen and slum slush, cannon fodder. He just kept sending them in and so help me they kept on going, until eventually he won. You call that bravery? I call that two things, murder and stupidity. The generals murdered their men and the men were too stupid to resist.’
‘And too brave, it wasn’t just stupidity.’
Hymie ignored my interjection. ‘History makes it all okay. History forgets the vomit and the shit, the blood and the horses with their guts blown away, the cries of men as they shit their pants and drowned in their own blood. The Charge of the Light Brigade is celebrated because it was the most obviously stupid, most spectacularly stupid, most stupendously stupid sacrifice of men until the brilliant British generals finally topped it for sheer cold- blooded slaughter in the trenches in Flanders and on the cliffs above Gallipoli.’
Hymie changed course suddenly. ‘Hitler murdered six million Jews. He had to round them up and rail them to the death camps and the world wept for man’s inhumanity to man. But underneath it all there is the feeling that the Jews should have fought, should have resisted, should have died defending their kith and kin, should have died like men. All the women and children and the cobblers and tailors and small shopkeepers who believed that they were Germans and Poles and Hungarians, who believed passionately in logic and order, in Kant and Spinoza, and in minding their own business and never getting involved and most of all, in never volunteering to be stupid, should have turned into a fighting machine that takes pride in dying.
‘Because they didn’t go chasing a piece of coloured bunting around the place, history may yet judge them cowards.’ Hymie sniffed and wiped his nose across the back of his hand. I had never seen him quite as upset and
