Fisking the home office advice...

I just had to. My work is in parentheses....

What is the purpose of this statement?

(To keep the voters quiet without our actually having to fix a problem.)

It is a rare and frightening prospect to be confronted by an intruder in your own home.

(No, it's an increasingly ordinary problem and it should be an enraging one.)

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and Chief Constables are responding to public concern over the support offered by the law and confusion about householders defending themselves.

( Responding to the media reports of outrage, not to the problem itself which has been growing for some time. )

We want a criminal justice system that reaches fair decisions, has the confidence of law-abiding citizens and encourages them actively to support the police and prosecutors in the fight against crime.

( We know what YOU want- a criminal justice system which protects you. Tough, we are in charge. SUBJECTS, remember?)

Wherever possible you should call the police.

( Although you, the burglars, rapists, killers, the police, and the authors of this statement all know that the police will not arrive until the harm has been done. )

The following summarises the position when you are faced with an intruder in your home, and provides a brief overview of how the police and CPS will deal with any such events.

( You're at the intruders' mercy, and we'll deal with it as we think best with the advantages of safety and hindsight. )

Does the law protect me?

( Only if you only do what we want you to do. )

What is ‘reasonable force’?

(We'll decide that, after you've done whatever you do.)

Anyone can use reasonable force to protect themselves or others, or to carry out an arrest or to prevent crime.

( That's as clear as it gets, folks. )

You are not expected to make fine judgements over the level of force you use in the heat of the moment.

( We'll make the fine judgements afterwards from the aforesaid vantages of safety and hindsight. )

So long as you only do what you honestly and instinctively believe is necessary in the heat of the moment, that would be the strongest evidence of you acting lawfully and in selfdefence.

( If we agree. But you'll notice that we can't be bothered to proofread this and put a space between self and defence. Nor do we understand the correct meaning of instinctively.)

This is still the case if you use something to hand as a weapon.

( As long as it's not a weapon of which we disapprove, ot one which has effects of which we disapprove, or it or its results offend our political, academic, or media masters. And to hand means it had better not look like you thought about this beforehand. If it's a baseball bat, you'd better have a uniform, cleats, and a place on a team roster.)

As a general rule, the more extreme the circumstances and the fear felt, the more force you can lawfully use in self-defence.

( Again, as long as we see it as extreme or your fear as reasonable. You'd better hope you aren't scared by a bunch of 15 year olds. )

Do I have to wait to be attacked?

( You had better. )

No, not if you are in your own home and in fear for yourself or others. In those circumstances the law does not require you to wait to be attacked before using defensive force yourself.

( But you had better be able to convince the aforesaid masters that attack, and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE was in the minds of the assailants, I'm sorry, visitors. Good luck with that.)

What if the intruder dies?

( By the time it's all over, you will wish you had instead. )

If you have acted in reasonable self-defence, as described above, and the intruder dies you will still have acted lawfully.

( But we might still criminally prosecute you, and you WILL be sued civilly. Even if no lawyer will take the case, we will pay for one with your tax money. For HIM, not you, of course. Your legal bills will reduce you to penury even if you avoid prison. )

Indeed, there are several such cases where the householder has not been prosecuted.

(Yes, several householders have escaped. We just wanted to bring that up. Not to deter you or anything...)

However, if, for example:
* having knocked someone unconscious, you then decided to further hurt or kill them to punish them; or
* you knew of an intended intruder and set a trap to hurt or to kill them rather than involve the police,

( or someone such as the criminal's lawyer or family will get money if it can convince us you did these things... )

you would be acting with very excessive and gratuitous force and could be prosecuted.

( So much for no fine judgements expected in the heat of the moment. )

What if I chase them as they run off?

( Hope you are slow, and that they don't have friends outside. )

This situation is different as you are no longer acting in self-defence and so the same degree of force may not be reasonable.

( Like we said... )

However, you are still allowed to use reasonable force to recover your property and make a citizen’s arrest.

( We love competition that makes us look bad. )

You should consider your own safety and, for example, whether the police have been called.

( That's for when we beat you up. )

A rugby tackle or a single blow would probably be reasonable.

( Probably... )

Acting out of malice and revenge with the intent of inflicting punishment through injury or death would not.

( Again, the issue here is whether someone can convince us or the media to force us to see it that way... )

Will you believe the intruder rather than me?

( It depends. Are our jobs more threatened by you or by the forces arrayed against you? The richer and better connected you are, the better it looks for you.)

The police weigh all the facts when investigating an incident.

( This includes facts you couldn't know at the time, like the intruder's age, and facts that develop later, like media pressure. )

This includes the fact that the intruder caused the situation to arise in the first place.

( But that's not nearly as important as keeping our bosses and various ethnic pressure groups happy. )

We hope that everyone understands that the police have a duty to investigate incidents involving a death or injury. Things are not always as they seem. On occasions people pretend a burglary has taken place to cover up other crimes such as a fight between drug dealers.

( And of course this is directed at them, they model their conduct on advice like this. Also, we are too stupid and ignorant to tell a drug dealer from an honest citizen.)

How would the police and CPS handle the investigation and treat me?

( You'll find out, won't you? )

In considering these cases Chief Constables and the Director of Public Prosecutions (Head of the CPS) are determined that they must be investigated and reviewed as swiftly and as sympathetically as possible. In some cases, for instance where the facts are very clear, or where less serious injuries are involved, the investigation will be concluded very quickly, without any need for arrest. In more complicated cases, such as where a death or serious injury occurs, more detailed enquiries will be necessary.

( Note that we say SOME CASES might be handled without arrest. Do you feel lucky? )

The police may need to conduct a forensic examination and/or obtain your account of events.

( EVERY NUANCE OF EVERYTHING YOU SAY WILL BE DECONSTRUCTED IN DETAIL THAT WOULD SHAME THE SPANISH INQUISITION OR HARVARD LAW SCHOOL. BETTER GET IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME, and be IDENTICAL the next dozen. )

To ensure such cases are dealt with as swiftly and sympathetically as possible, the police and CPS will take special measures namely:
* An experienced investigator will oversee the case

(if one is available and not too busy); and

* If it goes as far as CPS considering the evidence, the case will be prioritised to ensure a senior lawyer makes a quick

(by our standards)

decision

( always subject to change of course.).

It is a fact that very few householders have ever been prosecuted for actions resulting from the use of force against intruders.

(Just thought you might like another reminder.)

No Tsunami aid!

The U. S. government seems to think it a matter of honour to force its citizens to render Tsunami aid.

This says it best (long but worth it).

"Several years ago I was one evening standing on the steps of the Capitol with some other members of Congress, when our attention was attracted by a great light over in Georgetown. It was evidently a large fire. We jumped into a hack and drove over as fast as we could. When we got there I went to work, and I never worked as hard in my life as I did there for several hours. But, in spite of all that could be done, many houses were burned and many families made houseless, and, besides, some of them had lost all but the clothes they had on. The weather was very cold, and when I saw so many women and children suffering, I felt that something ought to be done for them, and everybody else seemed to feel the same way."

"The next morning a bill was introduced appropriating $20,000 for their relief. We put aside all other business, and rushed it through as soon as it could be done. I said everybody felt as I did. That was not quite so; for, though they perhaps sympathized as deeply with the sufferers as I did, there were a few of the members who did not think we had the right to indulge our sympathy or excite our charity at the expense of anybody but ourselves. They opposed the bill, and upon its passage demanded the yeas and nays. There were not enough of them to sustain the call, but many of us wanted our names to appear in favor of what we considered a Praiseworthy measure, and we voted with them to sustain it. So the yeas and nays were recorded, and my name appeared on the journals in favor of the bill."

"The next summer, when it began to be time to think about the election, I concluded I would take a scout around among the boys of my district. I had no opposition there, but, as the election was some time off, I did not know what might turn up, and I thought it was best to let the boys know that I had not forgot them, and that going to Congress had not made me too proud to go to see them."

"So I put a couple of shirts and a few twists of tobacco into my saddle-bags, and put out. I had been out about a week, and had found things going very smoothly, when, riding one day in a part of my district in which I was more of a stranger than any other, I saw a man in a field plowing and coming toward the road. I gauged my gait so that we should meet as he came to the fence. As he came up I spoke to the man. He replied politely, but, as I thought, rather coldly, and was about turning his horse for another furrow, when I asked him if he could give me a chew of tobacco."

"Yes," said he, "such as we make and use in this part of the country; but it may not suit your taste, as you are probably in the habit of using better."

"With that he pulled out of his pocket part of a twist in its natural state, and handed it to me. I took a chew, and handed it back to him. He turned to his plow, and was about to start off. I said to him: "Don't be in such a hurry, my friend; I want to have a little talk with you, and get better acquainted," He replied:

"I am very busy, and have but little time to talk, but if it does not take too long, I will listen to what you have to say."

"I began: "Well, friend, I am one of those unfortunate beings called candidates, and---"

"Yes, I know you; you are Colonel Crockett. I have seen you once before, and voted for you the last time you were elected. I suppose you are out electioneering now, but you had better not waste your time or mine. I shall not vote for you again."

"This was a sockdologer. I had been making up my mind that he was one of those churlish fellows who care for nobody but themselves, and take bluntness for independence. I had seen enough of them to know there is a way to reach them, and was satisfied that if I could get him to talk to me I would soon have him straight. But this was entirely a different bundle of sticks. He knew me, had voted for me before, and did not intend to do it again. Something must be the matter; I could not imagine what it was. I had heard of no complaints against me, except that some of the dandies about the village ridiculed some of the wild and foolish things that I too often say and do, and said that I was not enough of a gentleman to go to Congress. I begged him to tell me what was the matter.

"Well, Colonel, it is hardly worth while to waste time or words upon it. I do not see how it can be mended, but you gave a vote last winter which shows that either you have not capacity to understand the Constitution, or that you are wanting in the honesty and firmness to be guided by it. In either case you are not the man to represent me. But I beg your pardon for expressing it in that way. I did not intend to avail myself of the privilege of the constituent to speak plainly to a candidate for the purpose of insulting or wounding you. I intend by it only to say that your understanding of the Constitution is very different from mine; and I will say to you what, but for my rudeness, I should not have said, that I believe you to be honest."

"Thank you for that, but you find fault with only one vote. You know the story of Henry Clay, the old huntsman and the rifle; you wouldn't break your gun for one snap."

"No, nor for a dozen. As the story goes, that tack served Mr. Clay's purpose admirably, though it really had nothing to do with the case. I would not break the gun, nor would I discard an honest representative for a mistake in judgment as a mere matter of policy. But an understanding of the Constitution different from mine I cannot overlook, because the Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions. The man who wields power and misinterprets it is the more dangerous the more honest he is."

"I admit the truth of all you say, but there must be some mistake about it, for I do not remember that I gave any vote last winter upon any constitutional question."

"No, Colonel, there's no mistake. Though I live here in the backwoods and seldom go from home, I take the papers from Washington and read very carefully all the proceedings of Congress. My papers say that last winter you voted for a bill to appropriate $20,000 to some sufferers by a fire in Georgetown. Is that true!"

"Certainly it is, and I thought that was the last vote for which anybody in the world would have found fault with."

"Well, Colonel, where do you find in the Constitution any authority to give away the public money in charity!"

"Here was another sockdologer; for, when I began to think about it, I could not remember a thing in the Constitution that authorized it. I found I must take another tack, so I said:

"Well, my friend; I may as well own up. You have got me there. But certainly nobody will complain that a great and rich country like ours should give the insignificant sum of $20,000 to relieve its suffering women and children, particularly with a full and overflowing Treasury, and I am sure, if you had been there, you would have done just as I did."

"It is not the amount, Colonel, that I complain of; it is the principle. In the first place, the Government ought to have in the Treasury no more than enough for its legitimate purposes. But that has nothing to do with the question. The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be entrusted to man, particularly under our system of collecting revenue by a tariff, which reaches every man in the country, no matter how poor he may be, and the poorer he is the more he pays in proportion to his means. What is worse, it presses upon him without his knowledge where the weight centers, for there is not a man in the United States who can ever guess how much he pays to the Government. So you see, that while you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing it from thousands who are even worse off than he. If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right: to give to one, you have the right to give to all; and, as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity, and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive, what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other. No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity. Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose. If twice as many houses had been burned in this county as in Georgetown, neither you nor any other member of Congress would have thought of appropriating a dollar for our relief. There are about two hundred and forty members of Congress. If they had shown their sympathy for the sufferers by contributing each one week's pay, it would have made over $13,000. There are plenty of wealthy men in and around Washington who could have given $20,000 without depriving themselves of even a luxury of life. The Congressmen chose to keep their own money, which, if reports be true, some of them spend not very creditably; and the people about Washington, no doubt, applauded you for relieving them from the necessity of giving by giving what was not yours to give. The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things. To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else. Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution."

"I have given you," continued Crockett, "an imperfect account of what he said. Long before he was through, I was convinced that I had done wrong. I said to him:

"Well, my friend, you hit the nail upon the head when you said I had not sense enough to understand the Constitution. I intended to be guided by it, and thought I had studied it fully. I have heard many speeches in Congress about the powers of Congress, but what you have said here at your plow has got more hard, sound sense in it, than all the fine speeches I ever heard. If I had ever taken the view of it that you have, I would have put my head into the fire before I would have given that vote, and if you will forgive me and vote for me again, if I ever vote for another unconstitutional law I wish I may be shot."

"Now, sir," concluded Crockett, "you know why I made that speech yesterday. You remember that I proposed to give a week's pay. There are in that House many very wealthy men--men who think nothing of spending a week's pay, or a dozen of them, for a dinner or a wine party when they have something to accomplish by it. Some of those same men made beautiful speeches upon the great debt of gratitude which the country owed the deceased--a debt which could not be paid by money--and the insignificance and worthlessness of money, particularly so insignificant a sum as $10,000, when weighed against the honor of the nation. Yet not one of them responded to my proposition. Money with them is nothing but trash when it is to come out of the people. But it is the one great thing for which most of them are striving, and many of them sacrifice honor, integrity, and justice to obtain it."

Evermore....

I was at the CWGC in France the other day. The people there had never heard of this, which should be their official story. Or maybe second after The Gardener.

They still find about one a week, year in, decade out.
 

EVERMORE 

 

    ALL THE TIME she carried them with her, in a bag knotted at the neck. She had bayoneted the polythene with a fork, so that condensation would not gather and begin to rot the frail card. She knew what happened when you covered seedlings in a flower-pot: damp came from nowhere to make its sudden climate. This had to be avoided. There had been so much wet back then, so much rain, churned mud and drowned horses. She did not mind it for herself. She minded it for them still, for all of them, back then.

  There were three postcards, the last he had sent. The earlier ones had been divided up, lost perhaps, but she had the last of them, his final evidence. On the day itself, she would unknot the bag and trace her eyes over the jerky pencilled address, the formal signature (initials and surname only), the obedient crossings-out. For many years she had ached at what the cards did not say; but nowadays she found something in their official impassivity which seemed proper, even if not consoling.

  Of course she did not need actually to look at them, any more than she needed the photograph to recall his dark eyes, sticky-out ears, and the jaunty smile which agreed that the fun would be all over by Christmas. At any moment she could bring the three pieces of buff field-service card exactly to mind. The dates: Dec 24, Jan 11, Jan 17, written in his own hand, and confirmed by the postmark which added the years: 16, 17, 17. ‘NOTHING is to be written on this side except the date and signature of the sender. Sentences not required may be erased. If anything else is added the postcard will be destroyed.’ And then the brutal choices.

 

I am quite well.

I have been admitted into hospital

     sick                       and am going on well

{                 }

     wounded                and hope to be discharged soon

    I am being sent down to the base

                                                                                                letter dated.............

    I have received your        {telegram.................                                                                                                     parcel...................

    Letter follows at first opportunity

   I have received no letter from you
 
                      lately
              {  

                      for a long time

  He was quite well on each occasion. He had never been admitted into hospital. He was not being sent down to the base. He had received a letter of a certain date. A letter would follow at the first opportunity. He had not received no letter. All done with thick pencilled crossing-out and a single date. Then, beside the instruction Signature only, the last signal from her brother. S. Moss. A large looping S with a circling full stop after it. Then Moss written without lifting from the card what she always imagined as a stub of pencil-end studiously licked.

  On the other side, their mother’s name - Mrs Moss, with a grand M and a short stabbing line beneath the rs - then the address. Another warning down the edge, this time in smaller letters.

‘The address only to be written on this side. If anything else is added, the postcard will be destroyed.’ 

But across the top of her second card, Sammy had written something, and it had not been destroyed. A neat line of ink without the rough loopiness of his pencilled signature: ‘50 yds from the Germans. Posted from Trench.’ In fifty years, one for each underlined yard, she had not come up with the answer. Why had he written it, why in ink, why had they allowed it? Sam was a cautious and responsible boy, especially towards their mother, and he would not have risked a worrying silence. But he had undeniably written these words. And in ink, too. Was it code for something else? A premonition of death? Except that Sam was not the sort to have premonitions. Perhaps it was simply excitement, a desire to impress. Look how close we are. 50 yds from the Germans. Posted from Trench.

  She was glad he was at Cabaret Rouge, with his own headstone. Found and identified. Given known and honoured burial. She had a horror of Thiepval, one which failed to diminish in spite of her dutiful yearly visits. Thiepval’s lost souls. You had to make the right preparation for them, for their lostness. So she always began elsewhere, at Caterpillar Valley, Thistle Dump, Quarry, Blighty Valley, Ulster Tower, Herbécourt.

  No Morning Dawns

  No Night Returns

  But What We Think Of Thee

  That was at Herbécourt, a walled enclosure in the middle of fields, room for a couple of hundred, most of them Australian, but this was a British lad, the one who owned this inscription. Was it a vice to have become such a connoisseur of grief? Yet it was true, she had her favourite cemeteries. Like Blighty Valley and Thistle Dump, both half-hidden from the road in a fold of valley; or Quarry, a graveyard looking as if it had been abandoned by its village; or Devonshire, that tiny, private patch for the Devonshires who died on the first day of the Somme, who fought to hold that ridge and held it still. You followed signposts in British racing green, then walked across fields guarded by wooden martyred Christs to these sanctuaries of orderliness, where everything was accounted for. Headstones were lined up like dominoes on edge; beneath them, their owners were present and correct, listed, tended. Creamy altars proclaimed that THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE. And so it did, on the graves, in the books, in hearts, in memories.

  Each year she wondered if this would be her last visit. Her life no longer offered up to her the confident plausibility of two decades more, one decade, five years. Instead, it was now renewed on an annual basis, like her driving licence. Every April Dr Holling had to certify her fit for another twelve months behind the wheel. Perhaps she and the Morris would go kaput on the same day.

  Before, it had been the boat train, the express to Amiens, a local stopper, a bus or two. Since she had acquired the Morris, she had in theory become freer; and yet her routine remained almost immutable. She would drive to Dover and take a night ferry, riding the Channel in the blackout alongside burly lorry-drivers. It saved money, and meant she was always in France for daybreak. No Morning Dawns … He must have seen each daybreak and wondered if that was the date they would put on his stone … Then she would follow the N43 to St-Omer, to Aire and Lillers, where she usually took a croissant and thé à l’anglaise. From Lillers the N43 continued to Béthune, but she flinched from it: south of Béthune was the D937 to Arras, and there, on a straight stretch where the road did a reminding elbow, was Brigadier Sir Frank Higginson’s domed portico. You should not drive past it, even if you intended to return. She had done that once, early in her ownership of the Morris, skirted Cabaret Rouge in second gear, and it had seemed the grossest discourtesy to Sammy and those who lay beside him: no, it’s not your turn yet, just you wait and we’ll be along. No, that was what the other motorists did.

  So instead she would cut south from Lillers and come into Arras with the D341. From there, in that thinned triangle whose southern points were Albert and Péronne, she would begin her solemn

and necessary tour of the woods and fields in which, so many decades before, the British Army had counter-attacked to relieve the pressure on the French at Verdun. That had been the start of it, anyway. No doubt scholars were by now having second thoughts, but that was what they were for; she herself no longer had arguments to deploy or positions to hold. She valued only what she had experienced at the time: an outline of strategy, the conviction of gallantry, and the facts of mourning.

  At first, back then, the commonality of grief had helped: wives, mothers, comrades, an array of brass hats, and a bugler amid gassy morning mist which the feeble November sun had failed to burn away. Later, remembering Sam had changed: it became work, continuity; instead of anguish and glory, there was fierce unreasonableness, both about his death and her commemoration of it. During this period, she was hungry for the solitude and the voluptuous selfishness of grief: her Sam, her loss, her mourning, and nobody else’s similar. She admitted as much: there was no shame to it. But now, after half a century, her feelings had simply become part of her. Her grief was a calliper, necessary and supporting; she could not imagine walking without it.

  When she had finished with Herbéourt and Devonshire, Thistle Dump and Caterpillar Valley, she would come, always with trepidation, to the great red-brick memorial at Thiepval. An arch of triumph, yes, but of what kind, she wondered: the triumph over death, or the triumph of death? ‘Here are recorded names of officers and men of the British armies who fell on the Somme battlefields July 1915–February 1918 but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death.’ Thiepval Ridge, Pozières Wood, Albert, Morval, Ginchy, Guillemont, Ancre, Ancre Heights, High Wood, Delville Wood, Bapaume, Bazentin Ridge, Miraumont, Transloy Ridges, Flers-Courcelette. Battle after battle, each accorded its stone laurel wreath, its section of wall: name after name after name, the Missing of the Somme, the official graffiti of death. This monument by Sir Edwin Lutyens revolted her, it always had. She could not bear the thought of these lost men, exploded into unrecognisable pieces, engulfed in the mud-fields, one moment fully there with pack and gaiters, baccy and rations, with their memories and their hopes, their past and their future, crammed into them, and the next moment only a shred of khaki or a sliver of shin-bone to prove they had ever existed. Or worse: some of these names had first been given known and honoured burial, their allotment of ground with their name above it, only for some new battle with its heedless artillery to tear up the temporary graveyard and bring a second, final extermination. Yet each of those scraps of uniform and flesh - whether newly killed or richly decomposed - had been brought back here and reorganised, conscripted into the eternal regiment of the missing, kitted out and made to dress by the right. Something about the way they had vanished and the way they were now reclaimed was more than she could bear: as if an army which had thrown them away so lightly now chose to own them again so gravely. She was not sure whether this was the case. She claimed no understanding of military matters. All she claimed was an understanding of grief.

  Her wariness of Thiepval always made her read it with a sceptical, a proof-reader’s eye. She noticed, for instance, that the French translation of the English inscription listed - as the English one did not - the exact number of the Missing. 73,367. That was another reason she did not care to be here, standing in the middle of the arch looking down over the puny Anglo-French cemetery (French crosses to the left, British stones to the right) while the wind drew tears from an averting eye. 73,367: beyond a certain point, the numbers became uncountable and diminishing in effect. The more dead, the less proportionate the pain. 73,367: even she, with all her expertise in grief, could not imagine that.

  Perhaps the British realised that the number of the Missing might continue to grow through the years, that no fixed total could be true; perhaps it was not shame, but a kind of sensible poetry which made them decline to specify a figure. And they were right: the numbers had indeed changed. The arch was inaugurated in 1932 by the Prince of Wales, and all the names of all the Missing had been carved upon its surfaces, but still, here and there, out of their proper place, hauled back tardily from oblivion, were a few soldiers enlisted only under the heading of Addenda. She knew all their names by now: Dodds T., Northumberland Fusiliers; Malcolm H. W., The Cameronians; Lennox F. J., Royal Irish Rifles; Lovell F. H. B., Royal Warwickshire Regiment; Orr R., Royal Inniskillins; Forbes R., Cameron Highlanders; Roberts J., Middlesex Regiment; Moxham A., Wiltshire Regiment; Humphries F. J., Middlesex Regiment; Hughes H. W., Worcestershire Regiment; Bateman W. T., Northamptonshire Regiment; Tarling E., The Cameronians; Richards W., Royal Field Artillery; Rollins S., East Lancashire Regiment; Byrne L., Royal Irish Rifles; Gale E. O., East Yorkshire Regiment; Walters J., Royal Fusiliers; Argar D., Royal Field Artillery. No Morning Dawns, No Night Returns …

  She felt closest to Rollins S., since he was an East Lancashire; she would always smile at the initials inflicted upon Private Lovell; but it was Malcolm H. W. who used to intrigue her most. Malcolm H. W., or, to give him his full inscription: ‘Malcolm H. W. The Cameronians (Sco. Rif.) served as Wilson H.’ An addendum and a corrigendum all in one. When she had first discovered him, it had pleased her to imagine his story. Was he under age? Did he falsify his name to escape home, to run away from some girl? Was he wanted for a crime, like those fellows who joined the French Foreign Legion? She did not really want an answer, but she liked to dream a little about this man who had first been deprived of his identity and then of his life. These accumulations of loss seemed to exalt him; for a while, faceless and iconic, he had threatened to rival Sammy and Denis as an emblem of the war. In later years she turned against such fancifulness. There was no mystery really. Private H. W. Malcolm becomes H. Wilson. No doubt he was in truth H. Wilson Malcolm, and when he volunteered they wrote the wrong name in the wrong column; then they were unable to change it. That would make sense: man is only a clerical error corrected by death.

  She had never cared for the main inscription over the central arch:

  AUX ARMEES

  FRANCAISE ET

  BRITANNIQUE

  L’EMPIRE

  BRITANNIQUE

  RECON-

  NAISSANT

 

 

  Each line was centred, which was correct, but there was altogether too much white  space beneath the inscription. She would have inserted ‘less #’ on the galley-proof. And each year she disliked more and more the line-break in the word reconnaissant. There were different schools of thought about this - she had argued with her superiors over the years - but she insisted that breaking a word in the middle of a doubled consonant was a nonsense. You broke a word where the word itself was perforated. Look what this military, architectural or sculptural nincompoop had produced: a fracture which left a separate word, naissant, by mistake. Naissant had nothing to do with reconnaissant, nothing at all; worse, it introduced the notion of birth on to this monument to death. She had written to the War Graves Commission about it, many years ago, and had been assured that the proper procedures had been followed. They told her that!

  Nor was she content with EVERMORE. Their name liveth for evermore: here at Thiepval, also at Cabaret Rouge, Caterpillar Valley, Combles Communal Cemetery Extension, and all the larger memorials. It was of course the correct form, or at least the more regular form; but something in her preferred to see it as two words. EVER MORE: it seemed more weighty like this, with an equal bell-toll on each half. In any case, she had a quarrel with the Dictionary about evermore. ‘Always, at all times, constantly, continually’. Yes, it could mean this in the ubiquitous inscription. But she preferred sense 1: ‘For all future time’. Their name liveth for all future time. No morning dawns, no night returns, but what we think of thee. This is what the inscription meant. But the Dictionary had marked sense 1 as ‘Obs. exc. arch.’ Obsolete except archaic. No, oh certainly not, no. And not with a last quotation as recent as 1854. She would have spoken to Mr Rothwell about this, or at least pencilled a looping note on the galley-proof;

but this entry was not being revised, and the letter E had passed over her desk without an opportunity to make the adjustment.

  EVERMORE. She wondered if there was such a thing as collective memory, something more than the sum of individual memories. If so, was it merely coterminous, yet in some way richer; or did it last longer? She wondered if those too young to have original knowledge could be given memory, could have it grafted on. She thought of this especially at Thiepval. Though she hated the place, when she saw young families trailing across the grass towards the redbrick arc-de-triomphe it also roused in her a wary hopefulness. Christian cathedrals could inspire religious faith by their vast assertiveness; why then should not Lutyens’ memorial provoke some response equally beyond the rational? That reluctant child, whining about the strange food its mother produced from plastic boxes, might receive memory here. Such an edifice assured the newest eye of the pre-existence of the profoundest emotions. Grief and awe lived here; they could be breathed, absorbed. And if so, then this child might in turn bring its child, and so on, from generation to generation, EVERMORE. Not just to count the Missing, but to understand what those from whom they had gone missing knew, and to feel her loss afresh.

  Perhaps this was one reason she had married Denis. Of course she should never have done so. And in a way she never had, for there had been no carnal connection: she unwilling, he incapable. It had lasted two years and his uncomprehending eyes when she delivered him back were impossible to forget. All she could say in her defence was that it was the only time she had behaved with such pure selfishness: she had married him for her own reasons, and discarded him for her own reasons. Some might say that the rest of her life had been selfish too, devoted as it was entirely to her own commemorations; but this was a selfishness that hurt nobody else.

  Poor Denis. He was still handsome when he came back, though his hair grew white on one side and he dribbled. When the fits came on she knelt on his chest and held his tongue down with a stub of pencil. Every night he roamed restlessly through his sleep, muttered and roared, fell silent for a while, and then with parade-ground precision would shout Hip! hip! hip! When she woke him, he could never remember what had been happening. He had guilt and pain, but no specific memory of what he felt guilty about. She knew: Denis had been hit by shrapnel and taken back down the line to hospital without a farewell to his best pal Jewy Moss, leaving Sammy to be killed during the next day’s Hun bombardment. After two years of this marriage, two years of watching Denis vigorously brush his patch of white hair to make it go away, she had returned him to his sisters. From now on, she told them, they should look after Denis and she would look after Sam. The sisters had gazed at her in silent astonishment. Behind them, in the hall, Denis, his chin wet and his brown eyes uncomprehending, stood with an awkward patience which implied that this latest event was nothing special in itself, merely one of a number of things he failed to grasp, and that there would surely be much more to come, all down the rest of his life, which would also escape him.

  She had taken the job on the Dictionary a month later. She worked alone in a damp basement, at a desk across which curled long sheets of galley-proof. Condensation beaded the window. She was armed with a brass table-lamp and a pencil which she sharpened until it was too short to fit in the hand. Her script was large and loose, somewhat like Sammy’s; she deleted and inserted, just as he had done on his field-service postcards. Nothing to be written on this side of the galley-proof. If anything else is added to the galley-proof it will be destroyed. No, she did not have to worry; she made her marks with impunity. She spotted colons which were italic instead of roman, brackets which were square instead of round, inconsistent abbreviations, misleading cross-references. Occasionally she made suggestions. She might observe, in looping pencil, that such-and-such a word was in her opinion vulgar rather than colloquial, or that the sense illustrated was figurative rather than transferred. She passed on her galley-proofs to Mr Rothwell, the joint deputy editor, but never enquired whether her annotations were finally acted upon. Mr Rothwell, a bearded, taciturn and pacific man, valued her meticulous eye, her sure grasp of the Dictionary’s conventions, and her willingness to take work home if a fascicle was shortly going to press. He remarked to himself and to others that she had a strangely disputatious attitude over words labelled as obsolete. Often she would propose ?Obs. rather than Obs. as the correct marking. Perhaps this had something to do with age, Mr Rothwell thought; younger folk were perhaps more willing to accept that a word had had its day.

  In fact, Mr Rothwell was only five years younger than she; but Miss Moss - as she had become once more after her disposal of Denis - had aged quickly, almost as a matter of will. The years passed and she grew stout, her hair flew a little more wildly away from her clips, and her spectacle lenses became thicker. Her stockings had a dense, antique look to them, and she never took her raincoat to the dry-cleaner. Younger lexicographers entering her office, where a number of back files were stored, wondered if the faint smell of rabbit-hutch came from the walls, the old Dictionary slips, Miss Moss’s raincoat, or Miss Moss herself. None of this mattered to Mr Rothwell, who saw only the precision of her work. Though entitled by the Press to an annual holiday of fifteen working days, she never took more than a single week.

  At first this holiday coincided with the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month; Mr Rothwell had the delicacy not to ask for details. In later years, however, she would take her week in other months, late spring or early autumn. When her parents died and she inherited a small amount of money, she surprised Mr Rothwell by arriving for work one day in a small grey Morris with red leather seats. It sported a yellow metal AA badge on the front and a metal GB plate on the back. At the age of fifty-three she had passed her driving-test first time, and manoeuvred her car with a precision bordering on elan.

  She always slept in the car. It saved money; but mainly it helped her be alone with herself and Sam. The villages in that thinned triangle south of Arras became accustomed to the sight of an ageing British car the colour of gunmetal drawn up beside the war memorial; inside, an elderly lady wrapped in a travelling-rug would be asleep in the passenger seat. She never locked the car at night, for it seemed impertinent, even disrespectful on her part to feel any fear. She slept while the villages slept, and would wake as a drenched cow on its way to milking softly shouldered a wing of the parked Morris. Every so often she would be invited in by a villager, but she preferred not to accept hospitality. Her behaviour was not regarded as peculiar, and cafés in the region knew to serve her thé à l’anglaise without her having to ask.

  After she had finished with Thiepval, with Thistle Dump and Caterpillar Valley, she would drive up through Arras and take the D937 towards Béthune. Ahead lay Vimy, Cabaret Rouge, N.D. de Lorette. But there was always one other visit to be paid first: to Maison Blanche. Such peaceful names they mostly had. But here at Maison Blanche were 40,000 German dead, 40,000 Huns laid out beneath their thin black crosses, a sight as orderly as you would expect from the Huns, though not as splendid as the British graves. She lingered there, reading a few names at random, idly wondering, when she found a date just a little later than the 21st January 1917, if this could be the Hun that had killed her Sammy. Was this the man who squeezed the trigger, fed the machine-gun, blocked his ears as the howitzer roared? And see how short a time he had lasted afterwards: two days, a week, a month or so in the mud before being lined up in known and honoured burial, facing out once more towards her Sammy, though separated now not by barbed-wire and 50 yds but by a few kilometres of asphalt.

  She felt no rancour towards these Huns; time had washed from her any anger at the man, the regiment, the Hun army, the nation that had taken Sam’s life. Her resentment was against those who had come later, and whom she refused to dignify with the amicable name of Hun. She hated Hitler’s war for diminishing the memory of the Great War, for allotting it a number, the mere first among two. And she hated the way in which the Great War was held responsible for its successor, as if Sam, Denis and all the East Lancashires who fell were partly the cause of that business. Sam had done what he could - he had served and died - and was punished all too quickly with becoming subservient in memory. Time did not behave rationally. Fifty years back to the Somme; a hundred beyond that to Waterloo; four hundred more to Agincourt, or Azincourt as the French preferred. Yet these distances had now been squeezed closer to one another. She blamed it on 1939-1945.

  She knew to keep away from those parts of France where the second war happened, or at least where it was remembered. In the early years of the Morris, she had sometimes made the mistake of imagining herself on holiday, of being a tourist. She might thoughtlessly stop in a lay-by, or be taking a stroll down a back lane in some tranquil, heat-burdened part of the country, when a neat tablet inserted in a dry wall would assault her. It would commemorate Monsieur Un Tel, lâchement assassiné par les Allemands, or tué, or fusillé, and then an insulting modern date: 1943, 1944, 1945. They blocked the view, these deaths and these dates; they demanded attention by their recency. She refused, she refused.

  When she stumbled like this upon the second war, she would hurry to the nearest village for consolation. She always knew where to look: next to the church, the mairie, the railway station; at a fork in the road; on a dusty square with cruelly pollarded limes and a few rusting café tables. There she would find her damp-stained memorial with its heroic poilu, grieving widow, triumphant Marianne, rowdy cockerel. Not that the story she read on the plinth needed any sculptural illustration. 67 against 9, 83 against 12, 40 against 5, 27 against 2: here was the eternal corroboration she sought, the historical corrigendum. She would touch the names cut into stone, their gilding washed away on the weather-side. Numbers whose familiar proportion declared the
terrible primacy of the Great War. Her eye would check down the bigger list, snagging at a name repeated twice, thrice, four, five, six times: one male generation of an entire family taken away to known and honoured burial. In the bossy statistics of death she would find the comfort she needed.

  She would spend the last night at Aix-Noulette (101 to 7); at Souchez (48 to 6), where she remembered Plouvier, Maxime, Sergent, killed on 17th December 1916, the last of his village to die before her Sam; at Carency (19 to 1); at Ablain-Saint-Nazaire (66 to 9), eight of whose male Lherbiers had died, four on the champ d’honneur, three as victimes civiles, one a civil fusillé par l’ennemi. Then, the next morning, cocked with grief, she would set off for Cabaret Rouge while dew was still on the grass. There was consolation in solitude and damp knees. She no longer talked to Sam; everything had been said decades ago. The heart had been expressed, the apologies made, the secrets given. She no longer wept, either; that too had stopped. But the hours she spent with him at Cabaret Rouge were the most vital of her life. They always had been.

  The D937 did its reminding elbow at Cabaret Rouge, making sure you slowed out of respect, drawing your attention to Brigadier Sir Frank Higginson’s handsome domed portico, which served as both entrance gate and memorial arch. From the portico, the burial ground dropped away at first, then sloped up again towards the standing cross on which hung not Christ but a metal sword. Symmetrical, amphitheatrical, Cabaret Rouge held 6,676 British soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen; 732 Canadians; 121 Australians; 42 South Africans; 7 New Zealanders; 2 members of the Royal Guernsey Light Infantry; 1 Indian; 1 member of an unknown unit; and 4 Germans.

  It also contained, or more exactly had once had scattered over it, the ashes of Brigadier Sir Frank Higginson, Secretary to the Imperial War Graves Commission, who had died in 1958 at the age of sixty-eight. That showed true loyalty and remembrance. His widow, Lady Violet Lindsley Higginson, had died four years later, and her ashes had been scattered here too. Fortunate Lady Higginson. Why should the wife of a brigadier who, whatever he had done in the Great War, had not died, be allowed such enviable and meritorious burial, and yet the sister of one of those soldiers whom the fortune of war had led to known and honoured burial be denied such comfort? The Commission had twice denied her request, saying that a military cemetery did not receive civilian ashes. The third time she had written they had been less polite, referring her brusquely to their earlier correspondence.

  There had been incidents down the years. They had stopped her coming for the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month by refusing her permission to sleep the night beside his grave. They said they did not have camping facilities; they affected to sympathise, but what if everybody else wanted to do the same? She replied that it was quite plain that no one else wanted to do the same but that if they did then such a desire should be respected. However, after some years she ceased to miss the official ceremony: it seemed to her full of people who remembered improperly, impurely.

  There had been problems with the planting. The grass at the cemetery was French grass, and it seemed to her of the coarser type, inappropriate for British soldiers to lie beneath. Her campaign over this with the Commission led nowhere. So one spring she took out a small spade and a square yard of English turf kept damp in a plastic bag. After dark she dug out the offending French grass and relaid the softer English turf, patting it into place, then stamping it in. She was pleased with her work, and the next year, as she approached the grave, saw no indication of her mending. But when she knelt, she realised that her work had been undone: the French grass was back again. The same had happened when she had surreptitiously planted her bulbs. Sam liked tulips, yellow ones especially, and one autumn she had pushed half a dozen bulbs into the earth. But the following spring, when she returned, there were only dusty geraniums in front of his stone.

  There had also been the desecration. Not so very long ago. Arriving shortly after dawn, she found something on the grass which at first she put down to a dog. But when she saw the same in front of 1685 Private W. A. Andrade 4th Bn. London Regt. R. Fus. 15th March 1915, and in front of 675 Private Leon Emanuel Levy The Cameronians (Sco. Rif.) 16th August 1916 aged 21 And the Soul Returneth to God Who Gave It - Mother, she judged it most unlikely that a dog, or three dogs, had managed to find the only three Jewish graves in the cemetery. She gave the caretaker the rough edge of her tongue. He admitted that such desecration had occurred before, also that paint had been sprayed, but he always tried to arrive before anyone else and remove the signs. She told him that he might be honest but he was clearly idle. She blamed the second war. She tried not to think about it again.

  For her, now, the view back to 1917 was uncluttered: the decades were mown grass, and at their end was a row of white headstones, domino-thin. 1358 Private Samuel M. Moss East Lancashire Regt. 21st January 1917, and in the middle the Star of David. Some graves in Cabaret Rouge were anonymous, with no identifying words or symbols; some had inscriptions, regimental badges, Irish harps, springboks, maple leaves, New Zealand ferns. Most had Christian crosses; only three displayed the Star of David. Private Andrade, Private Levy and Private Moss. A British soldier buried beneath the Star of David: she kept her eyes on that. Sam had written from training camp that the fellows chaffed him, but he had always been Jewy Moss at school, and they were good fellows, most of them, as good inside the barracks as outside, anyway. They made the same remarks he’d heard before, but Jewy Moss was a British soldier, good enough to fight and die with his comrades, which is what he had done, and what he was remembered for. She pushed away the second war, which muddled things. He was a British soldier, East Lancashire Regiment, buried at Cabaret Rouge beneath the Star of David.

  She wondered when they would plough them up, Herbécourt, Devonshire, Quarry, Blighty Valley, Ulster Tower, Thistle Dump and Caterpillar Valley; Maison Blanche and Cabaret Rouge. They said they never would. This land, she read everywhere, was ‘the free gift of the French people for the perpetual resting place of those of the allied armies who fell…’ and so on. EVERMORE, they said, and she wanted to hear: for all future time. The War Graves Commission, her successive members of parliament, the Foreign Office, the commanding officer of Sammy’s regiment, all told her the same. She didn’t believe them. Soon — in fifty years or so — everyone who had served in the War would be dead; and at some point after that, everyone who had known anyone who had served would also be dead. What if memory-grafting did not work, or the memories themselves were deemed shameful? First, she guessed, those little stone tablets in the back lanes would be chiselled out, since the French and the Germans had officially stopped hating one another years ago, and it would not do for German tourists to be accused of the cowardly assassinations perpetrated by their ancestors. Then the war memorials would come down, with their important statistics. A few might be held to have architectural interest; but some new, cheerful generation would find them morbid, and dream up better things to enliven the villages. And after that it would be time to plough up the cemeteries, to put them back to good agricultural use: they had lain fallow for too long. Priests and politicians would make it all right, and the farmers would get their land back, fertilised with blood and bone. Thiepval might become a listed building, but would they keep Brigadier Sir Frank Higginson’s domed portico? That elbow in the D937 would be declared a traffic hazard; all it needed was a drunken casualty for the road to be made straight again after all these years. Then the great forgetting could begin, the fading into the landscape. The war would be levelled to a couple of museums, a set of demonstration trenches, and a few names, shorthand for pointless sacrifice.

  Might there be one last fiery glow of remembering? In her own case, it would not be long before her annual renewals ceased, before the clerical error of her life was corrected; yet even as she pronounced herself an antique, her memories seemed to sharpen. If this happened to the individual, could it not also happen on a national scale? Might there not be, at some point in the first decades of the twenty-first century, one final moment, lit by evening sun, before the whole thing was handed over to the archivists? Might there not be a great looking-back down the mown grass of the decades, might not a gap in the trees discover the curving ranks of slender headstones, white tablets holding up to the eye their bright names and terrifying dates, their harps and springboks, maple leaves and ferns, their Christian crosses and their Stars of David? Then, in the space of a wet blink, the gap in the trees would close and the mown grass disappear, a violent indigo cloud would cover the sun, and history, gross history, daily history, would forget. Is this how it would be?

Rosa Parks and the hunting ban....

I was out with the Blencathra the day the ban passed, and in Exford at the White Horse that night. Usually busy, the place was almost empty. I spent the next week hunting on Exmoor, talking to people.

The mood was strange, and I tried to understand it. I believe I have, in an odd way.

I was born in fortunate circumstances in the American South, and I am just old enough to remember the end of overt segregation. Raised in a respectful environment, I didn't really begin to understand prejudice and stereotyping until I moved north. There, I found that as soon as I opened my mouth I was ignorant, bigoted, uneducated, and all the other fantasy attributes of the southerner. So I began to "get it" in a direct and personal way.

And I thought I understood the anger and sense of rejection that segregation caused. Talking to black people like Mr. M, who had served through the war with the Third Army, yet couldn't get a non menial job back home, I imagined how it must feel. But I didn't know.

In Exmoor, I saw that a million people had just been made second class citizens in their own country. Parliament told my hunting friends (and me) that we aren't wanted. Our contributions, our efforts, our way of life are all rejected. Our membership in the very society is revoked unless we stop being ourselves and accept our place.

So now I understand a little better. I understand the pilgrims, and I'll do my best to assist any hunting person who wants to come to the U. S. They will make great Americans. (Really, they are already Americans, they just don't live here yet.)

But I don't understand Rosa Parks.

I would have sneaked into the lot late at night, and blown the bus UP.

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Alright, I can't snag the pictures so I've done this with links. When you see one, open it in a new window and there you go. This is meant to be a skeleton, but he's a bit fat because I know editors would rather have more content than too little! I'm using Sarah's pictures from her website, but I'm sure she has lots more too.

Staghunting in France- Focus on the Hounds...

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6fe4b9c2#h6658c69e

 (another possible title- Hunting in France- the Same,  but Different!

It isn't every day that I have the chance to take American  friends for their first day staghunting in France. And when magnificent  hunting photographer Sarah Farnsworth comes along, you know the pictures will be better than real life!

We met, as usual, deep in the forest.

Even though we were early to the meet, we weren't first.

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h66213a25#h6fe4b9c2

French hunting with hounds- the chasse à courre- is a spectacle that has been refined since medieval times. It's the ancestor of English hunting, and so it's more formal. And it's France, so it's less formal.      

All French hunting is done in the forests, which have been carefully maintained for centuries. The woods are organized-  they are cut with two-horse-wide pathways in a pattern that resembles a pattern of spider webs. You always know where you are- every intersection has a name, and in this forest, a signpost telling you which clearing is which way.
http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6fd655f7#h64942c68

Just like a North  American day with hounds, more people show up. But they show up earlier, and there are more of them, and they are different-

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6cefed22#h66213a25

The first thing Americans notice is that all sorts of people, with all sorts of motive power, come out. On foot, in vehicles, on bicycles. Mounted hunters are distinctly a minority, although the etiquette is that they have the right of way. It's an occasion for everybody. This man on his very well muffled scooter is a regular.

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h684f5396

Like hunters in the states, everyone is smiling.

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h64942c68#h6fd655f7

And everyone shakes hands, or gets a kiss on the cheek!  The meet-and greet goes on for a while,  snacks come out, and the tufters straggle up. Just a coincidence.

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h68e533f1#h6c591eef

These hounds went out with their handlers at dawn, looking for signs of big red deer stags- this pack's quarry.  Horses show up, and their riders- the French are very efficient users of truck space.

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h60871554#h60871554

We joke that it's a 16-horse van. But Patrice, who's providing our livery for the day, always has wonderful horses. Well turned out, mannerly, and hard as nails.

And here come the hounds! They have their very own minivan-

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6fe4b9c2#h6157e8b1

"We want to hunt!"

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6cb2cf4d#h69b965cb

Out they get, and everyone gathers up for the rapport.

In the U. S., hunting is preceded by some announcements and social chitchat, but here things are getting different. The tufters line up, and each one tells the Master what he's found- or not found- in the solitary misty dawn. It's an example of how French hunting is more crowdsourced than ours is. Those volunteer tufters who think they have a good stag try to "sell" what they've found to the Master, and there's plenty of banter.  Eventually he decides where he will draw, and puts us all in the picture. He also warns us about possible problems, where things are going on in the forest, and so forth. So, to horse/truck/bike/track shoes!

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6cb2cf4d#h6e996fb7

The hounds know it's almost time.

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h69b965cb#h67cbe128

This is where another French difference starts- the music!

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h6bad70c3 

They have no truck with our little one note horns, senior hunters all carry full sized, valveless French horns wrapped around themselves. Everything that happens during a hunt has a specific tune to go with it, and "Let's go" is first. All through the day, you'll hear those horns telling you what's going on. Remember this s the woods, so unless you're right there, you can't see the action. But your ears will let you know if they have found, what kind of stag it is, when it crosses a road or goes along it, goes to water, or gets away out of the forest.

And by the way, another difference and one of my favorites- NO electronic communication. They'll send you home if you use a cell telephone to hunt, and I think a radio might get you a head shaving. If you can't keep up or get lost, you miss out. Eyes and ears were good enough for Charlemagne.

We're off!

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h69b965cb#h67cbe128

Dress is different here too- gold braid, long coats, and swords add panache and draw the eye in a way our somber livery doesn't.

Drawing is the same in Virginia or the Vendee. But when hounds strike, they just don't go. Because of wildlife management requirements, hounds can hunt only a mature stag. So all eyes are out to see the game- everyone is looking along the allees to see it cross.

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h63c0c2ed

 And another difference appears- there's no field! You're on your own here- everyone  goes where he thinks he'll have the best  chance to spot the quarry and hounds. Again, it's something I like and it would make most English and American huntsmen crazy. Thirty horses, twenty cars,  a hundred foot and bicycle people all over the place.

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h6841314d 

I love it myself, but it will look like seven train wrecks the first time you see it.


Once hounds are off, everyone is h-u-n-t-i-n-g. The focus is on hounds and the game, period. Even the horses know what's what-
http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h6c190791


And so we settled in for the middle.
Once hounds find, the stag puts on his skates and runs. Like a coyote back home, they have superior speed and strength, intimate territorial knowledge, and they evade for a living. So there's going to be an hour or two of find him lose him, draw again.

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h663a7781

Sarah will do whatever it takes to get the shot, you can't see it but she climbed a pretty good little bank to get this one, and took a pretty good tumble coming down quickly! You don't have to be on a horse to get hurt doing this.



And here we saw more of that crowdsourcing. The Master and the Huntsman weren't shy about asking what we'd seen, or what we hadn't seen. After a while, this whipper-in saw the hunted stag- lucky us, we were right there-  and we were off again!

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h68780a88

Injured hounds have priority, just like at home.

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h6927b919

Horses were getting tired,

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h6cb367b2

And people too. Another French difference- no alcohol out hunting! I know, it sounds crazy, but it's true.

The Americans were still in it!

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h66ff1538



 A tai-o,

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h6e8fd174

and we were off again! This find-lose-find took much longer on this day than usual, there was speculation that the stag was a visitor because  he did not seem to run typical routes. We got to see lots of forest!

And then, away! I must confess that your humble correspondent made the mistake of taking a chance on where he thought the stag would go. I have got to quit that thinking stuff, it hurts my head. I was wrong, and we were thrown well out.

It turns out that the stag left the forest! They do that now and again, and once they do, it's tough to catch them up again. Although I've seen this pack do it they didn't today. Shadows were lengthening, there were only a few people still up (including the Americans!), so they gave him best.

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h6137e3d9

I admit that I like this part of the hunting day a lot.

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h628587c1

Piled up hounds,

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h628587c1

tired horses,

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h645acdf7

Making sure everyone is accounted for,

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h6e9da132

and loading that last one who's just too tired to take another step.

http://www.sarahfarnsworth.co.uk/p831166707/h6658c69e#h6061964a

I've left off talking about differences, because this is universal. This might be different for you, though.  TheGirl diaried it- "We saw the hunted stag six times, six hours in the saddle, 45 Kilometers".

By French standards,  not a particularly big day.

 THE BOX

You asked for a box -

I love my hunting, and I encourage everyone who hasn't to go hunting in France.

There are packs of stag, roebuck, boar, rabbit, and even fox hounds all over the country.  Like American hunts,  they are happy to have visitors. If you want to ride, livery horses are usually available. If you just want to follow afoot or in car, the more the merrier.  Ask questions, and try to connect with someone to guide you around if you aren't assigned one. Just behave as you'd want a foreign visitor to your pack to behave and you'll be fine.

Venerie.org is the French MFHA site and is a good gateway. If you want more information, shoot an email to untacked and they will forward it on to me.

There you go. I'm way over word and picture count, so cut away. And if you want me to talk about other things, tell me what.

On review, there's not much heritage and dress up stuff so if you want more of it, let me know. I can sort of change it up and just do extended picture captions as it were if you like that instead.

HCB

Where are the sick people?

Listening to all the health care complaining, I'm confused by the absence of sick people.

Maybe I'm lucky, but I don't see lines of people seeking treatment snaking around the hospital I pass each day.

Nor are the streets filled with the collapsed. No dead carts making the rounds, either. My co workers seem to show up regularly enough that I don't notice many absences.

When people have heart attacks they get bypasses immediately, and I've never heard of an 18 week wait for a hip replacement, which takes 18 MONTHS in England.

So where are the sick people?

A wager for Senator Kerry...

I'd like a new car, so here's a bet for him, or anyone who whinges about "poverty in America".

Let's go to any place in this country where tax money is dispensed to the poor- food stamp office, housing project, or welfare office. We'll take a scale and a table of normal body weight.

For every applicant or recipient present who is under normal weight, I'll give him a thousand dollars.

For every one over weight, he gives me a thousand.

For every applicant or recipient present without a cellular telephone, I'll pay the same thousand. Every one with a cell, a thousand to me.

One proviso- the only applicants or recipients who count are those born to U. S. citizens.

Just for enlightenment, try going to one of those places yourself and doing a count of the portly cell carriers by eye. Your money at work.

Westminster Bribery Case

REX z; GEORGE, MACDONALD, MAXTON, 
AND OTHERS 

Corrupt Practices 

The Political Bribery case was concluded at the Old 
Bailey to-day, when nearly four hundred Members of 
Parhament crowded the dock 

Mr Justice Trout {in his summing-up to the jury) You 
have heard the lengthy and well-paid addresses of 
counsel, and you will now, if you can, divert your gaze 
from the distinguished figures in that dock and pay 
some attention to me 

The pnsoners include the whole of the Parhamen- 
tary Labour and Liberal Parties, His Majesty's Ministers 
(with three exceptions) and the man George They 
are charged under a section of the Corrupt Practices 
Act, 1854 (incorporated m the Corrupt Practices Act, 
1883), which says that any person shall be guilty of 
bribery who 

^shall directly or indirectly^ by himself or by any other 
person on his behalf y give or procurcy or agree to give or 
procure^ or ojer, promise, or promise to procurey or to 
endeavour to procure any office or employment to or for any 
voter y or to or for any person on behalf of any voter y or to or 
for any other person in order to induce such votes or refrain 
from voting ’ 

Now, you have heard in evidence that at the last 
General Parhamentary Election all the accused 
persons presentedf themselves as candidates to their 
respective constituencies, and the evidence is clear also 
in every case that they did promise to procure employ- 
ment for certain voters, as a result of which promises 
they did induce the exercise of millions of votes m their 
own mterest The promises varied m extent and con- 
fidence Some of the prisoners contented themselves 
with promismg to procure employment for particular 
sections of the people in particular trades, such as coal- 
mimng, or the cotton mdustry, others promised to find 
‘Work for AH’, and among these must be numbered 
the prisoner George, whose generous behef in his own 
capacity to find remunerative employment for all our 
citizens made a special impression on some of the 
witnesses 

There is very httle evidence that their promises have 
in fact been carried out, but that is not a relevant 
consideration The charge is one of bribery, not of 
deceit or false pretences (though that aspect of the 
matter may call for mqmry on some other occasion) It 
IS sufficient for the prosecution m this case to prove that 
the undertakings were made and that votes were given 
in return for them. 

It may occur to you, gentlemen, members of a later 
generation than my own, to inquire why these facts, if 
proved, should constitute an offence The answer is 
that m the year 1854 ^ very different view of the nature 
and responsibihties of the vote was held from that 
which IS common to-day In the much-abused nme- 
teenth century the exercise of the sufifirage was valued 
more as a pubhc duty than as a pnvate right. Men 
voted, or were expected to vote, after long mternal 
debate, for reasons directed to the general welfare, to 
remove an mcompetent Ministry, to uphold the honour 
or save the soul of their country, to 'defend rehgion or 
succour ihe oppressed, but not to advance their personal 
fortunes And Parliament, m the statutes already 
cited, took special steps to secure that the vote should 
never be bartered for private material gam, whether m 
the shape of money, place, or employment 

All this, as some of the prisoners confessed, almost 
with pride, has changed It is now a commonplace for 
Parliamentary candidates to mvite the support of the 
voter by the simple assurance that, if they are elected, 
the voter will receive more money, more food, and more 
material pleasure It is odd, perhaps, that this increase 
of materialism in pohtics should coincide with the 
advent to power of certain political parties which claim 
a monopoly of ideals, but it is the fact The result is 
that the vote is generally regarded not as a precious 
instrument by which each man may do his country 
good, but as a weapon of offence or cajolery by which 
his country may be influenced to satisfy lus material 
desires 

If this is the state of the public mmd (and that is not, 
I think, m dispute), it follows that those laws which 
govern the conduct of elections must be enforced with 
especial seventy and watchfulness Our conditions, in 
some cases our consciences, may have changed, but the 
law remains the same It is an offence to persuade the 
citizen to vote for this man or for that by holding out 
promises to provide him with employment, for this is 
to corrupt the character not only of the candidate but 
of the voter It is also to brmg mto the arena of pohtical 
warfare matters of trade and industry which are much 
better left out of it, but that is by the way There is no 
doubt m my mmd, and there can be httle in yours, that 
this offence — ^the offence of bribery — ^has been commit- 
ted by all the pMsoners The penalties provided by 
the Act are heavy> but you must not be deterred by
that consideration from brmging in a true verdict The 
penalties are twelve months’ imprisonment, with or 
without hard labour (or a fine of two hundred pounds), 
deprivation of the suffrage for seven years, and removal 
from and disqualification for any public office, and if 
the offender be a candidate, he also loses his seat (if 
elected) and is disqualified for ever from representmg 
the constituency Gentlemen, you will now consider 
your verdict 

The jury, without leaving the box, found all the 
pnsoners guilty, and m imposing the maximum 
sentences the judge said 

I have decided to inflict imprisonment rather than 
a fine m order to ensure that none of these persons 
shall be free to take part m the approachmg General 
Election It has been urged before me that the sudden 
mcarceration of the whole Cabmet may cause some 
trouble, but I am satisfied that the mconvenience will 
be both trifling and temporary Two hundred Members 
of the House of Commons will stiU remam at large, and 
these should without difficulty be able to provide a 
Government I may add that these proceedmgs were 
taken at the instance of a Mr Albert Haddock, and 
the nation has to thank him, not for the first time, for 
his enterprise and pubhc spirit 


Note — ^This case, decided m January, 1931, had a profound influence 
upon the technique of pphtics In the election which followed the 
‘crisis’ of the autumn, 1931, His Majesty’s Ministers vied with each 
other in promismg the electors not benefits but blows ‘We have 
reduced,’ they said, ‘your wages and your allowances and increased 
your taxes, and if we arc elected there may be worse to come * The 
more they threatened and bullied the people the more the people 
cheered The Government was returned to power by an imparalleled 
majority, while those who promised the people more work and higher 
wag^ and allowances were almost obhtcratcv