A History Maker (17 page)

4 – Servants. These had a talent for housework,
no wish to fight and preferred the company of men to women. They seldom left the Warrior house because their love affairs were with each other. The only class conflict was slight tension between servants attached to the officers' mess and hero-worshipping cadets who sometimes worked as waiters.

Page 65.

March, march, Ettrick and Teviotdale
etc. Based on
March, March, Pinks of Election,
a song published by Hogg in his Jacobite
Relics, Blue Bonnets Over the Border
is one of the many lyrics which Walter Scott (1771–1832) scattered through his novels. It is sung by Louis (one of Julian Avenel's followers) in
The Monastery
. Set to a pleasant marching tune and slightly bowdlerized it was so popular with anglophone choirs in the late historical era that T.S. Eliot quotes it in
The
Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles.
Like other Scottish songs its local popularity was ensured by emphatic use of place names.

Page 74.

coronach
= a Gaelic lament for the fallen.

Page 75.

bogie
= a call to cancel a game while people are still playing it.

Page 80.

glaikit sumphs
= irresponsible dullards.

Page 82.

girning
= whining or wailing through teeth exposed as in a grin.

dour
= determined, hard, stern, dull, severe, obstinate, unyielding, sullen, humourless, slow, sluggish, reluctant.

ahint
= behind; at the rear end.

disjaskit
= disjoined or discombobulated.

pawkie
= crafty; shrewd.

couthie
= friendly; sympathetic.

Page 88.

YE GOWK!
= you cuckoo.

YE DOITED GOMERIL!
= you crazed idiot.

YE STUPIT NYAFF!
= you puny insignificance.

YE BLIRT!
= you unexpected squall of rain; rain or wind; you childish outcry; you externally visible part of the genitalia of a female horse.

Page 107.

carnaptious
= irritable; contentious.

Page 108.

Secret societies (like governments, stock
exchanges, banks, national armies, police
forces, advertising agencies and other groups
who made nothing people needed) had ended
with the historical era.

All these organizations existed to create and protect money which everyone needed in the last centuries of the historical era. Wat did not know the wonderful value huge amounts of money added to the lives of those who owned them.

Page 111.

The times are racked with birth pangs. Every
hour Brings forth some gasping Truth
, etc. These lines are by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94) Bostonian doctor, professor of anatomy and essayist. In 1858 his
Autocrat
of
the Breakfast Table
made him famous by its playful wit, fresh unconventional tone and vignettes in verse. The monstrous but quickly domesticated truths he describes here are nineteenth-century geological and biological discoveries not foreshadowed in the Bible. At first many feared these contradicted the word of God, undermined organized religion and would overturn established authority. In a few years it was obvious that ecclesiastical, legal and political bosses were as firmly established as ever, and scientific discovery was making industrial investment more profitable.

It was written by an American judge
heralding fascism.

This statement is untrue. The speaker has confused the nineteenth-century doctor and essayist with his son of the same name, a U.S.A. Supreme Court Chief Justice who ruled in 1927 that third generation idiots could be legally sterilized, and also lived to see the rise of Hitler. The first O. W. Holmes could not herald fascism. He lived when the world's most fascist states were European monarchies or the colonies of European monarchic empires. In those days no American would have thought such places patterns for the U.S.A.

Page 111.

Keep right on to the end of the road, Keep
right on to the end!
etc.

Probably the best-known song recorded by Sir Harry Lauder (1870–1950) Scottish mill boy and coal miner who became one of Britain's most popular music-hall comedians. The mindless, onward-trudging optimism of the words and tune comforted many in the era between two World Wars. Lauder's trite verses and use of a Lowland Scottish accent while wearing a Highland kilt made him particularly loathed by the great poet Hugh MacDiarmid, who also spoke with a Lowland Scottish accent and often wore a Highland kilt.

Page 116.

Those [eighteenth-century] Europeans
thought they were safer than the Imperial
Romans.

The historian Edward Gibbon (1737–94) began his most famous book thus:

In the second century of the Christian Aera,
the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest
part of the earth, and the most civilized portion
of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive
monarchy were guarded by ancient renown
and disciplined valour. The gentle, but
powerful, influence of laws and manners had
gradually cemented the union of the provinces.
Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and
abused the advantages of wealth and luxury.
The image of a free constitution was preserved
with decent reverence; the Roman Senate
appeared to possess the sovereign authority,
and devolved on the emperors all the executive
powers of government. During a happy period,
A.D. 98–180, of more than fourscore years, the
public administration was conducted by the
virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian
and the two Antonines
.

Gibbon deliberately used phrases prosperous Britons used about their own nation:
most civilized portion of mankind, extensive
monarchy, union of the provinces, free
constitution
etc. He then described Roman civilization slowly, continually collapsing through thirteen centuries of Christianity, German invasion and Mohammedan conquest until nothing remained but impressive ruins and words in books. However, he found differences suggesting his own civilization was more secure. The Roman Empire had failed because ruled by a single city: first Rome, then Constantinople. The civilization to which Gibbon belonged was European — not just British — and ruled the world from London, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Madrid et cetera, from
many
capitals of nations too strong to be defeated by outside invaders, too united by shared advantages to seriously damage each other. Some were monarchies, some republics, but mutual toleration and an intelligent economic system were common to all, and their mastery of explosive armaments made them safe from barbarians.

Gibbon completed his
Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire
in 1788. The French Revolution started a year later and convinced him that civilization would always be a few brief decades between eras of barbarism. In this he differs from Thomas Carlyle who believed
human history would have been meaningless if the French Revolution had NOT broken out.

Note: The notion that a civilization, empire or nation is a prosperous minority for whom the rest exist was a historical commonplace, though the size of the minority varied. Here are a few of their names: Aristocracy, Equestrians, Lords, Gentry, Officers, Brahmins, Mandarins, Court-and-Camp, Church-and-State, The City, The Bourgeoisie, Le Monde, Society, The Party, The Nomenclatura, The Executive Class and (in twentieth-century England where social manipulators were too modest to declare themselves) The Middle Class.

Page 116.

Our rational Utopia is about to go boom and
fall apart too and you, Wat Dryhope, are the
virus of the plague which is going to
destabilize it.

destabilize
= to secretly undermine or subvert a government or economy so as to cause unrest or collapse, thus making a land available to outsiders who have not declared war on it. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries civilized traders did this by giving native tribesmen, in return for local produce, blankets in which people had died of smallpox; but the
most effective way of weakening people was by destroying their food supply. After the United States government had signed a peace treaty with the central American redskin nations it built forts across the prairies to ensure the treaty was kept. The soldiers in the forts, assisted by white settlers and sportsmen, then exterminated the buffaloes on which the Indians depended for food. Indians who fought to prevent this were killed with rifles and machine guns because they were breaking the treaty. The starving remainder (chiefly women and children) had to beg for food at the forts and were given some on condition that they shifted to less fertile lands, lands which the white man did not want until oil was discovered on them a few decades later.

In the twentieth century rich trading companies toppled electoral governments in South America and Asia by a combination of bribery, financial manipulation and lying news stories. They were assisted by governments they had bribed. Since these governments were nominally democratic the assistance was given chiefly through
secret
intelligence networks.

The virus used by Delilah Puddock to destabilize the modern world was developed on
the K20 asteroid, and aimed to combine the advantage of all previous methods. It was a normally harmless strain of the common cold which she passed to Wat through sexual congress after weakening his immune system with drugs. It was so infectious and contagious that a few hours later he passed it to almost everyone he spoke to or who shook his hand. The virus had hardly any noticeable effect on people's health, but harboured a nanomechanism which became active and started replicating when it touched a powerplant, eventually destroying the plant's ability to photosynthesize. The inventors of this plague hoped to achieve the following results.

1 – The death of half the world's powerplants in a week. Households using them would have no food but what they grew or could hunt on the commons. Besides hunger they would also lack heat, lighting, sewage disposal and means of recycling waste.

2 – In seeking help from uninfected neighbours they would spread the disease further. When households in uninfected districts realized this they would keep out infection by creating boundaries and forbidding the starving to cross. This would enclose the commons, make all travellers dreaded and rejected, divide humanity once more into the desperate poor
and selfish prosperous.

3 – The frontiers would be defended by soldiers who would want guns, grenades and bombs to avoid being infected through hand-to-hand fighting. These would be ordered from domestic powerplants, thus depriving homes in the uninfected areas of items everyone took for granted and putting women under military rule. Generals would also form world-wide alliances to keep the poor householders in their places. A stern military patriarchy would therefore replace mild matriarchy as a system of government.

4 – The Red Cross would try to organize famine relief co-operatively through the open intelligence net but be defeated by the size of the problem. The network would soon evolve seedlings of a plague-immune powerplant, but since these would be distributed under military control the dominant officer class in healthy areas would first replace their own powerplants with the plague-immune kind, postponing help for the poor indefinitely for reasons of security.

5 – Powerplants take at least thirty years to reach household-supporting size and before then the new ruling class would see any wide extension of peaceful prosperity as a miserable levelling down, a failure of law and order. Like all patriarchies they would have acquired wives
and mistresses who supported them and wanted to give their advantages to their children. They would do so by continuing the scarcity which allowed them to dominate the rest. The patriarchs would therefore grow powerplants on estates carved out of the commons, employing some of the poor to keep the rest out and paying them with food and occasional luxury items. In these conditions it would soon become possible to run the world on a monetary basis again.

6 – Chaotic historical eras tend to be dominated by monstrous egoists. Alexander the Great, Augustus Caesar, William the Conqueror, Tamerlane, Henry the Eighth, Ivan the Terrible, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Bismarck, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Thatcher would have been harmless if treated as equals by sensible people. But in competitive historical states common sense is scorned. Both rich and poor want leaders who embody Godhood, Destiny, Unyielding Reality, so many give unlimited obedience to whoever best acts such parts. Delilah Puddock's clique of plotters gloried in their insane egoism. They were sure their longevity and foreknowledge of events would make them rulers of a new historical era.