Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun (4 page)

Irony number one: when Europe's kings united against Napoleon in 1813, instead of maintaining a connection with France, Bernadotte led Sweden into the anti-French alliance and
played a key role in the ultimate victory over Napoleon. In the process he acquired Norway from Denmark, a territory Sweden retained until 1905. He became King of Sweden as Charles XIV
John, and his wife became Queen, upon the death of Charles XIII in 1818.

Irony number two: Napoleon had left
Désirée
for Josephine, but Josephine was unable to bear him
children.
Désirée
gave Bernadotte a son, who succeeded his father as King Oscar I.

Irony number three: the Bonaparte dynasty, overthrown in 1814, was briefly restored
under Napoleon's nephew in 1854, and finally put to rest in 1871. The House of Bernadotte sits
to this day upon the Swedish throne.

 

In the years before Italian unification was finally accomplished, only the Kingdom of
Piedmont-Sardinia was ruled by an Italian dynasty, namely the House of Savoy, the
Savoyard king at the time being Victor Emmanuel II. The Austrians ruled Lombardy and Venetia in the north; the
Papacy ruled the Papal States of Lazio,
Umbria
, Romagna and the
Marches
in the center; Bourbon nobles
ruled the duchies of
Parma
,
Modena
, and
Tuscany
; and all
Italy
south of the
Papal States
were
part of the Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies
, also ruled by Bourbons.

It was obvious to most Italian nationalists that unification under Victor Emmanuel was a goal both desirable and possible, a fact of which the Bourbons, the Austrians, and the Pope were
all well aware. For this reason any expression of opinion in print or speech linking Italian nationalism with the House of Savoy was regarded as a crime and was punished severely.

The Italians are great lovers of opera—many Italians maintain that they invented it—
and one of the most popular operatic composers of the era was Giuseppe Verdi, whose major
works
(
Rigoletto
, La
traviata
, Aida,
etc.) are still performed regularly all over the world. It was
therefore no surprise to the authorities to find graffiti celebrating the composer on walls and
bridges all over Italy. It took years for them to realize that when they saw the word
V E R D I
painted here and there in Rome, Milan, Venice, Naples, and elsewhere, they were actually seeing an abbreviation:

V
ittorio
E
mmanuel
R
ei
D
'
I
talia.

Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy.

 

Wilhelm I,
King of Prussia
and later Kaiser of the German Reich, was present as an
observer at the crucial Battle of Sedan in 1870. When the battle was over, Napoleon III was a captive and the
Prusso
-German armies were moving on
Paris
, and
Germany
was about to be unified under the Prussian crown.

The king had been by the side of his commanding general,
Helmuth
von
Moltke
, during
the entire battle, but disappeared toward the end of the fight. Alarmed that Wilhelm might be
wounded or captured,
Moltke
sent a search party to look for him. They found the king behind a
tree, happily eating a large piece of chocolate which, he confessed, he had not wished to sharewith
Moltke
.

 

When fascist dictator Benito Mussolini ordered the Italian invasion of
Ethiopia
in 1935,
King Victor Emmanuel III, was not particularly concerned. "If we win," he said, "I shall be
Emperor of Ethiopia. If we lose, I shall be King of Italy." Of course,
Italy
lost World War Two,
and after the Italian people abolished the monarchy via a plebiscite, he ended up being neither.

 

The monarchic temperament is more a matter of breeding than of actual position or
power. The last Austro-Hungarian emperor, Karl I, III, and IV (1
^st
of
Austria
, 3
^rd
of
Bohemia
, 4
^th
of
Hungary
respectively) abdicated at the end of World War One, and when he died, his eldest son Otto became heir to the Hapsburg throne(s). He was forbidden to enter any of the three
"kingdoms" to which he had a dynastic claim, and lived in relatively penurious exile in
Italy
and
France
. Nonetheless, Hapsburg royalists, and Otto himself, regarded him as the legitimate
claimant to the Austro-Hungarian throne.

By 1938 another Austrian, Adolf Hitler, had established himself as the single most important person in European politics. When the imperial pretender was asked his opinion of
Hitler, the monarchic temperament came to the fore. "Having not yet having had the opportunity
to receive Herr Hitler," Otto replied blandly, "I cannot say."

Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and future prime minister of the
United Kingdom
, was Napoleon's principal opponent at the Battle of Waterloo in June of 1815. As both the French and British forces arranged themselves for the coming battle, Napoleon rode back and forth before his troops upon his grey charger, waving his hat and encouraging his men. But he unwittingly rode within range of the British guns, and a young lieutenant asked Wellington if he might try a shot which, if successful, would have ended the conflict then and there. "Certainly not!" Wellington snapped. "Commanders of opposing armies have better things to do on the brink of battle than to take shots at each other." The ensuing battle left 63,000 men dead or wounded.

 

Benjamin Disraeli, later 1
^st
Earl of Beaconsfield, was prime minister of the United
Kingdom twice, the first time in 1868. Though in later years Queen Victoria came to adore her beloved "Dizzy" (especially after he arranged for her to be proclaimed Empress of India), she at
first took a personal dislike to him. At the customary dinner given by the Queen to honor the new
PM, the entire meal was, perhaps intentionally, poorly prepared; in fact, the temperature of the food testified to the fact that it had been cooked much earlier in the day and had been left sitting
around.

Needless to say, Disraeli was too dignified and proper to evince annoyance at the personal affront. However, after he drank the traditional champagne toast, he turned to an
associate and, in a whisper loud enough to be heard around the room, said, "At last! Something warm!"

 

Disraeli was a Jew by birth and upbringing bur converted to the Church of England in his teens. His Christian adherence notwithstanding, both he and his political opponents were acutely
aware of the ambiguous status attending upon his ethnic background. In one somewhat
confrontational exchange in the House of Commons, one MP sought to put him "in his place" by
contrasting Disraeli's recent British pedigree with his more deeply rooted one. "I remind you, Mr. Disraeli," he said, "that my ancestors were present at the signing of the Magna
Carta
."

"I commend you for your ancestors," Disraeli replied. "Mine were present at the proclamation of the Ten Commandments.”

 

On occasion tragedy can segue to humor. A good example of this can be seen in the death
of the prime minister of
Australia
, Harold Holt, in December of 1967. Holt and some friends were walking along a beach known for its dangerous undertow (or “riffs”) when he spontaneously stripped
off his shirt and plunged in for a swim. He was never seen again. Two days later the government
pronounced him dead. No remains were ever recovered—"If you drown out here you become part of the food chain pretty quickly," one Australian observed—but Holt was later
commemorated in the capital city of
Canberra
with the dedication of a public facility in his
name. It is a municipal swimming pool. (Perhaps this tells us something about Australians.)

Ramsey MacDonald, the first Socialist prime minister of
Britain
(in 1929 and again from 1931 until 1935), was well known for the impenetrability of his rhetoric. His turgid, convoluted,
desultory speeches often left his audiences applauding politely in stunned confusion. (Winston Churchill once commented that one of MacDonald's speeches was “… like the peace of God. It
passeth
all understanding.” A good example of this is the following excerpt from a speech he delivered to the House of Commonsregarding the unemployment problem.
(Needless to say, the author did not record this from memory. He looked it up.)

"Schemes must be devised, policies must be devised if it is humanly possible
to take that section, those unemployed who are not shortly to be reabsorbed into industry, and
to regard them not as wastrels, not as hopeless people, but as people for whom occupation must be invented somehow or another, and that occupation, although it may not be in the factory or in large-scale industrial activity or in large-scale organized industrial groups, nevertheless will be quite as effective for themselves mentally, morally, spiritually,
physically, than, perhaps, if they were to have been included in this enormous mechanism of
humanity which is not always producing the best result, and which, to a very large extent, fails in producing those good results that so many of us expect to see from a higher civilization based upon national wealth which, when comprehended, or apprehended, must needs lead to an inevitable conclusion. We are faced with the question of what to do in respect to this question, to that question, and to the other question, but perfectly obviously,
after we have faced the more superficial aspects of the several questions, we need to know in
relation to a complete plan what we are actually giving and what we are actually getting.
Therefore, when the departmental, or rather, the compartmental, exploration has gone on to a certain extent, it cannot be completed until somebody, coordinating all the problems, sets out
in one statement and declaration the complete scheme, once devised, that the House
(of Commons)
can pass to give hope for the future—until that scheme has been placed before you, you cannot possible hope to complete your examination of the departmental, or rather, the compartmental problems and questions. This is indeed itself a problem that must be faced."

If the reader can make heads or tails of this excerpt... well, to quote Rudyard Kipling,
you're a better man than I am,
Gunga
Din.

 

Engelbert
Dollfuss was chancellor (i.e., prime minister) of
Austria
from 1932 until his
assassination in 1934; he was also effectively a dictator from 1933 until his death.

The establishment of the Dollfuss dictatorship was made possible by the Austrian
national quality of
Schlamperei
,
which means a kind of slovenly good-
naturedness
occasionally succumbing to irrational fits of emotion. In 1933, when Dollfuss was already chancellor, a debate
in the Austrian parliament on a very important topic was about to conclude with a vote. The chamber was equally divided between the Social Democrats and the Christian Socialists, each with 81 members; despite the similarity of the parties' names, they were the radical left and
radical right, respectively. Just as the members began to deposit their written ballots in the
Ja
or
Nein
box, a socialist deputy left the chamber to go to the men's room. A colleague, realizing he
would miss the vote, hurriedly filled out ballot for him; but in his haste he not only signed the wrong name on the ballot, he also placed it in the wrong box.

The measure failed by a vote of 81 to 80. Outraged, the speaker of the house (who was
constitutionally prohibited from voting), a Social Democrat, screamed a resignation at the
members and stormed out of the chamber. Left in control were the two deputy speakers, one a
Social Democrat, the other a Christian Socialist. Each put forth his own name to be elected speaker, and each received, of course, 81 votes. Hurling imprecations at each other, both of them also resigned, and the house adjourned in pandemonium.

What no one seemed to have considered was that according to the Austrian constitution,
only the speaker or one of the deputy speakers could reconvene the parliament, and they had just all resigned. Dollfuss was thus left in place as a chancellor without a parliament. He proceeded to rule the country by decree, a dictator in fact if not in name. Never in History has the need to urinate had so deleterious an effect upon government.

 

Otherwise intelligent leaders have upon occasion a remarkable lapse of judgment. In
1936, Hitler ordered German troops into the Rhineland, an area of
Germany
on
France
's border
that had been demilitarized by the Versailles Treaty. This action is generally regarded as Hitler's first aggression, and the last opportunity to stop him short of a general war. When the
French approached their British ally to coordinate opposition to the act, Prime Minister Stanley
Baldwin dismissed their concerns by saying, "Jerry is only walking into his own back yard." ("Jerry" was an English nickname for Germans.) And when two years later Hitler demanded that
Czechoslovakia
cede to
Germany
a
territory called the
Sudetenland
, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain indicated a disinclination
to defend the Czechs from the German demand to dismember their state by referring to the
whole problem as "a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing."
Prague is 642 miles from London; and the people involved in the quarrel, the Czechs and the Germans, are people about whom, one surmises, the English knew at least something.