Recent travels between France and England give Dalrymple a glimpse at the manners of the general public, and he is not encouraged by what he sees.
In 1912, aged 24, Joyce Cary, who was later to become famous for his novels of Nigeria and bohemian artistic life (a strange but autobiographical combination), went out to Montenegro to be a stretcher-bearer for the British Red Cross in the First Balkan War. He was fearful that if he did not take the opportunity to witness war first-hand, he would never have it again, war having been abolished by civilisation. Two years later the First World War, in which he was wounded, taught him otherwise.
He wrote a book on his return from Montenegro, Memoir of the Bobote, that was only published eight years after his death in 1957. It is a young man’s book that treats war as if it were something of a lark, an adventure holiday. When it was over, ‘we assured [the victorious Montenegrin general] that we had enjoyed the war very much.’ At no point in the book does he say what the war and its attendant slaughter was about (200,000 Turkish soldiers were killed in it). This was simply not a question for him; later, he changed his attitude, which perhaps explains why he did not publish it in his lifetime.
There were British and Australian doctors attached to the Red Cross, and also to the Red Crescent on the other side of the lines. How many lives they saved, or how much succour they brought to the injured, may be doubted. Cary tells the following story:
He [a medical orderly] could barely stand for fatigue, cleared the room of soldiers, spread sheepskins for his patients, and made his examinations. Two were hit in the legs, one thigh, one calf, no harm done, one in the forearm, but no more than a chip out of the flesh – the fourth was shot through the belly.
Cary continues:
The best thing that can happen to a man hit in the belly is to be forgotten. Let him alone, don’t shake him, and his gut will close up quickly. This man had been carried from Dramos, up and down three miles of stony hillsides, and was lucky if he escaped peritonitis.
Despite Cary’s generally jaunty approach even to his own discomforts such as infestation with lice, the pit of war sometimes shines through. There is in his pages one of the best descriptions of a man dying shot that I have ever read:
There were three [men] crossing those five yards at the moment, and the first and second stepped safely past under the wall. The third was an old man, wounded in the leg. He was within a yard of the wall, when a single shot sounded overhead – he made a noise like a small dog whose tail has been trampled on, twisted half round, and fell like a sack. His cloak bellied out in the wind, fluttered and settled down on him. He was dragged under the wall, but died in a couple of minutes. At that angle, the bullet passed through the body from end to end…
Against such wounds, Cary had a liniment composed of eggs, olive oil, turpentine and vinegar.
He dedicated the book to Martin Leake, one of two Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons to have been awarded Victoria Crosses twice. Only one other person has won two VCs: surgeons are the bravest of the brave.
Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels
In granting an appeal by 3 men in England, the European Court of Human Rights basically called all life imprisonment unjust. Dalrymple responds at the Library of Law and Liberty:
There is nothing unjust (no derogation of anyone’s human rights) in society saying that a person forfeits his right to live as a free person in that society if he commits acts above a certain level of malignity. Indeed, one might say that a society that does not say such a thing has lost its humanity, its capacity to react to moral outrage. This does not mean that people who commit such acts should be dealt with cruelly, subject to torture, and so forth…
And I had to point out this delightful little nugget from P.D. James:
It was the crime writer, P. D. James, who spent much of her early career in the British government department that administered prisons, who pointed out that if someone who had committed crimes such as those imputed to these three men truly repented of what he had done, and truly understood its moral import, he would not campaign for his own release but be content to let others decide his fate. In other words, he would quietly accept his imprisonment as inherently just, however long it was.
Dalrymple reports on the results of a ten-year trial. Even “intensive lifestyle intervention” does not improve longevity among Type II diabetics.
Credit the ambitious goal of this Hilarious Pessimist installment, a defence of journalists.
Was Richard the Third really the murderous devil so famously portrayed by Shakespeare, or was he actually a good man wronged by history, as an increasing number of people seem to believe? The debate seems hotter than ever, especially after the astonishing discovery of Richard’s remains beneath a car park in Leicester.
Dalrymple tends toward the former view, but then, as he acknowledges, he would always give Shakespeare the benefit of the doubt, wouldn’t he?
Dalrymple responds at the Library of Law and Liberty to a recent interview of Lance Armstrong in Le Monde:
Armstrong cheated his way to a fortune, lying either implicitly or explicitly to the sporting authorities, to the general public and to his commercial sponsors. By all accounts he was a bully towards anyone within his power. None of this is pleasant or excusable, but they are the crimes and misdemeanors appropriate to an age of hypercelebrity and to a culture in which people are supposedly influenced in their purchases by the patently mercenary endorsements of people no more qualified than themselves to pronounce upon the quality of products for purchase. The use of sportsmen as human advertisements is obviously dishonest and is an appeal to human stupidity, or at least gullibility. Being part of this fatuous but extremely lucrative circus, Armstrong (an intelligent man) could have formed no very high estimate of the honesty of the upper echelons of the world or the intelligence of the general public.
According to Dalrymple at Pajamas Media, recent improvements in the diagnosis of pulmonary embolus are an example of how increased detection can often do more harm than good. Read it here.
The European debt crisis is one of those times when economists are better understood as novelists than scientists, says Dalrymple at the Library of Law and Liberty, because the crisis is a story of social and political problems best portrayed by reference to history, psychology and sociology.
I hope I will offend none of my Greek friends when I say that their country is not one in which an Irish-type response to the crisis could happen. The Greeks are a talented people, but organizing a functioning modern state is not one of their talents. Mistrust between various parties is so great that none of them believes that there is such a thing as the national interest, or if there were such a thing that anyone could or would put it ahead of his own individual or sectional interests. Corruption is so general that it has destroyed faith in even the possibility of honesty. By contrast the Irish, though they hold their political class in almost as deep contempt as do the Greeks, believing them to be a pack of thieving or at least of self-interested scoundrels, retain a sense of national unity and purpose, no doubt a legacy of the long struggle for independence (and it helps that it is so small a country that no one is more than a couple of phone calls away from the highest powers in the land). An appeal to the national interest in Ireland in time of obvious crisis will not therefore be regarded cynically, as just another ruse of one tiny section of the population to deprive everyone else of what is rightfully his. A constructive attitude in one country is not automatically reproducible in another, and depends upon history and mass psychology.
Dealers in antiques often scatter leather-bound volumes, usually of small value, around their shops to create an atmosphere of elegant learning. Recently in one such shop, I picked up a volume, the Justice of the Peace Reports, Vol. LXII, for 1908.
It fell open at page 467 and I was, as addicts so dishonestly say, hooked at once. It was a report of a case in the newly-instituted Court of Criminal Appeal:
J. was found on a road cutting off the head of a woman with a table knife. When spoken to, he continued to cut off the head. On help being obtained, J. was found to have taken the body into a field, where he was cutting off the arm of the woman. On being spoken to again, he continued to cut at the arm. On being threatened with a crowbar, he threw down the knife and was secured, but he insisted on taking with him the umbrella, hat and corsets of the woman, and spoke to those arresting him of the prices he would get for these articles.
Doctors testified that J. was mad, but he was nevertheless found guilty and sentenced to death. The appeal court sent him to hospital as a criminal lunatic.
There were many fascinating (and terrible) cases in this volume. A man appealed against his conviction for manslaughter:
The prisoner had assaulted his daughter, a baby, on November 13th, 1906, and again on December 29th, 1907; on both occasions the child received blows on the head. The prisoner was convicted and sentenced for each of these two assaults to four and six months’ imprisonment. On January 4th, 1908, she had convulsions, and on March 5th, 1908, she died. It appeared from the evidence that she died of meningitis set up by external injury to the head.
The man was found guilty of manslaughter, but his appeal was upheld because the judge misdirected the jury that it didn’t matter whether it was the injury of November 13th, 1906 or that of December 29th, 1907, that ‘set up’ the meningitis. But it did matter, because in English law you cannot be convicted of manslaughter if death occurs more than a year and a day after the original injury.
Then there was an account of the trial of a medical practitioner accused of procuring eight abortions on his mistress, a servant girl whom he first met when he treated her for ringworm. She agreed to the first seven abortions, but not the last, which he forced upon her. She wrote a letter to her friend that was intercepted by the doctor but later found by the police:
I fell in the family way in July and he brought on another miscarriage and I cried when he hurt me and I think he was cross because I made a fuss has (sic) I have had seven miscarriages before this and have never cried or made any trouble about it.
But what really infuriated the poor young woman was that the doctor was simultaneously having an affair with his housekeeper, whom he refused to dismiss at her jealous demand. She therefore shopped him to a rival medical practitioner, who – whether from moral outrage or an eye to the economic main chance, or from some combination of the two – informed the police.
Although a uterine sound and the letter were found in the doctor’s consulting room, he was acquitted for lack of probative evidence.
Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels