Though the whole Country stands under Requisition, and every man is expected to bear for the Republic every conceivable sacrifice of person and property, yet to all owners of luxury Dogs and Horses who lose their lives during the State of Utmost War there is promised, unconditionally, compensation for the full value of the animal lost.
How is this? Among Men we have abolished Nobility; among Horses and Dogs we introduce it anew!—cry Schmeck and many others. But Hrebs cares not for distinctions among Animals, only for distinctions among Men; and thunders forth: Why is it that the Peasant, whose common Horse and mongrel Dog help him in his daily labour, receives no promise of compensation should they perish, while the Rich Man, whose Brelsing Red Hound and Funter-Habler—or, formerly, Esterclausen—Horse serve him for nothing but diversion, receives such a promise?
Nevertheless, this had been the condition laid down by the Masdenites for their support of the State of Utmost War. For to many of their electors Dogs and Horses are not merely a pastime but the principal business of their breeding; and so the vote must be given.
Urpen, knowing well the principled character of the Henscherites, knowing for what values they profess to contend, and being well acquainted with the theoretical foundations of their political Philosophy, explains to them that this is not the establishment of Nobility among Animals. For all Dogs and all Horses shall be treated equally; and to the Animals themselves it is indifferent whether their owners receive ten coins or ten thousand in compensation from the State when they perish. What is rewarded, rather, is the Man who preserves rare breeds of Dogs and Horses: patriotic, in relation to Guntreland, whose interest lies in the development of Dog-breeding and Horse-breeding; and moral, in relation to the Diversity of Species in Nature.
At the instant of voting there is heard also the Presidential Bell. Henscherite Bipler the Elder—for there is, in the Assembly, a Bipler the Younger!—the presiding officer of the moment, signals to the Representatives of his Club that they are to support the proposal as part of the bargain; and thereby to make possible the Masdenite support for the most important Decree. Thus the Decree concerning Luxury Horses and Dogs passes also.
(...)
Yet stronger than any Decree, stronger than all Decrees together, in raising the general spirit against Royalism, was the event that occurred upon the steps of the National Assembly after the Assembly had voted its measures.
There stands, beneath the pillars of the great entrance to the Parliamentary Edifice, throughout the whole sitting, a man evidently drunk, Tricolour ribbons fluttering from his garments, singing—or rather howling, for he has little acquaintance with Music—“Honour the Constitution, Citizens!” and pointing upward with his hand toward the frieze upon which those same words are inscribed.
From time to time some passer-by joins him for a few notes, then proceeds upon his way, turning again to his business, or toward one of the public Orators from whom he may hear something more.
The voting ends.
A company of Representatives is the first to emerge from the Building. Among them is Favus: the good-natured, rotund man, formerly a Post-Coachman, elected to the Assembly from the mountainous Central-Guntreland district of Proren.
The inhabitants of Proren had reasoned thus: that it were perhaps best for them to be represented in the National Assembly by a Post-Coachman, “for he has travelled the most, seen the most people, and knows the greatest number of curious stories; therefore he must possess the greatest wisdom.”
And this confidence Favus had, in truth, justified. In the Assembly he had taken an active part in many discussions; and frequently his practical amendments, founded upon personal experience and knowledge of men, had enriched the Laws—nay, even several Articles of the Republican Code itself.
Now the man upon the steps, seeing Favus emerge, stretches wide his arms in an ecstasy of joy. He rushes forward; he embraces the Representative; and there, locked together in patriotic fraternity, they begin to sing the Hymn.
But Favus is struck by one strange circumstance.
This Patriot does not appear to know the new words of the Hymn very well.
In the Fourth Stanza he obstinately sings “Kingdom” where the Republic has written “Fatherland”; “Crown” where the Republic has written “Glory”; and finally, in the refrain of that Fourth Stanza, “King” where the sacred word is “Constitution.”
Favus would correct him.
Alas!
He shall not utter a single word.
For in the hand of the Stranger there flashes the blade of a knife—and in an instant the blade is buried in the throat of the People's Representative.
The Assembly Guard comes rushing forward with drawn sabres.
Too late!
All that remains for them is to strike down the Assassin as he attempts to flee. Wounded, he falls upon the pavement beside the already lifeless Favus.
The stupefied multitude tears itself loose from every side and surges forward to annihilate the murderer.
But the Assembly Guard succeeds in restraining them, crying:
“Let him be! Vernas will cast him to the Dogs; that is better!”
Fifteen minutes later, before the astonished and terrified Judicial Committee, the Assassin is identified as Nicholas von Mariburg, fanatical younger son of a Count.
Proudly he declares:
“His Majesty the King has condemned to death all Arch-Usurpers who call themselves Representatives of the People; and I have executed his sentence upon one of them. You, Murderers of Princes, have a still worse destiny awaiting you.”
“Once men waited in turn for admission to the King's Supper,” answers Vernas, blazing with hatred and wrath; “today men wait in turn to attend the Dinner of my Dogs—and thou shalt receive that honour before thy proper turn!”
Several Members of the Committee demand that the prisoner be kept for several days longer under examination, that possible knowledge of further crimes in preparation may be extracted from him.
Vernas will not have it.
He persuades the majority.
And immediately the prisoner is cast to the Dogs.
So is the sentence executed.
“The speed of Republican Justice restores to all good Citizens their sense of security and moral purity,” writes Vernas in his judgment.
But the fury of the Dogs is nothing beside the fury of the People.
For one of the People—their Representative, into whose person they had invested a portion of their own natural Sovereignty—has been murdered, by command of a Tyrant, before the very gates of the holiest National House.
Can it be that even now the Tyrant may bestow Death upon whomsoever he pleases—and none can prevent him?
“The abominable murder of the brave and honest Republican, Citizen Favus, has filled every Republican heart with a burning thirst for vengeance,” we read in Henscher's New Regime.
Mobilisation is hastened.
And behold!
In a few days the Republic possesses thirty complete Armies.
The Decree of the State of Utmost War, so lately a document upon paper, is everywhere becoming Reality.
“Woe unto those against whom an entire Continent has arisen!” writes Henscher in letters of thunderous boldness.
And the People, taking up the words, carry them from street to street, from square to square; they inscribe them upon their Banners and Standards, and raise them above the heads of the newly assembled Legions.
The Continent has arisen.
The Republic has heard the trumpet.
And Royalism—let it tremble.
The Most Bellicose State of the whole Nation stirs every man and every thing to personal sacrifice for the Public Interest: some bring their pewter vessels, that they may be melted down into bullets; others inscribe upon their houses, in great letters visible through the spy-glasses of balloon-crews, the words “POWDER-MAGAZINE,” “WEAPONS FOUNDRY,” or “REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEE,” that they may tempt the enemy balloons to expend their explosive freight upon these, rather than upon targets more vital to the Republic; others pour forth their blood, that they may give it freely to the Vampires who, without cessation, dig through the cellars in search of saltpetre. In the municipality of Koldorf-on-Erna, in the Fifteenth Region—and let the reader picture it as he may—Citizens, being short of draught-horses, have harnessed themselves, that they might convey, with all possible speed, the materials required for the repair of the roads.
But look now; and look with especial attention, upon this thing which we behold at Loransburg, in our West, where the Revolution itself was born; and the date is the twenty-eighth of Hirandial, Year Twenty, of our Free and Natural Republic. Citizen Diren, Commander of a Loransburg Quart and sworn member of the Club of the Friends of Virtue and the Republic, issues an order that the printing-house of Citizen Gerifeld, in whose cellar the Immortal Loransburg Proclamation of the Founding of the Republic was printed, and which stands within that Quarter, must be defended at any cost: for information has just been received from spies that the Royalists have selected, for that very day, this target of peculiar and sacred significance to all Republicans.
The information has but just arrived; the hostile balloons are already near, upon their work of destruction; there is no time to summon assistance in the shape of further Republican balloons. Therefore, by order of Citizen Diren, there rises from the Quart the single balloon at the disposal of the Quart Command; and in it, as crew, a company of brave Constitutional Guards from Vorena, who happen to be there because Loransburg is short of men. And with them—for the affection which the crews of ships bear towards mascots from the sea-waves has now migrated also into the heavens—a special Balloon Mascot: a uniformed monkey, round whose arms, likewise, are bound tricolour ribbons.
The People in the streets of Loransburg gaze in astonishment as the tricolour balloon fearlessly approaches a group of ten hostile aircraft, all of them towing upon ropes balloons with little barrels of gunpowder, destined for the destruction of targets upon the earth; and then, with despairing fury, and amid thunderous cries of “Boo!,” they perceive the dreadful fact that from the basket of the tricolour balloon there has unfurled a flag bearing a greyhound, and that the crew have evidently resolved to defect to the superior enemy, under whose safe escort they might fly away to Royalist territory.
The balloons of the Coalition sound their trumpets in salute to the allied balloon; and the tricolour balloon, to the supreme horror of the spectators below, and amid the most thunderous cries of “Boo!”, takes its place in formation with the enemy.
At that moment, when the formation of red, green, and one black-silver-white balloon was already flying above the heavens of the Quart in which stood the intended object of its attack, amid such tremendous noise that it seemed as though the very sky above Loransburg were crashing down upon the earth—the sky itself burst into flame. An explosion blazed forth, resembling the end of the world as told in ancient legends and prophecies, and even the descriptions of the cataclysm of Ferdinand’s Armada.
When the Citizens of Loransburg had recovered from that first astonishment—which, amid such thunderous tumult and destructive fireworks in the heavens, must indeed have been prodigious—they, and soon the whole Republic, learned the truth: the Constitutional Guards had ascended in a balloon crammed with barrels of gunpowder; by cunning they had approached the enemy; and then they had blown themselves and him into the air together, thus saving the Republican sanctuary from destruction.
Among the personal effects of one of the Republican heroes who perished upon that occasion, left behind in the Quart hotel, there was found a sheet of paper upon which were written the words:
“On the wings of Freedom, and through a thousand enemies, we fly.”
Words which, in an instant, became the battle-cry of the whole Air Service and of the Republican People in general; words which good Republican women sew upon the tricolour balloons, and which Republican airmen pronounce as they ascend.
Meanwhile, even in the House of Honesty, and in the other prisons, crowded with those condemned for all those offences which, to every serious man, are truly insignificant, though sternly punished by the Republican Code, the prisoners, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, perform labours useful to the defence of the Republic. Whereupon Urpen rises in the Assembly and calls for a general amnesty.
But Henscher answers that such a thing would itself be an insult to the prisoners, who, as Citizens and Republicans, have the right to see Republican Law carried out upon them.
Such, then, are the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, for which men fly through a thousand enemies and blow themselves into the air, merely that the Sanctuary wherein those Rights were first solemnly proclaimed may be preserved!
The Loransburg Constitutional Guards have thus given us an example of how Citizens behave; but numerous also, in those same days, are the examples of how Citizens—or men at all—should never, nowhere, behave, if they desire to deserve those titles in their true meaning.
On the twentieth of Hirandial we hear a horrible din, and cries of “Let us out!” resounding from the empty underground cistern beneath the Boulevard of Equality, where almost the entire number of former Aristocrats of the Capital, together with the members of their households, have been packed in a mass, there to await their appearance before a Court of Urgency which shall distinguish the more guilty from the less guilty. The multitude crammed into this subterranean space is so great that in the cistern a man no longer has room to stretch out his arms. Horrified, and accustomed to comfort, the unhappy creatures shriek and cry, “Let us out!”
Most zealous in bringing these people to this strange dungeon are certain curious men whom we have never before seen: dressed in grey shirts resembling those of madmen, save that their sleeves have been cut away, with tricolour ribbons round their necks; they bully the people down into the cistern and, with rough gestures, fling them inside. One of them, a man of extraordinarily massive build, with slanting eyes which betrayed some disorder of the mind, leaps about upon the pavement above the underground cistern with an almost cheerful smile, from whence, thanks to the drain, the lamentations of the prisoners can be heard loudly.
Such scenes we behold in Eustata; but we behold them also in the Provinces. In the North, castles and palaces are blazing—those in which dwell the former Aristocratic families who were among the first to accept the Republic, and whose possessions were therefore not taken from them.[1]
The Regional Commander of the Ninth Region sends the Constitutional Guard to investigate these burnings, declaring that every good Citizen and every building in the Republic must be protected. In that extraordinary reversal of feeling characteristic of this time and this place, the Citizens who had rejoiced at the burning of the palace incited by the Hrebsovian Quarts are, only a few days later, vying with one another as to who shall help its former inhabitants most, and who shall provide them with a roof over their heads—especially when they discover that, despite their origin, these same persons had been active in Republican affairs during the Utmost State of War.
The wondrous Castle Lerwinstein, famous for its towers, its stained glass of Vorenian glass, and its pointed roofs adorned with mosaics, is transformed, on one of these days, into a heap of ashes and ruins.
And what general rule may we extract from these days, all marked by the Utmost State of War, mobilisation, the manufacture of weapons, the requisitioning of horses, mass hysteria, and the crimes appropriate thereto?
This much: the Quarts and places in whose administration the Masdenites are in the majority hold, first of all, to Order, and to the principle that all activities of the Utmost State of War shall proceed according to plan and without irregularity; the Quarts and places in whose administration the Henscherists are in the majority do the same, but, notwithstanding the demands and comprehensiveness of raising the whole Nation to the highest state of military readiness, they do not fail to notice even the smallest violation of the Republican Code, and to punish it in the manner of Vernas; finally, the Quarts and places in whose administration the Hrebsovans are in the majority call upon the newly recruited army to “leave no traitors behind who will slaughter our wives and children,” to “not permit nobles and Aristocrats to live until their master returns,” and all the rest of those expressions which are but euphemisms for murder, plunder, destruction, and every conceivable crime, directed against all upon whom there rested the slightest public suspicion that, for whatever reason, they might be sympathisers with the Old Regime.
Let there here be mentioned by name but one place: Reftelburg, a city in the Eastern Massif which might have been known for the nearness of its mountain peaks, its almost unreal waterfalls, and its precipices at which the breath of man is arrested; but which, while the world endures, shall remain known for the four hundred former nobles and Royalist persons massacred after a dubious trial before a District Court filled with Hrebsovans.
Indeed, never before in the history of mankind, in any one period and upon any one continent, had anything even remotely approaching so much blood been poured forth, nor so many lives violently extinguished, as during the Guntreland Revolution!
Let us record here also that in many places the Quart administrations, where the Hrebsovans formed their majorities, released hungry Werewolves into the dungeons in which suspected Royalists and enemies of the Republic had been heaped together, after summary trials; and thus, according to the records of the Quart Committees, which even today we may read with astonishment, “the question of executing the sanctions and the food question of a portion of the population were resolved by a single method.”
The delegation of the municipality of Mils-on-the-Ocean, which reported one such “single method” to the National Assembly itself, received, upon the initiative of the Hrebsovian Representatives, praise and honourable mention in the Banner of the Republic. Representative Filusen, a member of the Main Committee of the Hrebsovian Club, even proposes before the National Assembly itself a law whereby the food question, if it cannot be resolved by the just distribution of all provisions, shall be partially resolved by making all condemned enemies of the Republic into food for Werewolves, while the blood alone shall be left to the Vampires—thus contributing also to the solution of the blood question.
There are even a number of Henscherists who, seeing in this nothing but pure Rationalism—and Henscher himself once said that every death-sentence upon a Citizen is a crime, while every annihilation of a traitor is a virtue—show an inclination to vote in its favour. But the majority which the various shades of decent men still possessed in the Guntreland Parliament causes this “practical” conception nevertheless to be rejected.
The Assembly, moreover, officially forbids the Quarts to continue tolerating cannibalism as a lawful means of destroying condemned enemies of the Republic. Yet this practice, and this Assembly proposal, as we shall see, will not remain without influence upon certain other important events.
The Assembly may not yet be ready to permit the flesh of the condemned to be eaten; but towards the drinking of their blood it displays a far smaller degree of disgust.
The Constitutionally prescribed method of “annihilation” of confirmed enemies of the Republic—which provides that immediately upon their being condemned for crimes against the Republic they shall at the same instant be placed outside the law and cut down on the spot, or with the smallest possible delay, by the furious mob, or devoured by enraged dogs which the mob shall set upon them—corresponds to the Henscherist conception, which regards the death penalty as immoral except in the self-defence of the Republic when mortally threatened by its enemies, and which regards ceremonial executions upon machines specially designed for that purpose as a cruel perversion of the Old Regime.
But it suits no less well the Vampires, thirsting for free blood, who, from the very instant that a man is placed outside the law, throw themselves upon him with a ferocity equal to that displayed by the dogs and the most hardened Anti-Monarchist Humans.
And as far as the Royalist émigrés in Kelenburg, there spread a report—which we have no reason not to regard as true—that at the very “annihilation” of Princes Clarens and Rupert, the Vampires and the hungry dogs fell upon the unfortunate condemned with equal fury. In the eyes of the émigrés, this confirms that all the laws and customs of the Republic are precisely what they are in order to suit monstrous races.
On the other hand, the proposal of the Hrebsovans—that, since all blood in the Republic, like the Citizens themselves in whose veins it flows, has been requisitioned in the name of the People, “Citizens for whom the consumption of human blood is necessary for survival and the performance of their Republican duties” should receive it freely, by its being supplied without payment by those sentenced to exile or imprisonment, as well as by other Citizens selected by lot, in honour of universal solidarity, to give blood—is rejected; but by a very narrow majority, one which alarms all who still hold humanity dear.
The balance between decency and the rejection of all human custom rises and falls, from one side to the other, from day to day.
It is understood, the National Assembly—or rather that portion of it which still remains decent—does not remain silent before all these events, which, in Zold’s words, “dishonour the Republic more than such conduct would dishonour even a Tyrant.”
Whatever we may think of an Oskar Vingl, in reading portions of his speeches preserved in the minutes of the Assembly during these days, we discover in them the eternal voice of Civilisation and Lawfulness protesting against Crime, Savagery, and Anarchy:
“Do you see, dear Representatives of the People, what sort of country it is in which we live? Murders without trial are taking place, massacres, destruction of property, including cultural treasures. It is dreadful that in many places neither the Constitutional Guard nor any other lawful authority does anything to stop these crimes, but instead submits itself to the uncontrolled mob and its shameful passions.
“We cannot expect the subjects of Tyrants to demand freedom for themselves and join us, if we give them an example of Freedom in which an honest and decent man possesses even less personal liberty than under Tyranny; if persons and property are not protected by Law; if things occur from which any normal man must recoil in disgust.
“How are we to influence this People to change? How are we to make them defeat not merely the external enemy who wishes to return them to chains, but also their own defects; to civilise themselves; to replace barbarous vengeance with respect for lawful procedure? We need, I say again, serious Enlighteners.”
Thus speaks he on the second day of Cunical.
Vingl’s words are drowned in the torrent of Parliamentary shouting; and the enraged People, Hrebsovism, Vampirism, and Lycanthropy continue upon their way, provoking before them still greater shrieks and howlings from their victims.
But, Citizen Vingl, would Crime disappear merely because barbarous vengeance had acquired the outward form of respect for lawful procedure?
People’s Delegations, entering the Assembly Hall every hour, and whose proposals are the most exact barometer of the temper of the Nation, after the proclamation of the Most Bellicose State, come with increasing frequency during the opening days of Cunical bearing one proposal which, in its milder form, reads the imprisonment of all former Aristocrats and men of the Tyrant, and, in its harsher form, the annihilation of all former Aristocrats and men of the Tyrant!
Truly, this is a peculiar measure: the annihilation of so vast a multitude of human beings, among whom are many who have committed no crime whatever save that they were born with the title of Nobleman or in the ranks of the King’s men.
In an Assembly filled with the clamour of Hrebsovans approving this proposal as truly popular, the first to rise and demand the floor is Representative of the People Begleder, who briefly declares that he is “against people dying.”
This meets with the derisive laughter of Ostven, followed thereafter by his endless mocking repetition of the sentence, accompanied by an imitation of Begleder’s deep voice.
In a Republic engaged in a struggle for life and death, in a National Assembly to which the enemy has officially denied the right to live, Begleder’s words do indeed sound unconvincing—no more convincing, perhaps, than his recent proposal to abolish the commodity-money economy and return to barter.
But far more convincing is Wolf Schmeck, who calls such a proposal sheer Old-Regimeism, because it judges men according to their origin rather than according to their deeds.
Thus the Delegations demanding the imprisonment, or rather the annihilation, of all former Aristocrats and former men of the Tyrant receive not even honourable mention in the Banner of the Republic.
Yet this does not mean that many former Aristocrats and former King’s men do not end up imprisoned, and even annihilated, on account of the suspicions which they arouse chiefly by their origin; so that what is not carried out according to Law is nevertheless carried out according to the untameable nature of Man.
O Constitution and all Laws of the Assembly —when, at last, will Reality conform itself to you in all things?
While such things are happening, the President of the Public Command Committee, Citizen Henscher, when he is not in the Assembly, the Public Command Committee, the Club of the Friends of Virtue and the Republic, or his study, may be found taking long walks along the banks of the Euste, beside monumental stone edifices with their columns, and beside bridges upon which stand cannon adorned with tricolour ribbons; and beside that multitude of fishermen who, defying the enemy balloons which not infrequently bombard them deliberately, draw fish from the Euste day and night, immediately roasting it upon a fire and selling it, sandwiched between two slices of white Republican bread, as the greatest delicacy.
On these walks Henscher is accompanied by an animal: a domesticated fox, found wounded after the air-raids in a country farmyard, whither hunger had dragged her. The peasants, moved by the symbolism of the Fox as the traditional victim of the Aristocracy, and therefore as a symbol of the Republic, nursed her, tamed her, and brought her to the Public Command Committee.
Passers-by even testify that they have heard Henscher conversing with this fox; whether the popular vixen actually said anything to the Republican leader is a question which, as serious men, we shall not even raise, although Wolf Schmeck, in a speech from the Tribune of the National Assembly, warns the enemies of the Republic to beware, for the President of the Public Command Committee is learning from the fox that cunning by which he shall expose all their vile conspiracies.
When he had but lately received the fox, Citizen Henscher, moreover, took her with him straight into the National Assembly, since in that edifice he spends more time than anywhere else. But there she proved unable to unlearn such habits as scratching and otherwise destroying the costly ceremonial carpets and tapestries of the Assembly; so that Henscher almost began to fear that his new darling would join the Hrebsovian Club—for of educating so noble an animal by violent means he never even thought, regarding the very idea as abhorrent.
Certain decent Representatives complained also of her smell; but, so the story goes, it was not this which finally sealed her sentence of exile from the most exalted legislative house of all the Citizens of the Republic. That sentence was sealed only when she offended against the dignity of the People by doing no less and no more than—urinating upon the bust of Emil Dustel.
Nor did Henscher’s private dwelling prove a suitable home for the red-haired animal Citizeness Konstantina Henscher—the peasants who had found her had given her a name which reminded them of the Constitution. There, however, she felt lonely, for Henscher has no other family; and she was confined within a space inadequate to her nature, so that she began to pose a danger to Henscher’s famous furniture, upon which, as is well known, long before the President of the Public Command Committee, the disreputable afsen had also luxuriated.
At last a solution was found in the spirit of the Republican Code. Just as, when Citizens are unable to care for their children, their friends assume that duty, so the fox Konstantina was received for lodging and accommodation into the courtyard house of Henscher’s friend, the journalist Renburger.
And from thence he took her for walks, and thither he returned her afterwards, like some perpetually over-busy father, separated through his own fault from his child’s mother: our insufficiently cunning President of the Executive Authority.
There, too, we leave her, as we pass on to matters destined to have a greater influence upon the fate of the world.
To the reader, three decades after these events, living across the sea from the land in which their actors lived, it must be a strange picture indeed: the Health Minister of a State telling Deputies how the head of the Government learns cunning from a fox. But in Guntreland, during the Revolution, the fashion for fables prevailed more than anywhere else, perhaps more than at any time in the world; and even today it cannot be said to have entirely passed away.
Several years before the Proclamation at Loransburg, Hurel had published his Anecdotes from the Animal Kingdom—or The Animal Republic, as the title of their new edition ran—in which, by giving animals the qualities of men, he mocked the society of the Old Regime. And since all these fables possessed a moral lesson, the so-called moral, nothing could have been more natural than that, in revolutionary Guntreland, founded upon Virtue and obsessed with Morality, metaphors drawn from animals, and human qualities attributed to them, should become ubiquitous.
Be that as it may, Herman Henscher learns cunning from the fox; and henceforth he will no longer permit his idealism to be accompanied by naïveté concerning the goodness, honesty, and sincerity of Man.
And when he shall have mastered this art, let not only the enemies of the Republic—but all men who know him—beware of this New Henscher!
At this same time, upon the peninsula of Schwentz, there lands a thousand young Sigislanders of the former First and Second Estates, filled with Erzroyalist ardour, dressed in black tailcoats, upon the lapel of each one of the thousand being worn a violet flower of the Vanilla Shrub, which they call the Flower of Fidelity.
They are for the most part youths of sixteen and seventeen, awaiting Categorisation, and summoned by the martial glory of their noble families and by the adventurous spirit of their age to the duty of war—not, for example, to agriculture or handicraft, which Categorisation might otherwise assign to them. Reared upon legends of the Age of the Founder, and filled with the desire to avenge their fathers, elder brothers, and kinsmen who fell in the ruin of the Armada, they have named themselves the Purple Legion; and, abandoning the compulsory Erzroyalist education of their native continent, have joined the Coalition waging war against the Republic of Guntreland.
They care little that, by waging war upon the soil of a foreign country, they violate the legislation of their Archqueen; for they are, as stands written in the oath which they have sworn, “ready to sacrifice themselves and accept upon themselves the punishment of the Archqueen for having broken her laws, thereby strengthening her prestige, if that be the price of mercilessly exterminating her enemies.”
Their understanding—or at least the justification by which they explain their disobedience to themselves and to the world—is that Karolina-Louise is, against her will, compelled to such things as Categorisation and Pacifism, and that they are the men who execute her true Will, consenting for that purpose to let her herself destroy them, should such destruction become necessary to her.
Their oath further declares that they have “given their heart to the Archqueen,” and that none of them shall marry until her impaired prestige in the world has been restored in its entirety. Yet while some understand this vow as an obligation to Ferdinandine chastity, others, from the very hour of their arrival, enter into a succession of affairs with the splendid young noblewomen of Guntreland.
The King of Guntreland, and his allies, who require every soldier they can obtain upon their side for the coming invasion against the “mad” Guntreland People, receive this Purple Legion into the ranks of their “Congressional and Royal Army,” notwithstanding that these are men who have disobeyed the commands of their Congressional Sovereign. This they explain by declaring “that their respect for the person of the High Protectress of the Congressional Order entails that they cannot take into consideration Her commands which are contrary to Her Congressional obligations.”
News of this expedition produces a veritable storm in Sigislandic public opinion, already polarised between the friends and enemies of Reform, and still agitated by the recent shooting of the Anti-Eugenite Chiefs who had been preparing a new Separatist revolt.
Baron Sigismund speaks readily of the Purple Legion; and although he officially condemns their disobedience to the Archqueen, it seems as though beneath his formal condemnations there breathes also some sympathy for these “unhappily brave young men.” Many declare that his gold itself stands behind the organisation, arming, and transport of the company, though he emphatically denies that he would ever violate Archqueenly legislation.
Moreover, he defends their parents with great fervour, among whom are many great Archroyal nobles, publicly excluding every possibility that they could have stood behind so open a violation of the Archqueen’s Will.
At the same time as the affair of the Purple Legion, on the twenty-fifth of May, before the Coronation Cathedral in Ferdinandshafen, we witness another, and still more astonishing, form of protest against the absence of official Archroyal military assistance to Guntreland.
Tables having been set upon the paved square beside the stone Archroyal Fountain—the very fountain which recently brought one rebellious student to his end—we behold the National Gentlemen of all the Royalist States, before the eyes of the whole world, selling books of their poems and stories, sheet-music of their compositions, works of art which they themselves have created, objects of their scientific inventions; and, for money, giving legal advice and arranging medical consultations for various patients.[2]
Thus they perform, for the National Gentlemen, that forbidden and undignified activity of charging money for the products of their labour and for their services, declaring that “if the Sigislandic Archqueen has violated the Congressional principles, they cannot be so bold and inconsiderate as stubbornly to observe those rules in her country.”
Yet we soon learn that the Congressional rules have not, after all, been violated; for the entire sum thus earned has been donated to “charitable purposes for the development of the culture of the host country”—namely, to a society for the founding of a Museum of Sigislandic Weapons, since, as the National Gentlemen write in their joint declaration, “Sigislandic weapons are no longer used for the purpose of warfare, and therefore a museum is the proper place for them.”
The Sigislandic Archqueen is, indeed, capable of being filled by such gestures with considerable fury and nervous agitation, for she considers it an intolerably bad thing that anyone should protest against the fact that she wishes to help people not to die of hunger.
Nevertheless, she writes a formal letter of thanks to the foreign representatives for the money donated to development—for, as she herself writes—a culture that shines more brightly than any gunpowder.
Thus there is no question of duels, for which certain Sigislandic National Gentlemen have already begun sharpening their swords.
Karolina-Louise, moreover, considers it unjust that there exist no National Ladies and Gentlemen, and finds it strange that Ladies may wear even a Crown, while they are still in no wise permitted to wear the cockade and sash of the bearer of their country’s prestige abroad.
[1] The Constitution of the Republic of Guntreland provided that former Aristocrats who should, “without delay,” swear allegiance to the Republic, and symbolically demonstrate the same by tying their feudal charters to the tail of a donkey, should be permitted to retain all their property save that which had been declared “directly connected with the crime of Feudalism”; and among this had previously been included all land formerly cultivated by their dependent and unfree population.
Although proposals had been made in the National Assembly that these “honest” Aristocrats should be compensated, wholly or in part, for their lost feudal rights and privileges, this was rejected on the ground that such rights and privileges were contrary to morality, and therefore could not, as such, constitute property.
[2] Under the provisions of the Congressional Act, the National Gentlemen were permitted to engage exclusively in “dignified professions”: law, science, invention, literature, art, composition, medicine, agriculture—in the exclusive sense of ownership of and income from land—croquet-playing and betting upon horses, as well as the transmission of their knowledge and skills; but they were not permitted to earn money from their labour, nor did they receive material remuneration for their services to the State. From this we may see that the position was intended exclusively for persons of great wealth and financial security.
