The Loyalty of Esau Common

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Loyalty of Esau Common by H. G. Wells. This
is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the
public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit
LibriVox dot org. Read by CHRISTA. Zeleski, The Loyalty of
Esau Common a fragment the native land of Esau Common

(00:25):
was Aurelia, the head and center of that great political system,
the Aurelian Empire. And he was born near the capital,
in the very suburbs indeed of Brumosa, the mightiest city
in many respects that the world has ever seen. And
rather indiscreetly, as one is apt to do in this matter,
he was born a lower middle class Aurelian, of no

(00:47):
particular family, and less than no particular expectations of wealth
or influence in life. He was born in a little
room over a shopful of picture frames, and of lengths
and samples of picture framing, and amidst a faint smell
of glue, and his first cry mingled with the uproar
of attraction engine that was blundering along the paved suburban

(01:09):
high street, upon which the rattling sash windows of his
birth chamber gave. Moreover, his father was a man whose
trade had made him a vehement critic and contemner of artists,
an avid reader, and if possible, a purchaser of all books,
excepting only novels and works upon art that came in
his way. And these two circumstances gave certain qualities with

(01:31):
which providence, inexplicably careless of his social positions, had endowed
our Esaw a rather unusual and possibly unnatural direction. The
exceptional qualities that constituted ESA's endowment resembled each other, and
most other exceptional qualities, in being finally of very doubtful
value to him. In most other respects, they differed. One

(01:55):
was a gift of the mind, and the second was
a gift of the character. The first gift was a
certain uncommon quality of imagination and intelligence, as indisputable as
it is indefinable in the dialect of the old schoolmaster
who made a precarious living by pretending to teach the
tradesmen's sons in that Brumosan suburb. He was quick at figures.

(02:17):
He was also quick at drawing, though he found no
other copy in the school save the schoolmaster. And at
an astonishingly early age, he grasped the fact that the
practice of reading gave rewards incommeasurably great. He was a
great reader, said his mother. And it was remarked by
the curate who prepared him, in spite of precociously shrewd

(02:40):
theological objections for his first communion in the official church
of the Aralian Empire, that he was a lad of
unusual intelligence. Now, unusual intelligence alone in persons of the
Auralian middle class is aptly tragedies. The Great Aralian Empire
does not recognize the necessity of persons of unusual intelligence

(03:03):
springing up in its lower middle class. It is an
empire distinctly characterized by its eminent sense of order and decorum.
It goes to inordinate costs to maintain a special class
of superior persons, and for unusual intelligence to appear outside
that class displays, to say the least of it, an

(03:24):
uncivil disregard of wise and careful arrangements. Somewhere, in most instances,
unusual intelligence of such irregular origin is starved and ignored,
or at most permitted to exert itself under proper patronage
in the ineffectual field of the arts. But it chanced
that the tenor of the frame dealer's discourse on art

(03:45):
in general, and his best customers in particular, gave his
son an early and quite incurable bias against the practice
of art in any form, while the parental collection of
books gave it an equally strong bent towards the graver
and or spacious interests of public affairs. And this bent
presently got a very definite direction to one particular public affair,

(04:08):
the question of military methods and efficiency, by the outbreak
of a small but humiliating war upon the outskirts of
the Auralian Empire, and a visit that Esa paid, just
at that adolescent period when undying ambitions are begotten to
an uncle who was a butler near Blundershot, the great
permanent camp of military exercises in Aurelia, Esau discovered that

(04:30):
to think of war, to study war, to prepare, and
somewhere to play that mighty game was the one supremely
desirable thing in life. He might just as well have
decided that his calling in life was to play cricket
with the fixed stars. So far as any prospect of
realizing his ambition went. In the army of the Aralian
Empire at that time there were two distinct and practically

(04:53):
uninterchangeable sorts of soldier. There were officers and the privates.
The Aralian private soldier was almost invariably a man of
the lowest class. If he was not, that was his misfortune,
for he was treated as such on all occasions. Unlike
the ordinary common citizen. He was supposed to be unable

(05:14):
to read and such scanty instruction as was given him
in the art of war. There was a strong feeling
in the army against privates who knew too much was
balled at him by sergeant instructors of exceptional lung power.
Under pressure from these instructors, he was compelled to pursue
an ideal of soldierly smartness by cutting his hair very
short except a little lock on the brow, which he

(05:37):
called his quiff, and greasing the roots. Popularly, he was
called a swattie or a Jimmy. Our Jimmy's people would
say affectionately in times of war, and bloomin Jimmies in
times of peace. And his brightly conspicuous blue bay's uniform
was resented in all but the meanest drinking houses and
places of public resort. The public was perpetually regaled with

(06:01):
stories and anecdotes of the amours of Jimmy with the
nurse girl and the cook, and that women of this
sort were accustomed to pay pests to Jimmy, for his
public company was one of the dearest legends of the
great Aralian public. The practical promotion opened to Jimmy culminated
in such a position as an embezzling mess clerk, or
as a sergeant instructor, from which altitude he might ball

(06:24):
even as he had been balled at, and impose on
fresh generations of Jimmy's that mysterious ideal of soldierly smartness.
The quiff to become an officer was an accident, too rare,
too altogether dependent upon the remote opportunity coming to meet
the rare gift to enter into his ambitions. Clearly, there
was no way through enlistment as a private soldier by

(06:46):
which Esach might dream of becoming anything more than raw
material in the art of war, and the officers of
the Aralian army formed an equally inaccessible class. The general
public of this great empire, in spite of its inordinate
pride in its imperial ascendancy was probably as mean sold
as any public has ever been. It would not even

(07:07):
educate its own children, but cheerfully permitted them to be
trained in the sectarian schools of various proletizing bodies to
keep down the rates. And instead of assiduously seeking, through
all its available resources for men of exceptional gifts and
energy to shape and guide the military forces upon which
its ascendancy finally depended, it acquiesced, and indeed rejoiced in

(07:30):
a system which amounted practically to the conversion of each
of the few score undermanned regiments it maintained into a
social club. Its officers were paid a mere honorarium, its
subalterns received less money than if they had been tenth
rate clerks. And on the other hand, the officers dining arrangements,
their contributions to the regimental band and cursall, and their

(07:54):
hospitalities were conceived in a spirit of magnificent profusion. It
was the boast the glory of the Auurlian Army that
an officer, even with a code of honor that condoned
unpaid tradesmen's bills, could not live on his pay, and
consequently that its officers were gentlemen, which in Aurelia meant
richly living men. The center of regimental expenditure was the

(08:18):
mess and a regiment was more or less a crack
regiment in just the proportion that its officers were expensive messrs. This,
of course, narrowed the choice of the Aralian Empire in
the matter of officers to the limited class of the rich,
and even of these, the more adventurous and the more
intellectual traveled or played the more exciting game of public affairs.

(08:40):
For most of these officers, service in that army was
not regarded as an arduous profession, but as a way
of passing the time, and with the natural disinclination of
prosperous people to risk brain pressure, it was regarded as
a breach of good manners among them to talk shop.
The Aurelians were very proud of the class of officers,

(09:01):
at once showy, impressive and inexpensive, that was obtained in
this way, and it was believed as firmly that Jimmy
would not serve under a man who was not a gentleman,
as that he was tipped pennies by servant girls, and
certainly only young men with a taste for bright blue
bays and servants, girls pennies and acting as waiters in
a class club, were very urgently tempted, in peaceful times,

(09:25):
at any rate to enter the Aurelian Army. Now, as
Esau's father was a man of small means, Esau was
no sort of gentleman at all, and the mere whisper
of him becoming an officer in the army would have
sent every friend and relation he possessed into inextinguishable laughter.
They would have yelled with laughter at the idea of

(09:45):
the profession of arms being a remunerative calling. It would
have seemed to these singular people as funny as apprenticing
a boy to a duke. So Esau, when his school
days were over, became a clerk, and afterwards turned the
fruits of his father father's library to the business of journalism,
and the Aurelian Army did not visibly suffer in the

(10:05):
slightest degree for the loss of that exceptional intelligence and
imagination of his. The empire was at peace and not
a mess entertainment, but was the brighter for the absence
of ESA's no doubt vulgar manners, his not very cheerful face,
and the inglorious parsimony his presence would have entailed. But

(10:25):
as I said, Esau had not one exceptional gift, but two.
And the second was that queer set of elements in
the will that make a man dogged. He could see
obstacles at times, he saw them big, but he could
not see impossibilities. He was interested in the art of war.
He wanted to play that game. It was not the
outward show of soldiering captivated him, not the band and

(10:49):
the uniform, not the effect of the mess glories on
the feminine mind, nor the tramp tramp tramp, all of
which elements indeed seemed to him rather boring accessories, but
the real thing. And because he could not be a
professional soldier, he did not propose to bury his ambition
out of sight and turn to other things. At any rate,

(11:10):
there was nothing to prevent him studying, thinking about, dreaming about,
and if necessary, experimenting about this great actuality. So the
reading of his early manhood was all of campaigns and theories.
His holidays led him wherever military exercises were in progress,
and for a time under the immediate command of a

(11:32):
wholesale draper and the remote control of a superseded lieutenant
colonel of the regular army. He studied thirst and hunger,
banked holiday crowds, and the thinnest sham of sham fighting.
As a volunteer. In time, Esa came to know quite
a lot about war, to feel even that he could
imagine what it might be when the next war came.

(11:53):
At the very first, he had come to this matter
with a vague suspicion that the Aralian army was not
the supreme expression of human science and forethought, And as
his knowledge grew, his suspicion expanded into a conviction that,
partly by reason of the base parsimony of the Aralian
taxpayer and the dodgy and capacity of the statesmen he favored,

(12:14):
and partly by reason of the aggressive exclusiveness of the
Aralian wealthy, who would rather see a thing not done
than have it done by a low class fellow countryman.
The Aralian army was about as inefficient and inadequate a
fighting machine as any empire in the world, except perhaps
the Chinese, had ever tempted providence by maintaining it was

(12:36):
under manned, It was stupidly officered, Its economy was controlled
by civilian clerks, who knew nothing of war and cared less.
Its drill was fifty years out of date, it was
short of horses and devoid of transport, and he became
more and more convinced that nothing but a miracle could
save it from overwhelming disaster if it ever came into

(12:58):
collision with either the army of Sultaria or that of Barbarossa,
Aralia's great rivals in the world. Not indeed that either
of these armies struck Esa as being exceptionally efficient or
incapable of disaster, but they outclassed the Auralian force quite hopelessly.
For all that now, this realization distressed Esa very much.

(13:20):
Aurelia was a splendid and spacious empire, with a glorious
language in literature and a gallant history, even if it
lacked gallant taxpayers. And ESA's pride in his race and
nationality was to begin with an almost religious passion, and
here marring his pride and darkening his future. For him,

(13:40):
he perceived more and more clearly this flaw upon its glories.
The thing kept him awake at night, and by day
it distressed him to the pitch of perpetually wanting to
do something and never being able to get that something
done in a satisfactory manner. He wrote letters, letters to
influential military people, but it did not answer him or

(14:01):
snubbed him pitilessly. He wrote letters to papers that made
him seem a conceited and jealous detractor of happily placed officials.
He wrote articles that he found it very hard to
get printed, or that finally got themselves torn up again
in a fit of unpatriotic pique. He tainted the little
reputation he had made as a journalist by his attentions
to this topic. His chief editor had to stipulate that

(14:24):
when Esau wrote articles about this and that he should
not go dragging in the army grievance and cockshot. The
humors writer and talker added, hello, common, what's the Arralian
officer done now to his collection of daily jests, to
which Esau usually answered nothing. And when his patriotic ardor
began to cool under the discovery of his absolute insignificance

(14:47):
in the Irlian scheme of things, another passion grew to
replace it, and that was the exasperation of a man
who believes in his own capacity and finds it universally
denying who finds it his life slipping past him, with
no chance, with no shadow of an opportunity to prove
him more than a windy contempter of his superiors. By

(15:09):
three and thirty he was a bitter man. His birthday
fell on the Great Aralian Bank Holiday, when all over
the country that volunteer force, which was the Aralian excuse
for avoiding conscription, did what were called maneuvers by habit
or accident. He found himself walking in the pine woods
near Blundershot, the Great Aralian Camp of Arms. He had

(15:30):
come upon a battalion in the shape of a straggling crowd,
standing and firing a volley at two hundred yards, preparatory
to delivering a bayonet charge. And fleeing this horrid vision,
he had come upon another massing, apparently to receive shrapnel
at seven hundred yards. Finally, his luck had brought him
out upon the crest of a hill from which the

(15:51):
final march passed was to be seen dim and far
away through the dense clouds of dust. He sat down
upon a gate and watched the dark masses shape about
and move, and every now and then the warm breeze
brought the strains of their numerous, excellent and totally unnecessary bands.
To his ears, there were over twenty thousand men away

(16:11):
there infantry in battalions that invariably fell short of their
full strength. There were a squadron or so of cavalry,
half a battery, a machine gun section or so, and
twenty nine men with bicycles. The entire force had no
means of supply nor transport. Whatever it was fed by
a wholesale grocery firm that supplied its own carts, and

(16:34):
whatever survivors a month of campaigning might leave of it
were bound by every arrangement to be bootless and in
rags unless the enemy supplied them. In the prisoner's enclosure,
Esau's emotions took form at last in words. He misapplied
his condemnation. You fools, he said, addressing the collected masses.
A voice answered him, a voice with a faintly foreign accent,

(16:57):
peace advocate, I presume he saw turned and discovered a
gray golf cap, a bronzed nose, and a red mustache.
The golf cap lifted disclosed a pair of keen gray eyes.
Not a bit of it, said Esau. Well, said the
stranger Argumentatively, they'd be about as much good in a fight,

(17:17):
said Esau, as a hyde park demonstration looks pretty stocky stuff,
some of it, said the stranger. Esau made no direct reply.
There's a point, he said, where courage becomes lunacy. A
man who seriously proposes to go into a campaign as
a volunteer soldier under the Aralian War Office is either
sick of his life or an idiot. Studied the question

(17:41):
a little, said Esau, what's wrong? He had opened the
floodgates everything, said Esau, and assumed a more comfortable position
on his gait. For example, the stranger struck Esau as
a person of unparalleled intelligence. He did not simply listen.
He punctuated Ysau's remarks with brief, intelligent sentences of appreciation.

(18:04):
In the first place, explained, yesaw, this volunteer army has
not one tenth of the guns it ought to have.
It has no cavalry, It has no transport and no stores.
In a country abounding in horses, there is no organization
for registering and using the national stock of horse flesh
for transport, and it wears unserviceable uniforms. It is indeed

(18:25):
a mere costly and inefficient emergency apparatus for filling up
infantry battalions in the regular army that ought never to
need filling its drill is obsolete. Drill, cried Esau. They
haven't begun to drill. All they can do is march
up and down in lines and files and masses and
shoot at targets. Those crowds there couldn't fight. They're only

(18:47):
organized for processions and a sort of deadly rioting in
savage lands. We haven't such a thing as a fighting
regiment in the world. The stranger sought explanations, Yesaw, expanded.
The first thing a battalion should be taught to do,
he said, is surely to fight in a battle. There's
three principal things in that section. To learn to advance,

(19:09):
to learn to stick tight and tackle and advance, and
what's hardest and most necessary, to learn to move back fighting.
As for the last, they haven't dreamt. It's possible. The
others they play at at odd times. But just imagine
what a battalion might be that was trained, say, as
well as a second rate football club, to play up
and stiffen and come back and rally. Why not? It

(19:32):
isn't done anywhere, I know, said Esaw. But it might be.
It's all the fighting they want to know, you know now,
And if they learn it at the price of marching
ragged on parade, what does it matter? And the next
thing they want to know, every man of them, and
the whole lot collectively, is just how to keep their
little stomachs in order, and their feet clean and tidy

(19:54):
over all sorts of ground. His voice thickened with indignation.
They shy our poor devils, jimmies, he cried, into wildernesses
of mud, up icy mountains, into hot deserts. They send
them where there is nothing but putrid water to drink,
and with emergency rations for three days ahead, clamoring to
be eaten or thrown away. And never till the war

(20:14):
comes do they give them a happort of training in
judgment or self restraint. You know, the fighting in warfare
is nothing to the other thing, the traveling. That's the
principal thing an army does in war. It moves about.
But until this army of ours is actually in a war,
it never moves itself a bit. Its squats in barracks
while its officers give entertainments and play cricket and polo,

(20:37):
and half the men in each skeleton battalion are trotting
about doing housework and washing up and all that. But
you know, if everyone connected with this army was not
a cursed fool, it would burn its barracks and march
where everywhere, all around the Auurlian Empire in carts, on
horses or bicycles. Bicycles for preference. This army should goans,

(21:00):
full up, rationed, armed guns and everything, ready to fight
in bad weather. Always rough on it, not a bit
of it. It's the barracks our hell for soldiers. It's
the dread of barracks keeps decent men out of the army.
It's the barracks that make one man in twelve dessert.
The suicides at Blundershot are proverbial. They'd learn soon enough

(21:24):
how not to let marching be rough on them. They'd
see the world. Think of the sort of recruits they'd
get for a bicycle tour around the empire with the
off chance of fighting like football. Eh, they'd rope in
something better than the lout who wants a blazing uniform
because of the girls and has to be trained to
sit his rifle by command. Just think of it, beautiful

(21:44):
regiments of brown, hard seasoned men, with sound feet and
sound insides, and all their stuff compactly with them, all
of them knowing just what to do and just how
to do it. Think of them going off white and
young Southeast and coming back hard and brown out of
the West. Eh. Ever, lastingly, but there must be a reason,

(22:04):
began the red haired man. The reason is why the
army is a social institution. Where'd the huntby? Where'd the
band be? How about the annual sports? No tennis for him,
no cricket? Think above all of the wives of the
titled officers. He saw expanded still further. He poured out
the bitterness of his soul upon the strange ordering of

(22:25):
things that made warfare the privilege of a particular class,
the honor of soldiering a prequisite of wealth. He admitted
to this stranger, the tragedy of his thwarted ambitions. With
that freedom and intimacy that is sometimes so much more
possible with strangers than it is even with our nearest friends,
the red haired men meditated upon him. I too was

(22:47):
born in Aralian, he said at last, But now life
was too strictly defined in this country for my father.
He did not like that state, unto which it had
pleased God to call him, and as sticking in that
state is one of the fundamental articles of religion here
at home, he went to Marantha, where they have a
different creed. I was sixteen years old then, and now

(23:10):
I am a Mouranthian. Esau looked at him with a
new interest, for Marantha was a curiously situated country, sunken
as it were, between encircling arms of the Aralian Empire,
and threatened, it was openly said in both countries by
that process of expansion that seemed to be the Aralian destiny.
But he said, don't you find that mixed your sympathies

(23:31):
a little? The Mouranthian shook his head. You don't feel
yourself an Aralian, not a bit of it. Why should I.
You can come back to the land where you spent
all the impressionable years of your life and feel a foreigner.
The red haired man looked at the dusty regiments away
there and smiled up at Esau. Don't you, he asked,
not a bit of it. Where do you come in?

(23:55):
Esau looked interrogation. They don't want you, said the red
haired man, they will, said Esau, not very confidently, not
a bit of it. They'd rather run their empire on
the rocks and scuttle it than take help from a
common man like you. What is it they call you?
He hesitated, bounder suggested liesa. Yes, that's the word bounder, outsider,

(24:18):
poor man, not in the know. Esau stared at the
distant march past the red haired man. Pursued his advantage
Your empire, he said, did it bother to educate you?
I did my learning in a national school. There you are.
The Empire didn't want you. It handed you over to
a society of pious people and let em bring you

(24:38):
up on charity and cheap teachers to their own particular
brand of piety. Eh, it paid the very least it
could for you. It only did that out of shame.
It treated you as bad men treat their bastards. And afterwards,
Esau took a higher line. One gives to the empire.
It's a duty, not a charity. They won't let you give.

(24:59):
Keep out of it, you low class brute. That's the
Empire's compliments to you. Let our officer boys at the
proper class learn war with your blood and take your
gifts to hell? Has it ever spoken differently to you?
Esau straddled his gait defensively. The day will come, he said,
when you will die and be buried, said the red
haired man. Since the Ironsides faded from the world, they've

(25:23):
run no risks of men of your sort getting their
hands on the machines. They came upon a pause now
in Marantha, said the red haired man, as though he
spoke aloud. A good soldier is a good soldier wherever
he was born. Esa did not answer. Why should you
not go to Marantha, said the red haired man, suddenly
firing point blank. What does Mirantha want with soldiers, asked Esau.

(25:47):
It wants em anyhow, said the red haired man, and
it sees that it gets them. Why to prepare for
war is to avoid it, not always it is the best.
What possible could Marantha fight? The Red haired man shrugged
his shoulders. I am an aralian, said Esau. The country

(26:07):
does not admit it, said the red haired man. It
lets me live here like any other foreigner. You have
no more to do with official aralia than with the
official barbarossa or official sulteria. In the language of polite society,
you don't exist. Now in Marantha. You can exist just
as much as you see proper. Esa shook his head,

(26:28):
and the red haired man, being a man of tact,
presently passed to other things. And when they parted, he
saw that they exchanged addresses, and Esau discovered that his
intralocutor was command Aunt Thomas Smith, in that army of
Marantha that never dreamt of fighting. And in the night
Esa lay awake, turning over many spacious issues. At first

(26:50):
the matter of his thoughts was intensely personal, then it
became political, and finally that specialist side of him got
the upper hand. If ever, that war came, if after all,
Marantha should fight, what possible chances could Marantha hope for?
Suddenly he began to discover chances. In the morning, he
found his brain had got that problem forward to a

(27:12):
very interesting stage. He devoured his breakfast and went out
and bought as good a selection of maps of Marantha
and portions of Marantha as Brumosa could afford him. And
for some days his income as a journalist was in
suspense as he studied this more congenial theme. If, after all,
he said, they should try and make an army on

(27:33):
these lines by Jove, cried Esau. If they do that,
they will beat us. He stood up, smitten to the
heart by a vision. If I had the making of
this army, he cried, it would be the finest war.
When he had studied the country, he came to the
army that Aurelia would have to fight in that country.
But Aurelia possessed very little information about the army of Marantha.

(27:57):
In the current number of a high class review, however,
Esau found a curious article on Marantha by a gentleman
of position, whose gist was this that the Mouranthians, who
had once been excellent sharpshooters, could now no longer shoot. Now.
I wonder what he and his relatives had been talking about,
said Esau, and presently found himself hunting for further information.

(28:20):
He discovered himself short of ready money. He was not
the sort of man who keeps a big current account,
so he drew in some reserves, declined some new journalistic
work that offered, and set himself to pursue these unsuspected
chances for the Marinthians that had dawned upon him. In
the middle of the night. He meditated upon Commandant's Thomas Smith,

(28:40):
until that gentleman assumed something of a legendary quality in
his memory. He chanced upon a paragraph in an evening paper,
a not very conspicuous paragraph referring to certain custom house
difficulties that had arisen with Marantha. It's nothing, said Esau,
after thrice reading the paragraph. It's the sort of little
hitch that might happen at any time. And the next

(29:01):
day he had a visit from Commandant Thomas Smith. Common
came through the folding doors between his bedroom and his
living room to discover Commandant Smith standing near the window,
pulling his red mustache and affecting to be unaware of
the maps, sketches, and memoranda that littered the writing table. Well,
said Commandant Smith, Well said Esau. Have you thought it

(29:24):
over as a problem, Yes, a good deal as a
personal problem. No, as a problem in the art of
war that follows later. How about yourself, I'm an Irallian,
said Esau, and took down his tobacco and pipe. Commandant
Smith sat down cigarette, said Esau, and handed tobacco and papers.

(29:45):
Commandant Smith reopened his attack. He developed his theory of
the Aralian Empire with patient elaboration. What I want to do,
he said, is to clear away this delusion of yours
that you belong to this empire, or that it belongs
to you in any sort of way whatever. This empire
is a plutocratic officialdom supported by constituencies of fools. You

(30:06):
don't come in anywhere. You're a lodger. I don't suppose
you even vote. I didn't last election, admitted Esa. The
Liberals put up a jew and the Conservatives put up
a railway barrister, and I don't like either sort. Commandant
Smith claimed the point by a gesture all the same,
said Esau. I'm an Arrallian. Commandant Smith restated his case.
I'm an Irrallian, said Esau. Now look here, said Smith,

(30:30):
and meditated for a moment, with his eye on the
heap of maps. You persist in thinking you are an Irrallian.
Very well, I will tell you now what every one
in Marantha believes. That your upper class people here mean
to pick a quarrel with us wholly and solely to
annex us, not with any friendly desire for unity, but
simply that they may give us the benefit of that

(30:52):
same tight system of exclusive class government. Supported by a
sham of party elections that keeps everything here, schools, army
trade in a state of such amazing efficiency. Well, we
don't want those blessings. We've an old rascal as president,
but anyhow we've got checks on him. On the whole.
We don't do so badly. We think the Republican idea

(31:14):
is something worth fighting for, and so we are getting
ready to fight. I will tell you presently, in honest
round figures, just what we count upon in men, material
and support. Of course, I shall give you no proofs.
I shall just tell you at present they do not
know that we are getting ready to fight. They do
not know how we mean to fight. They know nothing

(31:35):
of our resources and nothing of our temper. I don't
believe that a single person in authority here has taken
the trouble to mug these maps you have there for
half an hour. They do not even know whom they
will send against us. He paused, Well, said he saw, Well,
said Commandant Smith, as you are so sure you are

(31:56):
an Aurelian, you are one of those who are going
to make war upon us, get ready to do it.
Hunt up the whole question, study the game till you
know it like your hand. When you know it all,
tell em offer to help them anyhow, volunteer. I know
for a fact they are going to fight us with
forty thousand men. Esau turned on him quickly. They are,

(32:16):
I tell you you know better. Tell em it can't
be done. You can do anything with forty thousand men,
not jimmies in bright blue bays, under amateurs who think
they are professionals and short of horses and guns. But
that's beside the mark I give you. Leave to play
the loyal Aralian for a year. Get to work, try

(32:37):
and set your country, to make use of what you
know and what you can do. Give yourself, don't ask
for pay. Well, and when the year is up, if
a Rali you will have nothing of you. I will
serve another year, said Esau common command. Aunt Smith made
a movement of impatience. He turned in his chair, and
his voice went up to the note of irritation. Confound it,

(32:57):
he shouted, don't you see that all this is not
loyalty to arall you. It's simply a stupid self devotion
to this privileged governing class. Do you think we should
object to union if we might come in fair and
equal not a bit of it. But we know they
don't mean to bring us in fair and equal. They
mean to walk over us and treat us as they

(33:18):
treat you. Ha ha. Soldiers and gentlemen, bossing everything, muddling everything,
spoiling our railways, spoiling our trade, snubbing all our promise,
breaking our hearts. With a few money lenders here and
there to help them, that's part of their pretty ways.
They will insult any good white man who isn't and
doesn't want to be rich. They will truckle to any

(33:40):
nigger who understands. Twenty percent your colonies in Columbia wouldn't
stand it. You wouldn't stand it if you hadn't to
do so. You know you'd barricade the streets of Brumosa
tomorrow if you got your hands on the guns. And
we're sure the Barbarossa and the Sultarian people would stand
off while you settle them. Only you're so thundering, loyal
and politic. You hate em, and so do we. We

(34:02):
won't have em in Marantha. We will burn our towns first.
We'll make our country a desert before we stand that.
Better be shot than stifled. It's no war against Aurelia.
It's a class war, yes, and so was the revolt
of your colonies in Columbia a hundred years ago. They
don't think it was now they've jabbered the truth away.

(34:24):
But the Columbia War of Independence was just a war
against privilege, and so is this. And what a man
of your class has to do on the side of privilege.
I'm an Aerralian, said Esau. You're a fool, said Smith,
and drummed impatient fingers on the table. Try that for
a year, anyhow, said Smith. I'll try it for two,
said Esau, and then still Aralian said common. Smith stood up.

(34:49):
Here is the address of an agent of mine, he said.
Whenever you want your passage to Marantha, he'll give it you.
He hesitated, with a card in his hand, even if
the war has begun. Of course, this ad dress at
any rate is confidential, of course, said Esau. But I
shan't come for all that, my dear man. Your country
will be licked into a cocked hat, and then it

(35:12):
will hump its back and say no thank you to
a man of your sort. They'll make a ninth class
kingdom like Portugal of this empire. Before they let your
sword in. They'll put a jew or a Gilchrist's nigger
in before they let you in. You're the uttermost foreigner,
You're a lower middle class Aurelian, and then you uch.
And Smith turned himself about to find his hat. So

(35:33):
soon as Smith had left him, Esa set his brains
to work to demonstrate his loyalty to the country that
was his own. He had a vision of a great
series of articles on the national military inefficiency. That he
would write articles of such capable and pitiless demonstration that
it would be impossible for any sane person to deny
the necessity of reform and of reform in the direction

(35:55):
that he would indicate very rum Copies of these articles
still exist in Manuscacy. Three even reached type. They were
sent to prominent magazines, They went as letters to politicians.
The burthen of them all was that the army was
bad officers, ignorant and untrained men, ignorant and untrained arms,
defective staff, defective ill reading. For Auralian eyes, it became

(36:19):
evident Esa was a Promaranthean one scheme he supproposed for
the brigading of volunteers was adopted without acknowledgment in a
mangled form by the War Office, and a well connected
colonel patented one of ESA's suggestions for transport vehicles. The
rest of his criticism and proposals were as the voice
of one whose head is in a sack. And meanwhile,

(36:40):
the slow interchange of diplomacy broadened that little issue between
Marantha and Aralia. That little difficulty of the custom house
added to itself other difficulties, and still other difficulties, until
the Marantha question had clamored from obscure corner paragraphs in
the newspapers to the possession of a daily column, and
until that column had shifted from bozi to position, until

(37:01):
it was the dominant column every day. Here the fragment
ends the impossibility of keeping up the tone of careless
geniality dawned upon the author H. G. Wells, end of
the loyalty of Esau Common. This recording is in the
public domain.