On Something (Dodo Press) (8 page)

Very beautifully does he tell us in his preface what moved him to that act.
"Colonel Money," he says, in the quiet third person of a self-respecting
Norfolk gentleman, "does not mean to assign any other reason for serving
the armies of France than that he loves his profession and went there
merely to improve himself in it." Spoken like Othello!

He dedicates the book, by the way, to the Marquis Townshend, and carefully
adds that he has not got permission to dedicate it to that exalted
nobleman, nay, that he fears that he would not get permission if he asked
for it. But Lord Townshend is such a rattling good soldier that Colonel
Money is quite sure he will want to hear all about the war. On which
account he has this book so dedicated and printed by E. Harlow, bookseller
to Her Majesty, in Pall Mall.

Before beginning his narrative the excellent fellow pathetically says,
that as there was no war a little time before, nor apparently any
likelihood of one, "Colonel Money once intended to serve the Turks"; from
this horrid fate a Christian Providence delivered him, and sent him to the
defence of Gaul.

His commission was dated on the 19th of July, 1792; Marshal of the Camps,
that is, virtually, brigadier-general. He is very proud of it, and he
gives it in full. It ends up "Given in the year of Grace 1792 of our Reign
the 19th and Liberty the 4th. Louis." The phrase, in accompaniment with
the signature and the date, is not without irony.

Colonel Money could never stomach certain traits in the French people.

Before he left Paris for his command on the frontier he was witness to
the fighting when the Palace was stormed by the populace, and he is
our authority for the fact that the 5th Battalion of Paris Volunteers
stationed in the Champs Elysées helped to massacre the Swiss Guard.

"The lieutenant-colonel of this battalion," writes honest John Money,
"who was under my command during part of the campaign, related to me the
circumstances of this murder, and apparently with pleasure. He said: 'That
the unhappy men implored mercy, but,' added he, 'we did not regard this.
We put them all to death, and our men cut off most of their heads and
fixed them on their bayonets.'"

Colonel or, as he then was, General Money disapproves of this.

He also disapproves of the officer in command of the Marseillese, and says
he was a "Tyger." It seems that the "Tyger" was dining with Théroigne de
Méricourt and three English gentlemen in the very hotel where Money was
stopping, and it occurs to him that they might have broken in from their
drunken revels next door and treated him unfriendly.

Then he goes to the frontier, and after a good deal of complaint that he
has not been given his proper command he finds himself at the head of that
very important post which was the saving of the Army of Valmy.

Dumouriez, who always talked to him in English (for English was more
widely known abroad then than it is now, at least among gentlemen), had
a very great opinion of Money; but he deplores the fact that Money's
address to his soldiery was couched "in a jargon which they could not even
begin to understand." Money does not tell us that in his account of the
fighting, but he does tell us some very interesting things, which reveal
him as a man at once energetic and exceedingly simple. He left the guns
to Galbaud, remarking that no one but a gunner could attend to that sort
of thing, which was sound sense; but the Volunteers, the Line, and the
Cavalry he looked after himself, and when the first attack was made he
gave the order to fire from the batteries. Just as they were blazing away
Dillon, who was far off but his superior, sent word to the batteries to
cease firing. Why, nobody knows. At any rate the orderly galloped up and
told Money that those were Dillon's orders. On which Money very charmingly
writes:

"I told him to go back and tell General Dillon that I commanded there, and
that whilst the enemy fired shot and shell on me
I
should continue
to fire back on them." A sentence that warms the heart. Having thus
delivered himself to the orderly, he began pacing up and down the parapet
"to let my men see that there was not much to be apprehended from a
cannonade."

You may if you will make a little picture of this to yourselves. A great
herd of volunteers, some of whom had never been under fire, the rest
of whom had bolted miserably at Verdun a few days before, men not yet
soldiers and almost without discipline: the batteries banging away in the
wood behind them, in front of them a long earthwork at which the enemy
were lobbing great round lumps of iron and exploding shells, and along
the edge of this earthwork an elderly gentleman from Norfolk, in England,
walking up and down undisturbed, occasionally giving orders to his army,
and teaching his command a proper contempt for fire.

He adds as another reason why he did not cease fire when he was ordered
that "without doubt the troops would have thought there was treason in it,
and I had probably been cut in pieces."

He did not understand what had happened at Valmy, though he was so useful
in securing the success of that day. All he noted was that after the
cannonade Kellermann had fallen back. He rode into St. Ménehould, where
Dumouriez's head-quarters were, ran up to the top of the steeple and
surveyed the country around the enemy's camp with an enormous telescope,
laid a bet at dinner of five to one that the enemy would attack again
(they did not do so, and so he lost his bet, but he says nothing about
paying it), and then heard that France had been decreed a Republic.
His comment on this piece of news is strong but cryptical. "It was
surprising," he says, "to see what an effect this news had on the Army."

Every sentence betrays the personality: the keen, eccentric character
which took to balloons just after the Montgolfiers, and fell with his
balloon into the North Sea, wrote his Treatise on the use of such
instruments in War, and was never happy unless he was seeing or doing
something—preferably under arms. And in every sentence also there is that
curious directness of statement which is of such advantage to vivacity
in any memoir. Thus of Gobert, who served under him, he has a little
footnote: "This unfortunate young man lost his head at the same time
General Dillon suffered, and a very amiable young man he was, and an
excellent officer."

He ends his book in a phrase from which I think not a word could be taken
nor to which a word could be added without spoiling it. I will quote it in
full.

"The reader, I trust, will excuse my having so often departed from the
line of my profession in giving my opinion on subjects that are not
military" (for instance, his objections to the head-cutting business),
"but having had occasion to know the people of France I freely venture to
submit my judgments to the public and have the satisfaction to find that
they coincide with the opinion of those who know that extraordinary nation
still better than myself
."

The people of Monomotapa, of whom I have written more than once, I have
recently revisited; and I confess to an astonishment at the success with
which they deal with the various difficulties and problems arising in
their social life.

Thus, in most countries the laws of property are complex in the extreme;
punishable acts in connexion with them are numerous and often difficult to
define.

In Monomotapa the whole thing is settled in a very simple manner: in the
first place, instead of strict laws binding men down by written words,
they appoint a number of citizens who shall have it in their discretion to
decide whether a man's actions are worthy of punishment or no; and these
appointed citizens have also the power to assign the punishment, which may
vary from a single day's imprisonment to a lifetime. So crimeless is the
country, however, that in a population of over thirty millions less than
twenty such nominations are necessary; I must, however, admit that these
score are aided by several thousand minor judges who are appointed in a
different manner.

Their method of appointment is this: it is discovered as accurately as may
be by a man's manner of dress and the hours of his labour and the size of
the house he inhabits, whether he have more than a certain yearly revenue;
any man discovered to have more than this revenue is immediately appointed
to the office of which I speak.

The power of these assessors is limited, however, for though it is left to
their discretion whether their fellow-citizens are worthy of punishment
or not, yet the total punishment they can inflict is limited to a certain
number of years of imprisonment. In old times this sort of minor judge
was not appointed in Monomotapa unless he could prove that he kept dogs
in great numbers for the purposes of hunting, and at least three horses.
But this foolish prejudice has broken down in the progress of modern
enlightenment, and, as I have said, the test is now extended to a general
consideration of clothes, the size of the house inhabited, and the amount
of leisure enjoyed, the type of tobacco smoked, and other equally
reasonable indications of judicial capacity.

The men thus chosen to consider the actions of their fellow-citizens in
courts of law are rewarded in two ways: the first small body who are the
more powerful magistrates are given a hundred times the income of an
ordinary citizen, for it is claimed that in this way not only are the best
men for the purpose obtained, but, further, so large a salary makes all
temptation to bribery impossible and secures a strict impartiality between
rich and poor.

The lesser judges, on the other hand, are paid nothing, for it is wisely
pointed out that a man who is paid nothing and who volunteers his services
to the State will not be the kind of a man who would take a bribe or who
would consider social differences in his judgments.

It is further pointed out by the Monomotapans (I think very reasonably)
that the kind of man who will give his services for nothing, even in the
arduous work of imprisoning his fellow-citizens, will probably be the best
man for the job, and does not need to be allured to it by the promise of
a great salary. In this way they obtain both kinds of judges, and, oddly
enough, each kind speaks, acts, and lives much as does the other.

I must next describe the methods by which this interesting and sensible
people secure the ends of their criminal system.

When one of their magistrates has come to the conclusion that on the whole
he will have a fellow-citizen imprisoned, that person is handed over to
the guardianship of certain officials, whose business it is to see that
the man does not die during the period for which he is entrusted to them.
When some one of the numerous forms of torture which they are permitted
to use has the effect of causing death, the official responsible is
reprimanded and may even be dismissed. The object indeed of the whole
system is to reform and amend the criminal. He is therefore forbidden to
speak or to communicate in any way with human beings, and is segregated in
a very small room devoid of all ornament, with the exception of one hour a
day, during which he is compelled to walk round and round a deep, walled
courtyard designed for the purpose of such an exercise. If (as is often
the case) after some years of this treatment the criminal shows no signs
of mental or moral improvement, he is released; and if he is a man of
property, lives unmolested on what he has, and that usually in a quiet
and retired way. But if he is devoid of property, the problem is indeed a
difficult one, for it is the business of the police to forbid him to work,
and they are rewarded if he is found committing any act which the judges
or the magistrates are likely to disapprove. In this way even those who
have failed to effect reform in their characters during their first term
of imprisonment are commonly—if they are poor—re-incarcerated within
a short time, so that the system works precisely as it was intended to,
giving the maximum amount of reformation to the worst and the hardest
characters. I should add that the Monomotapan character is such that in
proportion to wealth a man's virtues increase, and it is remarkable that
nearly all those who suffer the species of imprisonment I have described
are of the poorer classes of society.

Though they are so reasonable, and indeed afford so excellent a model to
ourselves in most of their social relations, the people of Monomotapa
have, I confess, certain customs which I have never clearly understood,
and which my increasing study of them fails to explain to me.

Thus, in matters which, with us, are thought susceptible of positive
proof (such as the taste and quality of cooking, or the mental abilities
of a fellow-citizen) the Monomotapans establish their judgment in a
transcendental or super-rational manner. The cooking in a restaurant or
hotel is with them excellent in proportion, not to the taste of the viands
subjected to it, but to the rental of the premises. And when a man desires
the most delicious food he does not consider where he has tasted such food
in the past, but rather the situation and probable rateable value of the
eating-house which will provide him with it. Nay, he is willing—if he
understands that that rateable value is high—to pay far more for the same
article than he would in a humbler hostelry.

The same super-rational method, as I have called it, applies to the
Monomotapan judgment of political ability; for here it is not what a
man has said or written, nor whether he has proved himself capable
of foreseeing certain events of moment to the State, it is not these
characters that determine his political career, but a mixture of other
indices, one of which is that his brothers shall be younger than himself,
another that when he speaks he shall strike the palm of his open left hand
with his clenched right hand in a particular manner by no means commonly
or easily acquired; another that he shall not wear at one and the same
time a coat which is bifurcated and a hat of hemispherical outline;
another that he shall keep silence upon certain types of foreigners who
frequent the markets of Monomotapa, and shall even pretend that they are
not foreigners but Monomotapans; and this index of statesmanship he must
preserve under all circumstances, even when the foreigners in question
cannot speak the Monomotapan language.