Tuesday, May 25, 2004

 
Some time ago I blogged or emailed something about how much fun it might be to go up to one of those Beefeater or Black Watch(little hazy on who's who)guys outside Buckingham Palace and yell something like, "Broken square! Fuzzy-wuzzies broke your square!" in the hopes of getting one of the famously expressionless guards to crack a smile or mutter something like, "Flake off, touch-hole."(1.) However, Jonah Goldberg's recent post about a British bayonet charge in Iraq prompted re-reading of a passage about the "First Sikh War" in Byron Farwell's "Queen Victoria's Little Wars" and the suspicion that any such Yank crank-yanking on my part could result in the urgent need for the ministrations of the NHS.

Pages 47-48 W. W. Norton & Company New York . London:

"Sir Harry Smith was in the thick of it and he described the action in a letter to Sir James Kempt:

'I carried the works by dint of English pluck, although the native corps stuck close to me, and when I got in, such hand-to-hand work I have never witnessed. For some twenty-five minutes we were at it against four times my numbers, sometimes receding (never turning round, though) sometimes advancing. The old 31st and 50th laid on like devils.'

Hookhum Singh, a Sikh gunner manning a gun facing the 10th Foot, has left a description of how the advance of the British infantry looked from his viewpoint:

'Nearer and nearer they came, as steadily as if they were on their own parade ground, in perfect silence. A creeping feeling came over me; this silence seemed so unnatural. We Sikhs are, as you know, brave, but when we attack we begin firing our muskets and shouting our famous war cry; but these men, saying never a word, advanced in perfect silence. They appeared to me as demons, evil spirits bent on our destruction, and I could hardly refrain from firing.

At last the order came, 'Fire', and our whole battery as if from one gun fired into the advancing mass. The smoke was so great that for a few minutes I could not see the effect of our fire, but fully expected that we had destroyed the demons, so, what was my astonishment, when the smoke cleared away, to see them still advancing in perfect silence, but their numbers reduced to about one half. Loading my cannon, I fired again and again into them, making a gap or lane in their ranks each time; but on they came, in that awful silence, till they were wit a short distance of our guns, when their colonel ordered them to to take breath, which they did under a heavy fire.

Then, with a shout, such as only angry demons could give and which is still ringing in my ears, they made a rush for our guns, led by their colonel. In ten minutes it was all over; they leapt into the deep ditch or moat in our front, soon filling it, and then swarmed up the opposite side on the shoulders of their comrades, dashed for the guns, which we still bravely defended by a strong body of our infantry, who foug bravely. But who could withstand such fierce demons, with th awful bayonets, which they preferred to their guns - for not a shot they fire the whole time - and then, with a ringing cheer, which heard for miles, they announced their victory.'"

1. See "The Churchill Wit" by Googling this with "National Lampoon"(It's a pain to type in the URL)Also see, for that matter, the killer "Churchill" qwip re the Boers. -Seriously, I'd love to read what he *really* said 'bout them Boers.
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I think that nearly all people who harbor goodwill for this country would agree that John Derbyshire acquitted himself very well tonight in the very demanding format of talk radio on "The Savage Nation." Given that I can't imagine myself doing anything but babbling incoherently in such a situation, it may be presumptious to complain that during the all-too brief exchange, neither Savage nor Derbshire dredged up Madeline Albright's infamous "states of concern" drivel. While "old hat" to conservative journalists, it would have been new to some of Savage's listeners, and many of the rest would have loved to have heard it repeated.
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Googling:
On June 19, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright dropped the label "rogue state" when interviewed on Washington's WAMU-FM's Diane Rehm Show. When Rehm asked if Kim Jong Il of North Korea was a rogue leader, Secretary Albright made news with her response. "Well, first of all, we are now calling these states 'states of concern' because we are concerned about their support for terrorist activity, their development of missiles, their desire to disrupt the international system."