I hope somebody can help me identify an allusion - actually two - in H. G.
Wells' wartime novel MR BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH (1916).
After a Zeppelin raid in which his elderly aunt has been fatally injured,
Mr Britling is pondering the cruelty of war, and particularly of the Germans.
"These Germans were an unsubtle people, a people in the worst and best
sense of the words, plain and honest; they were prone to moral
indignation.... Surely, they had argued, God was not on the side of those
who kept an untilled field. So they had butchered these old ladies and
slaughtered these children just to show us the consequences:
'All along of dirtiness, all along of mess,
All along of doing things rather more or less.'
The very justification our English poet has found for a thousand
overbearing actions in the East! 'Forget not order and the real,' that was
the underlying message of bomb and gas and submarine. After all, what right
had we English NOT to have a gun or an aeroplane fit to bring down that
Zeppelin ignominiously and conclusively? Had we not undertaken Empire? Were
we not the leaders of great nations? Had we indeed much right to complain
if our imperial pose was flouted?"
H. G. Wells, MR BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH (London: Hogarth Press, 1985) 295-6.
Any help would be much appreciated. 'Forget not order and the real' has
been bothering me for years.
Douglas Kerr
Hong Kong University
____________________
Dr Douglas Kerr
Associate Professor
English Department
University of Hong Kong
Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong
tel (852) 2859 7938
fax (852) 2559 7139
