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- 11508
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- ‘_Gent._’ Should he do so, whether out of ignorance or sly impudence,
the Major would have to hold his temper well in hand to obviate a
violent breach of the peace. To _Boss_ he objects not, that Dutch
monosyllable having an honest bovine sound to it, and being, in fact, a
natural localism of a city first settled by the Hollander; and if
_master_ be not the word’s exact equivalent, it would be difficult to
find one.
The Major’s propensity is to occasional unlicensed emphasis in his talk,
a thing assuredly not commendable in anybody, very likely contracted
from certain experiences, namely, his adventures in early life among our
frontiersmen. Nor could his subsequent campaignings during our Civil War
have served to displace the secular expletives by Biblical ejaculations
such as those attributed to Cromwell’s pious troopers, though, indeed,
the historical sceptics of our time have suggested doubts as to whether
even these same martial deacons for all their psalmody in the tents did
not during active operations against the foe indulge more or less in
that ‘horrible swearing’ wherewith ‘the army in Flanders’ stands
pre-eminently charged. To terrorise, if possible, this pertains to the
true function of a soldier in the field. The point is energetically put
by a Roman consul, one of those schooling his infantry on the eve of an
eye-to-eye and hand-to-hand encounter of ancient war. To the same
purpose is a well-known passage in Shakespeare. But there are various
modes of terrorising as a preliminary to closely engaging. The Chinese
Achilles, for example, hurls at the foe missiles of an unmentionable
name in English, and which explode an abomination of stench. The
sequence is hot air, though disagreeable, and what is ‘horrible
swearing’ but the same? It is perhaps equally efficacious, and, in
military ethics, why may not either be used as an adjunct to the
artillery? But alas for the oathing. It becomes a habit, and so in times
of peace is mechanically resorted to by the retired Christian veteran
when there is no military call for it. In short, a soldier’s or sailor’s
oath, however shocking to ears polite, is, at least when the man is not
actually engaged in tussle with the foe public or private, but an
idiocratic form given to whatever meaning may lurk in such phrases as
Bless my soul! Thunder! Goodness gracious!
If, however, sin be not of the heart but the tongue, a theological
opinion to which some would seem to incline, then woe to no few of our
warriors in the late Civil Unhappiness. For, in that case, who but an
orthodox Calvinist can with any adequacy appreciate the sublime
disinterestedness of their patriotism, since from his point of view, not
alone did our heroes jeopardise their lives for us, but mortally
endangered their souls. And for what? Oh futility! in the attempts to
terrorise enemies who, being our own countrymen, of course, refused to
be terrified, though in the end fate, working through force, made them
succumb.
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